A l b er ta
VOICES
A JOURNAL OF THE ENGLISH L­ ANGUAGE ARTS COUNCIL OF THE ALBERTA TEACHERS’ ASSOCIATION
Volume 12, Number 1
9 Boys and DEAR • 16 Teaching Reading to Chinese Students
July 2015
Contents
Editorial..............................................................................................................................2
Margaret L Iveson
Dig Deeper.........................................................................................................................3
Sharalynn Anderson
In Memory of Jody Lynn Davison................................................................................4
Joanna McWhirter
The Power of Students’ Lived Experience and Rethinking Success in an
ELL Classroom.................................................................................................................6
Robert Piazza
“I Guess I Gotta Do It Because It’s School”: Boys Discuss School
Reading for DEAR Time.................................................................................................9
Brenda Kelly
Ideas for the Teaching of Reading to Chinese Students in the English
Language Arts Classroom..............................................................................................16
Heather Blair, Hongliang Fu, Xiaobing Lin, Shuo Li and Nannan Wang
Studying Grammar in the Technological Age............................................................23
Marlow Ediger
Book Review: Polly Wants to Be a Writer: The Junior Authors Guide to
Writing and Getting Published, by Laura Michelle Thomas...........................................25
Bill Talbot
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Editorial
Margaret L Iveson
It is becoming more and more evident that our
subject area of English language arts and the act of
teaching it are increasing in complexity. Classroom
teachers are aware of the complexity of their classes. In
this issue of Alberta Voices, you will find articles that
address this complexity.
In “Dig Deeper,” a piece of creative writing,
Sharalynn Anderson invites us all to think about how
students and teachers understand each other and how,
together, we create success in the classroom.
Joanna McWhirter was an education student when
she wrote “In Memory of Jody Lynn Davison,” her
tribute to her teacher-hero who died young. Joanna
reflects on how her former teacher and mentor has
shaped who she is as a teacher and a person.
Robert Piazza invites us into his planning for
teaching to reveal how he adjusted his plans after
meeting his particular class of English language arts
students, who were all English-language learners.
2
In her article on boys and independent reading,
Brenda Kelly discusses the variety of ways in which her
research participants busied themselves during scheduled
reading time at school.
University of Alberta professor Heather Blair and four
of her graduate students analyze how Chinese writing
differs in nature from our alphabetic system, providing us
with ways of thinking about reading (and, more broadly,
literacy) to help our newcomer Chinese students.
Marlow Ediger shares some thoughts on working with
grammar from a traditional base to help today’s students.
Finally, Bill Talbot reviews a young adult fantasy
novel directed at young readers who want to learn about
writing and publishing their own books.
Our contributors provide ways into dealing with
today’s classroom complexities, based on their own
knowledge and experience. I hope that you will find
resonance and harmony in their articles, or new chords
for the musical score of your ongoing teaching.
Alberta Voices
Dig Deeper
Sharalynn Anderson
Sharalynn Anderson is the past president of ELAC.
I asked my students about it one day.
I asked . . . what is it?
Is it the pianist who plays? Is it the magic of song
that extends from the instrument as if it is the instrument itself ? Is it intelligence? Achievement?
And they said, “Yes. Yes, it is. But it’s more than
that . . . .”
They said . . . it’s an idea or a thought . . . bright,
colourful and vibrant. A moment of clarity or understanding. Inspiration.
It’s literature. A book you can’t put down. A poem
that speaks and warms the innermost being.
Volume 12, Number 1
It’s a piece of art. Brush and paint on canvas.
Dance. Shining. Confident. Spirited.
It’s goodness. Caring for others. Being an agent of
change. Bravery—believing you can be the difference.
It’s discovery and the sparkling eyes of the child
who has just made one. It’s the star in the sky and the
twinkle of snow reflecting the sun. It’s diamond, beauty
and excellence. It’s everywhere.
They said . . . everyone has it in their own way. One
just may not realize it yet. It’s individuality . . . potential.
Digging deeper.
It is splendour. Wonder.
Brilliance . . . look for it. Celebrate it. Dare to
expect it.
3
In Memory of Jody Lynn Davison
Joanna McWhirter
Joanna McWhirter was in the penultimate year of her bachelor of
education degree when she wrote this piece. She hopes to be a senior
high English language arts teacher and to inspire her students in
the same way Jody Lynn Davison inspired her.
What does it mean to be someone’s hero? What
qualities must a person possess in order to be considered
heroic? The first people who come to mind when I
consider the world’s heroes are soldiers, firefighters and
police officers—those who risk their own lives every day
for complete strangers. But how many people think of
their teachers as heroes? To be heroic does not necessarily mean that you do anything; it simply means that you
are something to somebody. My somebody was my
English 20 teacher, Ms Jody Davison. She helped me
become the person I am today. January 31, 2012, was the
day of her death, the day my life changed forever.
Ms Davison’s death was not unexpected, as she had
stage 4 breast cancer that had metastasized to her lungs
and lymph nodes. Her terminal illness was obvious. In
Grade 12, I wrote two pieces about the impact of her
life and inevitable death. Those pieces were written for
Ms Davison, so that I could show her how much she
meant to me while she was still alive. When she was my
teacher, I was not one to shy away from telling her in
person how much she had influenced me, but I can write
my feelings better than I can orally articulate them.
Finding a two-page letter tucked into one of my essays
was not an unusual event in Ms Davison’s life. She
inspired me more than she’ll ever know, and this inspiration did not end when her life did.
