A Thank You to Rocky

This semester I am undertaking to teach a twenty week course in Extensive reading. I am working under the mentoring of professor Rocky Nelson who has over fifteen years experience in both implementing and running Extensive Reading courses. Unfortunately Rocky will retire in December this year leaving a void at my university.


This blog is intended for me to keep a record for not only myself in the future but also any other teachers or students interested in developing or partaking in a solidly designed Extensive Reading course, especially for those in Korea. I will try to provide a weekly plan synopsis as I teach the classes and provide links to materials and other supplements.


I hope this site is useful for those that visit.

Extensive Reading Central -The New Extensive Reading Portal

I want to put at the top of this blog the new main Portal for Extensive Reading developed by Dr Robert Waring. Please click the link below.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

The Seventh Week

This week we continue with the SSR and TRR requirements and also it is the end of our first session (we run little 7 week mini sessions) so total page numbers were recorded and grades allocated.

The activities we did this week were really interesting looking at vocabulary level testing and also another activity called Guess my Bluff.

Dr. Nations Vocabulary Testing

Once again if you go to Dr Nations homepage you can download vocabulary testing for different levels of words. General Service List (GSL) words up to the 3000 word level and then the University Word List. The tests have both receptive and productive components and let students what words they should be studying.This is reinforced if you use books like Dr Nation's 4000 Essential English Words (6 book series).

Another excellent site for setting up vocabulary development for a class is  Praxised.com. At this web site there are even video tutorials to help you set up vocabulary homework for your students. This is what we did in the first hour of not SSR.

 Guess my Bluff

 Using the worksheets that a google doc linked below we set up a speaking vocabulary fluency activity as Rocky likes to include some fluency activities with a four skills approach. The instructions for the activity are: 
  • Put groups into teams of three.
  • They go through the vocabulary on the sheets together.
  • They try to determine which one is correct and which two are incorrect.
  • If they can't they may eventually ask the teacher (I prefer this to just using a dictionary)
  • Once they know the correct items face two groups against each other.
  • The groups have different sets of cards.
  • The students read their definitions to each other and then interactively negotiate to find the correct definition.
  • If the students choose the correct definition then that groups gets a point.
  • Groups take turns bluffing and guessing.
  • The group with the most point wins.
Here are the links to the Google docs:

That was that for week seven. 
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