Visual aids for teaching

I have an obsession with digital archiving. Before this winter break started, I was at the Payap Linguistics Institute library, rummaging through castoff books. There I found A Workshop Guide for Primer Construction by Katy Barnwell (1985). It was an instruction manual for creating early reading books for people in pre-literate societies, specifically in Nigeria, Africa. The last couple days I've been scanning and digitizing the book, and I finally finished it tonight.

The appendix entitled "Supplementary Teaching Aids" made me twinge; when I was teaching in Kinmen, I would alternate between spending no time on making visual aids, and spending an entire evening on them. I knew that flashcards held the kids' attention and made for some great review games. But I hated it that often, flashcards wouldn't get used more than one week at the most, and then we'd be on to a new lesson with new words. And I also thought it a waste of time to do something well if it couldn't be re-used.

Barnwell has some good insights on the reasons why visual aids are important. For me, who started out as a volunteer teacher who would play games and make learning communicative and interactive, supplementing or supplanting the non-native English speaking teacher's routine of ABCs, book-work and flashcards, this was instructive. While my role and teaching philosophy was valid for creating interest in English learning, the 'older' techniques also were new once. And they have a very basic part to play, especially in mother-tongue literacy, which is Barnwell's focus here.

She gives the following reasons for using visual aids:

• Preventing the students from memorizing when they should be reading
• Holding the attention of the class
• Keeping the student interested
• Making repetition practical
• Helping to test students' progress
• Giving the teacher an opportunity for initiative and creativity

She follows these up with page after page of inexpensive, creative ways to make and present flashcards, posters, phonics wheels, and more. For instance, did you know that white wrapping paper makes cheap posters? Did you ever try tacking a poster to a strip of wood so it could be rolled up for next time? Or did you ever think of stringing fold-over flashcards on a clothes line in the front of the class?

Read more here.

IBLP/King Car teachers in print

Several weeks ago, I was forwarded a citation by Danette Frazier, my former co-teacher at Kai Xuan Primary School in Kinmen. The author of one of the articles in this book is Shu-Chuan Wang-McGrath, a Taiwanese doctoral student at the time of research, and a dear friend of Danette's. In 2007-2008, she followed the team of IBLP/King Car English teachers in Nantou, Taiwan for around two months, collecting data for her dissertation. (This was later published as Wang, S. (2009). A qualitative study of english as a foreign language learning (EFL) by rural taiwanese students with christian native-english-speaking teachers. Indiana University of Pennsylvania).) The article below is a condensed version of Wang-McGrath's dissertation, focusing on power relations between the American teachers and their Taiwanese co-teachers, in the context of the Americans' desire to share their faith. The names of the American teachers have been changed, but these were my friends, as I was also working for the same organization in a different part of Taiwan.