Although I have written other pieces about the
significance of Ms Davison’s life, I have never talked
about the impact her death has had on me. Obviously, I
knew she was going to die, but I could not fathom her
death until it actually happened. On January 31, 2012, I
was sitting on my bed in my shared Lister residence
bedroom, studying for my upcoming psychology
midterm, when my sister called me, just like she does
4
every day. It was a typical conversation, with my complaining about the French test I had written that morning and my sister showing fake compassion.
All of a sudden she stopped talking and gasped. My
stomach lurched, and I knew what had happened—call it
intuition, call it my natural tendency to expect the worst,
whatever. After two minutes of silence at the other end
of the phone line, my sister solemnly informed me that
her rugby coach—and Ms Davison’s best friend at the
high school—had just texted her to tell her that Ms
Davison had died that afternoon.
Tears sprung to my eyes as I hung up the phone.
I sat on my bed wondering what I was going to do now.
My roommate looked up from her nursing textbook and
asked me what was wrong, but I couldn’t say the words.
Numbly, I sat with my study flashcards scattered on my
lap until I could conjure up enough words for my
roommate to figure it out. Trying to comfort me, she
told me to come sit with her and help her with the
poster she was making, but all I wanted to do was curl
up into a ball in the corner and cry. However, I am not
the type of person to cry in front of other people, so I
told my roommate I would assist her after I had showered. I got my shower stuff and walked down the
hallway toward the shared bathroom. Some of my
floormates were sitting in the hallway talking. I didn’t
want to stop and chat, but I had to say something. So I
played off the impact of Ms Davison’s death and simply
stated that someone I knew had just died. Then, I went
into the shower, let the hot water flow over me and
bawled until my skin was as red and puffy as my eyes.
I had lost an important person in my life, and I didn’t
know how I was ever going to get over it. Getting up
and going to class the next day with a happy face seemed
like an impossible feat. But I did it.
Ms Davison died on a Tuesday, and her funeral was
the following Monday—when you know you’re going to
die, I guess you plan your funeral ahead of time. I have
been to a funeral a time or two in my life, but saying
Alberta Voices
goodbye to my hero was the hardest thing I have ever
had to do, and it showed. I went through half a package
of tissues before the funeral even started. Watching Ms
Davison’s two young children file into the church, with
their aunt holding their tiny hands, broke my heart. And
the music. And the slideshow. And the fact that there
was a funeral to attend at all. My best friend sat beside
me and held my hand for the entire funeral.
I would really like to say that I have handled these
past two years with grace and class, but I can’t. In the
months after Ms Davison’s death, I was the girl who
drank too much and could then be found crying alone in
the bathroom. It was a rough transition. I had to find a
way to cope, and it wasn’t going to be at the bottom of a
bottle. So I decided to get a tattoo instead. My first
tattoo is on my right wrist and it says Hope, with an
unfortunately faded pink breast cancer ribbon. I know
it’s cliché, but it was exactly what I wanted. So I braved
through the immense pain that is having hundreds of
tiny needles dragged through one’s skin and honoured
my hero’s life and death the best I could. I stopped
drinking and crying and focused on hope.
But when the one-year anniversary loomed, I had
the itch again. To cope, I got another tattoo instead of
dealing with my feelings in a less painful way. This time,
I had a meaningful phrase from the Florence and the
Machine song “Only If for a Night” tattooed on my left
wrist. This tattoo was dedicated to my hero but also to
me. Ms Davison fought the fight of her life, quite
literally, and never flinched. I have taken it upon myself
to also fight for my life, metaphorically, and to never give
up hope.
One of the few pitfalls of having my teacher as my
hero was the jealousy this relationship provoked in my
mother. She could not understand why I got not one but
two tattoos for my Grade 11 teacher. She could not
grasp just how Ms Davison had saved me, because she
didn’t know I needed saving. My childhood taught me
that it was best to keep my emotions in check or risk
being taken advantage of and then abandoned. I worked
hard to suppress the anger and disappointment I felt
with every day that my father did not come back home
Volume 12, Number 1
to his family and with every word my mother shouted to
drive him further away from the door. However, when
Ms Davison asked me to put my feelings into written
words, I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders and I
could breathe again. That is the power of a teacher.
Ms Davison was heroic to me not because of any
particular thing she did but, rather, for the totality of her
life, both before and after her diagnosis. She was a
fantastic teacher, and I still appreciate today how much
she catered to me and my need for perfection. I was the
type of student who handed in assignments a week
before the due date, only to ask for them back to fix a
grammar mistake or add a sentence. Ms Davison
admired this trait and once told me that she thought it
was cool that I cared so much and that she hoped she
could keep up with me. She nurtured the overachiever
perfectionist in me, instead of telling me to get over the
fact that I only got 14 out of 15 on an assignment. I
needed that. I needed her to be proud of me, because no
one in my family cared about my academic success as
much as I did.
I never got to share with her how I was doing in my
university courses, because she died before we were able
to go for lunch and catch up. But I know she is still
proud of me, and every time I do well on an assignment
or just generally in life, I think of her. I will never stop
trying to make my hero proud. She was more than my
teacher; she is my inspiration.
Today is January 31, 2014, the first observation
day in my student teaching, and despite the horrible
memories I associate with this day, it has been a great
one. I am continuing to make Ms Davison proud as
I continue in my journey toward becoming a teacher
like her. I couldn’t spend the day feeling sorry for myself,
so I decided to turn this two-year anniversary of
Ms Davison’s death into a celebration. It is because of
Ms Davison that I am on this path, and I know that if
she were here, she would be excited to hear all about
my school and my mentor teacher. But she’s not. And
that’s OK. She lived her life to the fullest, and now I will
take everything she gave me and give it to my own
students.
5
The Power of Students’ Lived
Experience and Rethinking
Success in an ELL Classroom
Robert Piazza
Robert Piazza teaches at Centre High Campus in Edmonton
and is pursuing a doctorate in secondary education at the
University of Alberta.
