Luxi ESOL

http://www.171english.cn/music.asp

In Tibet, the education department has been making efforts to promote a Chinese-Tibetan bilingual education system. The Tibetan language is a major component of primary school education. This is a third-year classroom at Lhasa’s Number One Primary School. The children are all under 10, but they can write beautiful Tibetan. Student of Number One Primary School, Lhasa, said, “I like Tibetan classes because there are a lot of poems and stories in our Tibetan textbooks.” This was the first ordinary primary school to open in Tibet. More than 70 percent of the children are Tibetan and they study the Tibetan language in thirty percent of their classes. This helps students adapt to Tibetan language education after they enter into high schools or universities, and promotes the dissemination and inheritance of Tibetan culture. They also have learn Tibetan folk songs, and playing traditional Tibetan musical instruments. Tibetan language education is widespread in primary and secondary schools throughout the autonomous region. Test papers for courses teaching in the Tibetan language must be answered in Tibetan. And high schools and universities consider applicants’ ability in the Tibetan language. Losang Tumei, Deprtry Director of Office of Tibetan Language Committee, said, “Tibetan language education is thriving. Tibetan education was never so widespread in old Tibet.” The University of Tibet has now been training Tibetan teachers for secondary schools for 19 years. There are now more than 13 thousand Tibetan language teachers. And there are more than 22 thousand ethnic minority teachers, most of them in farming and pastoral areas. (http://www.171english.cn/article.asp?ThreadID=3670)

We’d like to recommend a website:

Title : Luxi English Language Teaching
Url : http://www.171english.cn
Description : Website for ESOL teachers and students in China, and elsewhere. Free materials and resources such as downloadable exercises, information about teacher training seminars, workshops and courses, study abroad links, online dictionaries, etc.

The “call to the classroom” - a chime, a bell, a buzzer - it may energize some. But among many, the sound, in whatever form it takes, evokes a sense of dread as it signals an end to playtime. A middle school in Shashi city, in central China’s Hubei Province has replaced its old monotone with sounds intended to be “therapeutic.”

Students at the school in Shashi are the beneficiaries of some research undertaken by the school. The old monotone call-to-class has been replaced with music. Administrators believe the new arrangement will serve as therapy, helping to ease the students’ minds and relax their bodies

Students say they feel a sense of calm when the music plays. And the music becomes a catalyst for inspiring enlivening images in their minds.

The teacher in charge of the project, says the standard, sonorous ring, evoked feelings of ennui and entrapment among students. The light music that students hear now, extends a sense of coziness all across the campus. There’s another benefit too. Students will learn music appreciation, by listening to world famous music everyday.

There’s a trend among Chinese elementary and middle schools to change the traditional call-to-class. Some schools have adopted music. Others are trying out readings of poetry and prose, to alert students that it’s time to go back to class. Some schools even let students compose their own versions of the old classroom bell. The tinkling of the traditional school bell, is fading away and soon will be remembered only, as a part of the past.

2008年：“水卫生”（sanitation）or (‘Water and Sanitation for Life’)
(supporting the International Year of Sanitation)

2007年：“应对水短缺”（Coping with Water Scarcity）
(This theme highlighted the increasing significance of water scarcity worldwide and the need for increased integration and cooperation to ensure sustainable, efficient and equitable management of scarce water resources, both at international and local levels. )

2006年：“水与文化”（water and culture）
(Water is not only essential for life, it is also a wide-ranging cultural presence — an inspiration for artists, a focus of scientific research, and an indispensable element in the religious rituals of many traditions and faiths.)
2005年：“生命之水”（water for life）

2004年：“水与灾害”（water and disasters）

2003年：“未来之水”（water for the future）
(It calls on each one of us to maintain and improve the quality and quantity of fresh water available to future generations. )

2002年：“水与发展”（water for development）

2001年：“水与健康”（Water for Health）

2000年：“21世纪的水”（water for the 21st century）

1999年：“每人都生活在下游”（everyone lives downstream）

1998年：“地下水–正在不知不觉衰减的资源”（ground water — invisible resource）

1997年：水资源评估‘Water Resources Assessment’or“世界的水:还够吗?”（The World’s Water: Is There Enough? ）

1996年：“为干渴的城市供水”（water for thirsty cities）
It emphasized the growing water crisis faced by cities across the world which threatens the sustainability of their social and economic development.

