New Plan

I had a meeting with Dr van Hees today. She was able to help me make clearer meaning of what I had read in her book. One of the things that I found particularly interesting was Dr Paul Nation's vocabulary lists. I googled it (naturally!). After finding what I thought was 'the' vocabulary test, I administered the test to my students. It was important to me to get another source of testing in order to compare the results at the end of my inquiry.

My students found the set-up of the paper-test very confusing and performed poorly. On showing Dr van Hees the test that I had administered she confirmed that it was not the right test. Instead she talked me through various strategies that were bound to have a positive impact on my students vocabulary-acquisition.

Dr van Hees suggested I tried' deep diving' with my students. Deep diving is unpacking the text using ‘chunking’ to get meaning and to identify the main ideas.  Jannie also suggested using more interesting texts. After looking through the texts that I normally use, she suggested two useful websites, where I could find interesting, levelled reading texts. These websites were National Aquarium of New Zealand and Newslea. I was previously disinclined to use whole-class texts as I have such varying reading levels, from 8- the high 20's. Dr van Hees assured me with proper scaffolding, chunking and having lots of talk accompanying the reading, all students should be able to cope.
We ended our meeting with Dr van Hees gifting me a slide presentation for me to use with my students. I feel really inspired after talking to her and I'm looking forward to deep diving with my students.