The summer of 2014 was volatile—Ferguson,
Missouri, and the death of Michael Brown weighed
heavily on our social conscience. The interweaving of
headlines, pundits, images and hashtags wrapped us in a
web of controversy and finger pointing that seemed to
miss the point altogether: How could this still be
happening in 2014? I thought the social justice issues in
Ferguson would provide the perfect framework for my
English Language Arts 20-2 course for English-language
learners (ELLs), which I was teaching for the first time. I
pulled together all the resources I needed to explore the
difficult themes, ideas and questions Ferguson brought
to our attention. As my summer holiday swiftly
approached its end, I had everything ready and was
excited to meet my students and teach them.
And then I met them, and they taught me.
First, I need to describe the students in my class. All
my students are from somewhere else. I don’t mean
Calgary or Medicine Hat, or even Toronto; I mean the
Philippines, Congo, Sudan, India, Nepal, China, Korea,
Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Sri Lanka. We are a veritable
United Nations of a classroom. I would say that approximately half to two-thirds of my students are refugees.
All have left behind what they consider home, as well as
their family members, friends and other loved ones.
Some have been in Canada for two or three years; others
have been here for two or three weeks.
When the semester began, I went ahead with my
plans. The first unit would be a persuasive writing unit.
6
The topic was whether the government should install
security cameras in public spaces. I thought this would
be a good way to ease them into the ideas of public and
private spaces, the reach of the government, law
enforcement and the rights of citizens—all themes that
my students needed to be well versed in if we were to
explore what happened in Ferguson.
As I got to know my students, and through our class
discussions, I realized that although these ideas were
important for students to be aware of and to understand, the Western cultural and textual frames of
reference with which I sought to explore these issues
were far beyond their grasp. I began to realize that what
I thought was important for them to learn wasn’t quite
what they needed to learn. I slowly arrived at the conclusion that what I had spent all summer planning was not
going to work with this class.
To buy some time, as I scrambled to change how I
would teach my students, I brought in some old English
Language Arts 30-2 diploma exams so we could practise
our visual response strategies. One photo we looked at
was the prompt from the June 2009 exam. It was an
Associated Press photo of a survivor and his home
following an earthquake in Yinghua, China.1
I had used this image in my 30-2 classes before, and
students often struggled with how to interpret it, so I
was curious about how my 20-2 class would react. Right
away, my students could relate to this survivor—not a
theoretical relation but in terms of their lived experience.
Students said, “Oh, yes. I’ve seen this in my home
country” and “Where I grew up, it looked like this.”
When I asked them what they thought this image was
about, they responded with the words hope, home, sacrifice,
Alberta Voices
determination and struggle. Then, they began to share their
stories with me. I couldn’t believe what I heard.
My students shared stories of typhoons and other
natural disasters that devastated their homes and the
homes of people they knew. They told me about how
entire communities would come together to support
each other. They told me how, despite irreparable losses
to their communities and families, they somehow found
the hope and strength to rebuild, time after time.
My intent was to follow up the visual response unit
with a film study, yet I had a nagging feeling that I
needed to change the film I had chosen, to something
that spoke with more relevance to my students’ lived
experience. I wondered how I could get them to see the
power of their own stories. I needed to find a way for
them to recognize this power within themselves.
I remembered a 2006 documentary called God Grew
Tired of Us. The film is about the Lost Boys of Sudan
and a group of these young men who moved to the
United States as refugees. The South Sudanese are
mostly Christian, and they were persecuted by the
northern (mostly Muslim) Sudanese, for reasons too
complex to detail here. The attempt was made to rid
Sudan of its Christian population, many of whom
belonged to the Dinka tribe. As villages were raided, the
order was decreed to kill all male South Sudanese,
regardless of age. With no other choice, 27,000 of them,
mostly boys, fled Sudan. On foot. They walked from
South Sudan to Ethiopia, where they were easy targets
for both the militia and the lions roaming the countryside. They lived in Ethiopian camps for three years. In
1991, when the Ethiopian government became unstable,
they were forced to flee again, back through Sudan, and
they ended up in Kenyan refugee camps. By then, the
27,000 had been reduced to 12,000—and those who
survived had endured unimaginable horrors.
The film follows a few of these Lost Boys for three
years, as they left Kenya for the United States. I thought
this would be the perfect film for my class. Although
they hadn’t necessarily endured the atrocities the Lost
Boys had, my students could all relate to the struggle of
leaving their home and living in a land where they did
not understand the language, the culture and (in the case
of Alberta) the weather.
I wanted my students’ opinions before I made the
decision to show the film. I told them about the difficult
images they would encounter. I told them there were
scenes of families and friends being separated and then
reunited many years later. I told them about how I had
Volume 12, Number 1
cried as I watched it. I explained to them why I thought
it was an important film for us to watch. How, although
it wasn’t their story, it really was. How, despite there
being 47 students in the class, each could relate to that
film. They unanimously agreed that we should watch the
film.
We watched the film. We laughed, we cried, we
rejoiced when one character, Jon, was reunited with his
mother at the end of the film. When the film was over, I
asked my students what they thought and how they
could relate. The floodgates opened.
I hadn’t realized how much my students’ experiences
overlapped with those of the boys from the film. Some
students said it was like watching their own life on the
screen. Others shared how they, too, were reunited with
a mother or father long thought to be dead or missing.
One student shared how she fled Zimbabwe when
rebels showed up and tried to stop government protests
by throwing molten rubber on people. She and her
mother lived on the streets of Johannesburg for months,
begging for food, until they were able to find an apartment with no water or electricity. Her father could
sponsor only one of them to move to Canada. Her eyes
welled up as she recounted how her mother was still
there, unable to join her here. She taught me about
resilience and hope.