1995年：“女性和水”（women and water）

1994年：“关心水资源是每个人的责任”（Caring for Our Water Resources Is Everyone’s Business）

(from-http://www.171english.cn/ShowPost.asp?ThreadID=3438］

Learners make mistakes and reinforce them because they produce sentences 1) too carelessly or 2) too early. You will avoid mistakes if you follow a couple of rules:

Rules of error-free speaking and writing

1. Use simple language. Some beginners try to build very complicated sentences with things like the present perfect tense or conditionals. They make horrible mistakes. Don’t do this! If you’ve just started to speak or write in English, you should say what you can say (simple sentences that you have seen many times) - not what you want to say (complicated sentences). You may feel you’re talking like a child or that you are not expressing your thoughts, but don’t worry about it. Right now, your task is not to express your thoughts freely; your task is to learn the language.
2. Be slow and careful. In the beginning, you should write very slowly. If you need 2 hours to write an e-mail message with 10 correct sentences, that’s okay. That’s how long it should take if you’re just starting to write.
Why should it take so long? Because you should read your sentences many times, looking for mistakes. You should correct your own sentences frequently. You should check if your sentences are correct by using a dictionary and the Web. And you should look for example sentences to imitate.
When you’re speaking, it’s okay to build a sentence for some time in your head before you open your mouth.
3. If you’re not sure how to say something, don’t say it. If you can’t say something correctly, it’s almost always better not to say it. You don’t want to teach yourself the wrong way to say it. You can try to look for the correct sentence in a dictionary or on the Web (see next point), but when speaking, usually you don’t have time for that. So it’s a good idea to say something else - something that you know is correct. It can even be something on a different subject.
4. When writing, always look things up. Whenever you’re not sure how to use a word, look it up in a good dictionary to find example sentences with it. When you’ve written something, and you are not sure if it’s correct, search for it on the Web with Google. If many pages contain your phrase, then it is probably correct. Dictionaries and Google should be your everyday tools, and you should use them even many times in one sentence (especially if you’ve just begun writing in English). See this forum topic for more information on using Google when writing.
5. Know where you can screw up. Sometimes learners don’t even realize how different English is from their native language. When speaking, they translate word for word from their native language, and they think their sentences are okay.
When reading or listening in English, pay close attention to things like word order, articles, prepositions, and tenses. Compare sentences in English with equivalent sentences in your native language. Notice the differences in words and in word order. This will make you more careful when speaking in the foreign language, because you will realize which parts of your sentences can be wrong and should be double-checked.

“Will I ever be fluent if I speak so slowly and carefully?”
Don’t worry about fluency. Fluency is easy to achieve by simply talking. If you practice speaking, you will be able to speak faster and faster. In high school, Tom achieved pretty good fluency in a month by talking to his English teacher (a native speaker) about two hours a week. That’s only 8 hours of talking.
In our opinion, it is much better to be slow and correct than be fluent and make a lot of mistakes. Why? Because if you are slow and correct, you can easily improve your speed and become fluent and correct. But if you are fluent and make a lot of mistakes, it is not so easy to remove your mistakes and become fluent and correct.

Don’t speak or write too early

If you follow the above rules and still make a lot of mistakes when speaking (= more than 1 mistake every 3 sentences), you should probably switch to writing for a while. Consider the following guidelines:
1. First write, then speak. Writing is easier than speaking because: 1) you don’t need to have good pronunciation (but you need good spelling), 2) you can write very slowly and nobody will mind, 3) you can use dictionaries, the Web, etc. So, it’s a good idea to practice writing first until you can build correct sentences quickly enough for speaking.
2. Don’t speak until you’ve learned to pronounce English sounds. You need to be able to pronounce all the English vowels and consonants in a clear way before you speak. If you don’t, you will get used to bad pronunciation.
3. Don’t say a word if you don’t know how to pronounce it. In other words, you need to know the pronunciation of all the words that you use. If you don’t, you will be making pronunciation mistakes and teaching yourself bad habits.

If you make more than 1 mistake every 3 sentences when writing in the slow and careful way described above, you should probably stop writing for some time and concentrate on reading and listening.

