The Thatched Mother
As a newly trained young ESL teacher, I was quite ready to believe the gospels of the experts, and adopt their magical methodologies for teaching English. The cloze passage was such a method. It was supposed to reveal a student's level of reading skill.
This is how it worked. The teacher took any reading passage and replaced every seventh word with a blank. Then the student filled in the blanks. When marking clozes, teachers were told it was important to accept only the original word as a correct answer.
I began to see the limitations of this assessment tool when I used a passage containing a sentence from a British text book, the title of which I cannot remember: "Tom lived _________ a small house with a thatched _____________."
The student was able to supply the preposition, but for the noun he used the word "mother." I didn't feel right counting this answer wrong, especially when, as far as I knew, neither in this country nor the country where the student grew up were there any thatched roofs.
At the same time, I recognized that he had missed the significance of the indefinite article. One does not establish family life with "a" mother, just any mother, no matter what kind of house one lives in.
Methodology comes and goes, but the very basic need for communication between the teacher and student remains, and how that plays out depends on personalities and circumstances. There is no textbook method that works every time.
Thus teaching is always a creative activity.
This is how it worked. The teacher took any reading passage and replaced every seventh word with a blank. Then the student filled in the blanks. When marking clozes, teachers were told it was important to accept only the original word as a correct answer.
I began to see the limitations of this assessment tool when I used a passage containing a sentence from a British text book, the title of which I cannot remember: "Tom lived _________ a small house with a thatched _____________."
The student was able to supply the preposition, but for the noun he used the word "mother." I didn't feel right counting this answer wrong, especially when, as far as I knew, neither in this country nor the country where the student grew up were there any thatched roofs.
At the same time, I recognized that he had missed the significance of the indefinite article. One does not establish family life with "a" mother, just any mother, no matter what kind of house one lives in.
Methodology comes and goes, but the very basic need for communication between the teacher and student remains, and how that plays out depends on personalities and circumstances. There is no textbook method that works every time.
Thus teaching is always a creative activity.