Another student shared how, when he was 13 and
his brother was 11, their parents were shot to death,
during a burglary, right before their eyes. From there, he
went to a refugee camp before finally moving to Canada
years later. That young man is one of the most incredible people I have ever met. When new students arrived
to our class, he greeted them with a handshake and asked
what languages they spoke. Upon their reply, he told
them who in the class also spoke their language and
invited them to sit together. He and the other students
showed up to our class, at 8:30 am almost every day, with
smiles on their faces. My students taught me about the
triumph of the human spirit.
As the students shared their stories, we all began to
forge a deeper connection. I began to question what it
means for students to be successful. In Alberta, school
success is often measured with diploma exam scores and
provincial achievement test results. In an English class,
success might mean completing a five-paragraph essay
that insightfully answers the topic question, has a strong
voice, and demonstrates confident control of spelling,
grammar, mechanics, sentence construction and word
usage.
7
By this definition, my 20-2 ELL students are not
successful. In fact, some might say that they are light
years away from this kind of success. Some of them
don’t even know what a paragraph looks like; they’ve
never heard of topic sentences or thesis statements, and
they wouldn’t know a simile even if one fell on their foot
like an anvil in a Wile E Coyote cartoon. I would argue,
however, that these students are more successful and
resilient than some of us can ever dream of being.
For my students, being alive is success. For my
students, success is coming to school and working two
jobs so they can support their family, meeting someone
who understands what they’ve been through, or surviving their first Canadian winter. Meeting these incredible
students has completely changed my perspective about
the nature of education. I am still teaching them how to
read and write, how to structure a paragraph, and the
difference between there, their and they’re. But we’re doing
it on their terms. My students taught me that marks,
while important, aren’t everything; we should be educating the whole person.
There exists a world of literature beyond
Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen—literature that
speaks to the experiences of my students and a world
where I am the one struggling to understand allusions,
culture-specific aphorisms and Indigenous ways of
being. In these scenarios, my students are the teachers
and I am the student. I am trying to use texts from
outside the literary canon; my aim is to find authors
from the same parts of the world as my students, to
build on their cultural capital and to provide them with a
sense of textual connection we sometimes take for
granted. They laugh as I struggle to say hello in their
8
languages; the lingual gymnastics I have to perform to
say those words are humbling—this is what my students
endure day after day as they try to learn English.
I have heard teachers complain about their frustrations in working with ELL students. I agree that it is
incredibly challenging to teach reading and writing to
students who are not English-language readers and
writers. Some are not literate in their own languages. For
me, the challenges are easily surmounted when, each day,
I bear witness to the endless compassion, empathy and
caring these students share with each other. One such
moment occurred when we were halfway through God
Grew Tired of Us.
It was a particularly difficult time for me: my infant
son hadn’t been sleeping, I was recovering from a nasty
case of strep throat, and I was knee-deep in marking two
class sets of 30-2 literary exploration essays. That
morning, two new students were added to our already
full 20-2 ELL class. They were twins from Sudan. When
I introduced them to the class and shared where they
were from, the students erupted in applause. They
understood the twins’ journey. One student motioned to
the empty seats next to him. Waving them over, he
exclaimed with joy, “We have two new brothers!” To the
boys, he added, “Welcome to the family,” and smiled. In
that moment, my irritated throat became clear and a
wellspring of energy stirred from within, leaving me
reinvigorated and excited to learn from the best teachers
I have ever had.
Note
1. The photo can be seen at https://education.alberta.ca/
media/1163575/04%20ela30-2%20sows%20jun09.pdf, on page 4.
Alberta Voices
“I Guess I Gotta Do It Because
It’s School”: Boys Discuss
School Reading for DEAR Time
Brenda Kelly
Brenda Kelly is an assistant professor of curriculum studies at the
University of Saskatchewan. She teaches courses in reading,
writing and associated literacies. Her research interests are literacy,
writing, gender and literacy, identity, rural education, social justice,
teacher education, and decolonization. She also teaches for the
university’s Northern Teacher Education Program (NORTEP),
the Indian Teacher Education Program (ITEP) and the
Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program
(SUNTEP).
When the first afternoon bell rang, the Grade 8 boy slumped
in his desk with a sigh and opened his novel. He stretched his long
legs underneath his desk and crossed his feet at the ankles. With
his head lowered, he slowly turned the pages of the book at regular
intervals. Occasionally, his glance strayed from the book to the
playground outside, to the teacher or to the clock at the front of the
classroom. After 15 minutes, the teacher asked the students to turn
to their science binders. At that point, I noticed that the novel the
boy had been reading was upside down.
Independent reading is an important component of
a strong school literacy program, but students’ inappropriate use of independent reading time has elicited little
attention. Initial responses to disengaged students have
focused on empowering the classroom teacher to build a
stronger, well-structured independent reading time for
students but have ignored the root causes of students’
behaviour. Because reading time tends to be less structured, students find it easier to appear to be readers
under the watchful gaze of the classroom teacher. Kelley
and Clausen-Grace (2006, 148) use the term “fake
readers” to describe those students who read the words
in a text without attaching meaning, or those who
Volume 12, Number 1
pretend to read. Fake reading has also been investigated
by Marshall (2002) and Reutzel et al (2008). Furthering
the response, Krashen (2011, 5) states, “When there is
real evidence of non-engagement, there is a plausible
reason: The basic principles of SSR [Sustained Silent
Reading] have been violated.”