Remember that you should first get lots of English sentences into your head, then build your own sentences. Your main activity should be reading and listening to English - and the reason is that you need good examples to follow before you can build your own sentences. The more sentences your brain absorbs, the more you can express in English. If you don’t see/hear enough correct, natural English sentences, you will not know how to say things in English. So you will be inventing your own language. And you will be making mistakes.

(http://www.171english.cn)

Phonological awareness is an important foundation for learning to read. Scientific research has documented that phonological awareness is a better predictor of reading success than IQ, vocabulary, or socioeconomic level of the family.

Research has shown that children who begin reading instruction with sufficiently developed phonological awareness understand the instruction better, master the alphabetic principle faster and learn to read quite easily.

Children who will later be identified as being dyslexic often do not have phonological awareness skills. Teaching these skills has been shown in research to prevent the occurrence of dyslexia in many children. Accordingly, many school systems now follow a program of early screening for phonological awareness skills.

No area of reading research has gained as much attention over the past two decades as phonological awareness. Perhaps the most exciting finding emanating from research on phonological awareness is that critical levels of phonological awareness can be developed through carefully planned instruction, and this development has a significant influence on children’s reading and spelling achievement.

Why Is Phonological Awareness So Important?

An awareness of phonemes is necessary to grasp the alphabetic principle that underlies our system of written language. Specifically, developing readers must be sensitive to the internal structure of words.

If children understand that words can be divided into individual phonemes and that phonemes can be blended into words, they are able to use letter-sound knowledge to read and build words. As a consequence of this relationship, phonological awareness is a strong predictor of later reading success. Researchers have shown that this strong relationship between phonological awareness and reading success persists throughout school.

Early reading is dependent on having some understanding of the internal structure of words, and explicit instruction in phonological awareness skills is very effective in promoting early reading. However, instruction in early reading — especially instruction in letter-sound correspondence — strengthens phonological awareness.

Success in early reading depends on achieving a certain level of phonological awareness. Instruction in phonological awareness is beneficial for most children and critical for others.

What Is Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness is the ability to break words into separate sounds. A child who has phonological awareness can tell you when two words rhyme and when two words start with the same sound. Further development of phonological awareness will allow the child to tell you when two words end with the same sound. For example, they can tell you that “bat” and “sit” end with the same sound but “bat” and “sad” do not end with the same sound.

Phonological awareness is a broad term that includes phonemic awareness. In addition, to phonemes, phonological awareness activities can involve work with rhymes, words, syllables, and onsets and rimes

The key to the process of learning to read is the ability to identify the different sounds that make words and to associate these sounds with written words. In order to learn to read, a child must be aware of phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest functional unit of sound. For example, the word cat contains three distinctly different sounds. There are 44 phonemes in the English language, including letter combinations such as /th/.

In addition to identifying these sounds, children must also be able to manipulate them. Word play involving segmenting words into their constituent sounds, rhyming words, and blending sounds to make words is also essential to the reading process. The ability to identify and manipulate the sounds of language is called phonological awareness. There are five levels of phonological awareness ranging from an awareness of rhyme to being able to switch or substitute the components in a word.

Children generally begin to show initial phonological awareness when they demonstrate an appreciation of rhyme and alliteration. For many children, this begins very early in the course of their language development and is likely facilitated by being read to from books that are based on rhyme or alliteration.

Teaching Phonological Awareness

Early experience with nursery rhymes can help children begin to notice and think about the phonological structure of words. Several research studies have shown that the children who know more about nursery rhymes at age 3, are those that tend to be more highly developed in general phonological awareness at age 4 and in phonemic awareness at age 6.

You don’t have to stop with nursery rhymes though. Read rhyming books, sing rhyming songs and chants. Have children identify the rhyming words using picture cards and do rhyming sorts with picture cards.

Also play games that teach children to isolate individual sounds in a word. For example, this game can be played with the “BINGO” song. There was a letter had a sound and you can say it with me b,b,b,like ball…… Play the game – “What’s the First Sound in this Word” This can be done orally or with picture cards

When children learn how to “listen to language”, they are also learning to connect oral language with the written word. Once they hear, know, and are able to manipulate sounds, they begin to realize how words work.

(From:http://www.171english.cn/article.asp?ThreadID=3223 )

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