Independent reading is part of good reading
programs in primary, elementary and middle years
schooling. Independent reading is also a school literacy
practice known by acronyms such as DEAR (Drop
Everything and Read), STAR (Sit Together and Read),
SQUIRT (Sustained Quiet Uninterrupted Independent
Reading Time) and SSR (Sustained Silent Reading).
Readers learn to select their own texts and read on their
own for enjoyment. They can select books pertaining to
their own interests and read at their own level and pace.
Students need many opportunities to practise their
developing literacy skills in authentic and meaningful
ways (Cambourne 1988, 2000/01). One goal of independent reading is to increase students’ engagement
with reading and, ultimately, with school. Most teachers
would agree that making time for students to read
self-selected books helps to create a positive attitude
toward reading, which in turn leads to increased scores
on reading achievement tests (DeBenedictis and
Fisher 2007).
Independent reading is usually not subject to formal
assessment or evaluation procedures in the classroom;
therefore, it is an activity children can freely participate
in with a greater degree of self-efficacy. Expectations
regarding time spent reading, type of texts read and
general classroom behaviour are common in most
classrooms. However, in some classrooms, the teacher’s
9
monitoring of the students, their reading materials and
their reading habits during independent reading
decreases in comparison to monitoring at other times of
the school day. Students then use independent reading
time for purposes that suit their own interests, their
social survival at school and their relationships with their
peers.
In this article, I discuss an ethnographic research
study that inquired into the in-school and out-of-school
literacy practices of six rural male adolescents in a
western Canadian province. One inquiry focused on the
use of DEAR time and the boys’ attitudes toward this
component of the school day. Here, I explore the
reasons for their literacy behaviours and offer recommendations for a more effective paradigm of using
independent reading as a strong piece of a good literacy
program.
Method
This research used an ethnographic research framework. Merriam (1998, 13) states that an ethnographic
study “uncovers and describes beliefs, values, and
attitudes that structure the behavior of a group.” I
wanted to look beyond the actual literacy artifacts in the
lives of these young men and engage in thoughtful
conversation with them about their perceptions of their
literate worlds. In my study, I addressed some or all of
the following: “beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, emotions,
verbal and nonverbal means of communication, social
networks, [and] behaviors of the group of individuals
with friends, family and associates” (LeCompte and
Schensul 1999, 4), as well as the use of technology, the
creation of artifacts and the “patterned use of space and
time” (p 4) in the lives of the boys. Here, I discuss the
boys’ use of the space and time allotted for independent
reading in their Grade 8 classroom.
Six male students formed my case study. The case
study, or bounded system, was set within the students’
and my shared cultural perspective (Creswell 2005),
based on extensive data collection. Bounded means that I
separated the case out for research and clearly defined it
in terms of time, place or physical boundaries (p 439).
The six boys formed a bounded case in the context of a
particular school at a particular time in history, and the
literacy activities and literacy events in which they
participated were the objects of my attention.
These boys volunteered to participate in the study,
for four months of classroom and school literacy events
10
and four more months of classroom, community, farm
and home events in which observable literacy activities
were the focus. They lived in a rural area on a working
farm and were Grade 8 students at a large rural pre­
kindergarten to Grade 12 school in a small town in a
western Canadian province. None of them had been
retained in earlier grades. Although there was a representative range of academic abilities within the group, each
boy expressed himself verbally in a thoughtful and
mature manner in the individual and small group
conversations. My intent was to write a sociocultural
analysis of the data, with genuine concern for the
cultural context of the participants, the rural Canadian
prairie school and the community, based on a particular
historical, social and economic context.
The boys’ in-school and out-of-school reading and
writing practices were observed and recorded. Personal
interviews and informal conversations occurred
throughout the study. The boys talked about their
perceptions of what reading was and how reading was
enacted in the classroom with the teacher and their
peers. They discussed the use and (mis)appropriation
of DEAR time and how they used it for their own
purposes within the school day. This focus on independent reading time was but one aspect of the literacy
study.
Limitations
No study is ever completely finished. In this
research study, several limitations emerged.
The data on the boys’ reading was collected every
three or four days, instead of on consecutive school
days, with the intention of getting a general view of
what was being read. Perhaps data collected every day
would have provided a more thorough view.
The focus of this study was six boys in a Grade 8
classroom. Observations about the girls’ behaviour in
that classroom were not included. As well, observations
about the classroom teacher’s behaviour and teaching
practice were as minimal as possible, because the focus
was on the boys. Data on the girls and the teacher may
have provided a more complete view of the classroom
situation, or it may have detracted from the purpose of
this article.
The observations in this research group were
accurate for the particular time in that school at that time
in history and, because of the nature of human behaviour, could not be duplicated in succeeding situations.
Alberta Voices
Place
Historically, the area was the home of the Cree
people, who followed the buffalo. The intrusion of
European fur traders disturbed the life of the Aboriginal
people and led to the creation of the land of Treaty 6 in
1876. With the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway
in 1907 and the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in 1908,
the population grew rapidly and a village was incorporated soon after. The Cree people were dispersed to
reservations north and west of the community.
Firmly rooted in west-central rural Canada, the
school draws its student population from the town in
which it is located and from the surrounding tiny villages
and family farms. In the summer, the rolling hills
(interspersed with alkali and freshwater sloughs on two
sides of the town) contrast with good farmland dotted
with poplar and aspen bluffs and sprawling pastures
covered with native prairie grasses on the remaining two
edges.
A train slowly chugging through the south end of
town is a reminder that the town got its start when it was
designated as one of the home terminals where train
crews changed. A thriving grain-processing plant and a
commercial greenhouse anchor the east side of town,
and grain elevators stand along the rail tracks to the
south of town. A major highway and a secondary
highway, intersecting on the north side of town, help to
keep the town’s businesses viable and provide transportation corridors to all parts of the province. Farm
machinery dealerships, bulk fuel stations and fertilizer
depots line the blacktop highways leading into town. Gas
stations provide fuel, confectionary supplies and lottery
tickets to the local people, as well as to traffic moving on
to other parts of the province.
The older residential areas, with wide, tree-lined
streets, contain smaller homes mixed with taller, twostorey homes. The newer residential areas contain larger,
stucco-covered homes spaced close together on the wide
streets.
A hospital and several care home facilities make this
a town in which senior citizens can retire and still have
access to needed health services. A healthy mix of single
career people, working-class and professional families,
and senior citizens leads to a vibrant residential and
business life in the town.
At the northern edge of this prairie town, the
prekindergarten to Grade 12 school occupies a large
tract of land and provides services to approximately 400
Volume 12, Number 1
students. One-third of the school’s students are from
rural areas, and the remaining two-thirds live in town. A
large football field, a memorial park, an elementary
children’s playground and a community college share the
plot of land. The morning quiet of the space around the
school is broken by the sounds of rumbling diesel
engines and large tires crunching the gravel as orange
school buses with standard gearshifts lumber along the
street to the west of the school. The buses stop to
deposit their precious cargo of students each morning
and return later in the day to take the students home
safely. The town students make their own way to and
from school.
School Reading for DEAR
The six boys participated in DEAR, which was the
school’s chosen acronym for independent reading. In
this Grade 8 classroom, DEAR occupied the first 15
minutes after the noon break. For eight classes, I
recorded what each boy was reading, and in later conversations I also talked with the boys about what they were
reading.1 The appendix at the end of the article details
the texts the boys read during the eight blocks of
DEAR.
Ron
Ron said that he read for enjoyment in DEAR. He
thought that DEAR was sometimes a waste of time but
that it could be fun. Ron was a reader who enjoyed
sustained time for reading because that made it easier for
him to become engaged in the storyline, and he considered the timetable’s allotted 15 minutes insufficient. He
appreciated it when the teacher gave them extra time to
read. Ron also said that he read “textbooks and stuff, like
what you have to do and not what I would like to do, but
I guess I gotta do it because it’s school.”
David
David was a good student who completed his
assignments well and was knowledgeable about many
topics. He considered fluency a sign of a good reader
and noted that “usually when we are reading something
out loud, the teacher asks me to keep reading out loud,
or if other people have trouble with words, I don’t.” He
enjoyed reading out loud when called upon by the
classroom teacher. David chose to read sports novels.
He was the captain of his baseball team and his hockey
11
team, and he was connecting his out-of-school interests
with his school literacy by choosing books that featured
sports heroes.
Sam
During the eight blocks of DEAR time, Sam read
seven books recommended for middle years students.
Interestingly, he read The Transall Saga, by Gary Paulsen
(1998), on Day 4 and Day 6 and another book on Day 5.
Sam followed the expectation of reading narrative
fiction novels during DEAR time, but he did so with
reluctance. He felt that DEAR reading was something
that teachers controlled, and he did not understand why
they made him read. Sam told me, “Well, I read the stuff
the teachers want me to read.” He also said that he had
no time for reading. In answer to my question about
what he liked about reading, he bluntly replied, “I don’t
like reading.”
Cal
Cal did not enjoy DEAR time at all. He never signed
out books when the class went to the library. Instead, he
sat at the tables and visited quietly with classmates, out
of the teacher’s visual attention area. He chose a table far
away from the circulation desk, where the teacher spent
most of the class chatting with the librarian and the
students who were checking out books. During DEAR
time, Cal alternated between reading his dictionary and
reading Jean Val Jean, by Solomon Cleaver (1989), which
the class was studying in English language arts. His
locker contained several truck and hunting magazines,
but he never brought those to class. Cal did not see the
reading he engaged in to satisfy his out-of-school
interests as being a form of reading that would be
accepted and acknowledged by the school. He did not
enjoy reading and said, blushing, “Uh, I don’t like it that
much, but we have to do it, so . . . .”
Walter
Walter was more thoughtful about using DEAR time
than the other boys were. He told me that reading is
“like reading the word on a page and understanding the
story and relating it to yourself.” With this statement, he
was expressing what was expected of him in terms of
school literacy during DEAR time. Walter was the top
student in the class, an accomplished athlete and a friend
to everyone. During six of the eight DEAR blocks, he
perused a well-thumbed paperback copy of a handbook
12
for snowboarders, which he had brought from home. He
could not locate this text for two DEAR blocks and,
therefore, read Overdrive, by Eric Walters (2004). Walter
had taken up snowboarding at a nearby ski hill, and he
wanted to learn as much as he could about clothing,
equipment and techniques. He chose to read this
nonfiction text that appealed to his out-of-school
interests and enhanced his knowledge of the world.
Walter demonstrated his confidence in himself when he
reported that he read at school “because I have to and
also for enjoyment, and to waste time.”
Keith
Keith was motivated to attend school by the sports
activities he could participate in during breaks, at noon
and after school.
Keith talked about reading at school: “Yeah, we just
read the words on the page, . . . and it is stuff the teacher
tells me to read.” He noted that he didn’t like “the
boring parts in the book that aren’t really interesting. . . .
Like, if there is a part that is just talking about the
characters and stuff and their personalities and their
stuff, and it just goes on and on.” He was referring to
several short stories in the Grade 8 English language arts
course that focused on relationships and character
development.
For DEAR time, Keith purposefully chose sports
novels that featured excitement and heroes overcoming
difficulty.
Common Themes
All six boys told me that occasionally during DEAR
time, they just stared at a book and pretended to read.
Feeling physically ill (such as the feeling of coming
down with the flu) and being overtired (from the
previous night’s sports activities, for example) were
mentioned frequently. Social behaviour in the gym and
hallways sometimes contributed to the fake reading.
Keith said that during DEAR he sometimes replayed
in his mind the excitement of being on the winning floor
hockey team at noon in the gym. Two of the boys said
that they felt angry about being bullied at noon in the
hallways by students from other classes and would use
DEAR time to think of ways to get even. Sam said that
he sometimes used the time to think about his hockey
practice that evening and what the coach might have
them do. The boys sometimes used DEAR time to think
Alberta Voices
over previous school incidents, plan for the rest of the
day or just daydream. They agreed that it was important
to “look like you are reading” to avoid attracting attention from the supervising teacher.
Results
The six boys used DEAR time in different ways.
They “performed school” by displaying the appropriate
social behaviour expected from them in their particular
Grade 8 classroom. Each had reading material at his
desk at the required time and appeared to use it in an
appropriate academic manner. Some read intensely
during the allotted time, and some used the time to
reflect on their noon activities. Some expressed a desire
for a longer DEAR time so that they could become
more engaged in their reading material.
Independent reading time allows students to practise
their reading skills in a context with less scaffolding and
support than in an English language arts class. Students
also find that there is less accountability for their reading
behaviour. Both teachers and students view independent
reading time as a time of more freedom. The idea that
students become better at what they practise is a chief
motivation for maintaining independent reading time in
the classroom (Cullinan 2000, 2).
Implications
In this classroom, there was no direct guidance
from the teacher regarding DEAR time. The students
either had been given the guidelines earlier in the
school year or had retained directions from previous
teachers.
The boys knew that they were expected to display
appropriate reading behaviour in the classroom. This
included not disturbing others, turning the pages quietly
and maintaining the appearance of being focused on the
book. There were negligible student–teacher interactions
before and during DEAR time. Positive teacher guidance
or intervention may have helped make this a time of the
school day to look forward to.
Half of the boys used the independent reading time
to read, and the other half used the time to replay events
in their school life and try to achieve a balance for the
rest of the day. This varied from day to day, as various
social-positioning events occurred throughout the school
year. Distractions such as these prevented the boys from
using their DEAR time optimally.
Volume 12, Number 1
Recommendations
It is commonly thought that everyone knows how to
read and can read during an unstructured time during
the school day. Professional development on independent reading time, in the form of workshops or professional conversations with literacy coaches, is limited. In
this particular classroom, some modifications could have
been made to better engage these six boys.
First, the teacher could have encouraged the boys to
read literacy texts other than narrative fiction. Magazines,
newspapers, graphic novels, nonfiction science books
and books from home could have been discussed and
made available for them.
Second, the teacher could have placed a collection of
diverse, interesting texts in a convenient location in the
classroom for those students who had forgotten their
books at home, or who just did not have a book at hand.
Third, the teacher could have experimented with a
DEAR time longer than 15 minutes. Most of the boys
thought that more time would allow them to become
more engaged in what they were reading.
Fourth, holding independent reading time at a time
other than right after the lunch break might have allowed
the boys to focus more on reading rather than thinking
about the events that had just occurred in the hallways
and the gymnasium.
Pilgreen (2000) has studied independent reading
programs in schools and makes recommendations for a
strong program, based on the following eight factors:
• Greater access to books
• Materials that appeal to students
• A conducive environment, with considerations of
seating and lighting
• Encouragement from the classroom teacher
• Staff training and professional development
• Nonaccountability for the reading done during this
time
• Follow-up activities after reading
• Distributed time to read (that is, having several times
throughout the day to read)
Independent reading time is less structured, so
students can read self-chosen books for pleasure in the
classroom setting. However, the teacher and students still
need to maintain some structure so that all may function
in an atmosphere of self-efficacy for reading satisfaction.
Then, perhaps, the young man described at the beginning of this article may be motivated to turn his book
around for authentic reading.
13
Appendix A: Boys’ Reading
Choices for Eight Blocks of
DEAR Time
Ron
The Hobbit, by J R R Tolkien (2013)
The Hobbit
The Hobbit
Running Loose, by Chris Crutcher (1983)
Running Loose
Jean Val Jean, by Solomon Cleaver (1989)
Jean Val Jean
Jean Val Jean
David
Cup Crazy, by Gordon Korman (2000)
Go Jump in the Pool, by Gordon Korman (1979)
Go Jump in the Pool
Timberwolf Challenge, by Sigmund Brouwer (2008)
A biography of hockey player Joe Sakic (author
unknown)
Rink Rivals, by Jacqueline Guest (2010)
Rink Rivals
Southpaw, by Rich Wallace (2006)
Sam
The Perfect Date, by R L Stine (1996)
The Great Pyramid Robbery, by Katherine Roberts (2001)
More Ghost Stories of Alberta, by Barbara Smith (1996)
The Transall Saga, by Gary Paulsen (1998)
A book about the wrestler The Great Khali (author
unknown)
The Transall Saga
Not a Trace, by Norah McClintock (2005)
See No Evil, by Diane Young (2006)
Cal
Dictionary
Dictionary
Jean Val Jean, by Solomon Cleaver (1989)
Dictionary
Jean Val Jean
Jean Val Jean
Dictionary
Dictionary
14
Walter
A snowboarding handbook (author unknown)
A snowboarding handbook
Overdrive, by Eric Walters (2004)
Overdrive
A snowboarding handbook
A snowboarding handbook
A snowboarding handbook
A snowboarding handbook
Keith
A book from Rich Wallace’s Winning Season series
(title unknown)
Absent from School (author unknown)
Rookie of the Year, by John R Tunis (1990)
Rookie of the Year
A biography of hockey player Mats Sundin (author
unknown)
The Day My Butt Went Psycho, by Andy Griffiths (2003)
The Day My Butt Went Psycho
The Haunted Shortstop, by Allan Zullo (1997)
Notes
This article is based on part of the author’s PhD dissertation
(Kelly 2010).
1. In the discussion that follows, the boys’ names have been
changed.
References
Brouwer, S. 2008. Timberwolf Challenge. Victoria, BC: Orca.
Cambourne, B. 1988. The Whole Story: Natural Learning and the
Acquisition of Literacy in the Classroom. New York: Scholastic.
———. 2000/01. “Conditions for Literacy Learning.” The Reading
Teacher 54, no 4: 414–17.
Cleaver, S. 1989. Jean Val Jean. Saskatoon, Sask: Western Extension
College Educational Publishers. (Orig pub 1935.)
Creswell, J W. 2005. Educational Research: Planning, Conducting, and
Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.
Crutcher, C. 1983. Running Loose. New York: HarperCollins.
Cullinan, B E. 2000. Read to Me: Raising Kids Who Love to Read.
New York: Scholastic.
DeBenedictis, D, and D Fisher. 2007. “Sustained Silent Reading:
Making Adaptations.” Voices from the Middle 14, no 3 (March):
29–37.
Griffiths, A. 2003. The Day My Butt Went Psycho. New York: Scholastic.
Alberta Voices
Guest, J. 2010. Rink Rivals. Toronto: Lorimer.
Paulsen, G. 1998. The Transall Saga. New York: Delacorte.
Kelley, M, and N Clausen-Grace. 2006. “R : The Sustained Silent
Reading Makeover That Transformed Readers.” The Reading
Teacher 60, no 2 (October): 148–56.
Pilgreen, J L. 2000. The SSR Handbook: How to Organize and Manage a
Sustained Silent Reading Program. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/
Cook.
Kelly, B. 2010. “A Study of the Literacy Practices of Rural Farm Male
Adolescents.” PhD dissertation, University of Alberta.
Reutzel, D R, C D Jones, P C Fawson and J A Smith. 2008.
“Scaffolded Silent Reading: A Complement to Guided Repeated
Oral Reading That Works!” The Reading Teacher 62, no 3
(November): 194–207.
5
Korman, G. 1979. Go Jump in the Pool. New York: Scholastic.
———. 2000. Cup Crazy. New York: Scholastic.
Krashen, S. 2011. “Non-Engagement in Sustained Silent Reading:
How Extensive Is It? What Can It Teach Us?” Colorado Reading
Council Journal 22: 5–10. Also available at www.sdkrashen.com/
content/articles/non-engagement_in_ssr.pdf (accessed May 27,
2015).
LeCompte, M D, and J J Schensul. 1999. Designing and Conducting
Ethnographic Research. Lanham, Md: AltaMira.
Marshall, J C. 2002. Are They Really Reading? Expanding SSR in the
Middle Grades. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse.
Roberts, K. 2001. The Great Pyramid Robbery. London: Collins Voyager.
Smith, B. 1996. More Ghost Stories of Alberta. Edmonton, Alta:
Lone Pine.
Stine, R L. 1996. The Perfect Date. Toronto: Pocket Books.
Tolkien, J R R. 2013. The Hobbit. New York: HarperCollins. (Orig
pub 1937.)
Tunis, J R. 1990. Rookie of the Year. San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich. (Orig pub 1944.)
Wallace, R. 2006. Southpaw. New York: Viking.
McClintock, N. 2005. Not a Trace. Markham, Ont: Scholastic Canada.
Walters, E. 2004. Overdrive. Victoria, BC: Orca.
Merriam, S B. 1998. Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in
Education. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Zullo, A. 1997. The Haunted Shortstop. New York: Scholastic.
Volume 12, Number 1
Young, D. 2006. See No Evil. Victoria, BC: Orca.
15
Ideas for the Teaching of
Reading to Chinese Students
in the English Language Arts
Classroom
Heather Blair, Hongliang Fu, Xiaobing Lin, Shuo Li and Nannan Wang
Heather Blair is a professor of language and literacy education at
the University of Alberta. Her research interests include literacy
education, English as an additional language, bilingual education
and multilingual classroom pedagogy.
Hongliang Fu is a doctoral student at the University of Alberta.
She was a preschool and kindergarten teacher in China. Her
research interests focus on early childhood education, bilingual
education and teacher education.
Xiaobing Lin is a doctoral student at the University of Alberta.
Her research interests are second language education and bilingual
education. She has taught English as a second language and
Chinese as a second language.
Shuo Li is an associate professor in the Foreign Language
Department at the Shanghai Dianji University. She teaches
English as a second language in China and has taught Chinese to
Canadian English speakers at the Edmonton Multicultural
Centre.
Nannan Wang is a master’s student in the Department of
Elementary Education at the University of Alberta. Her
specialization is bilingual education. She has taught high-schoollevel English as a second language in China, as well as Chinese to
English speakers in Canada.
Compared with other countries, Canada has the
second highest proportion of immigrants in its population (Statistics Canada 2013). Two-thirds of these
immigrants come from Asia. The growing number of
Chinese-speaking children in Alberta schools is evidence
of this, and it is important for all teachers to have an
16
understanding of the languages and literacies these
students bring to the classroom.
In this article, we discuss the nature of one non­
alphabetic writing system (Mandarin), and how knowing
a little about Mandarin and the reading of Mandarin can
help teachers understand the reading processes of their
Chinese students when they are reading English. Based
on the work of Goodman et al (2012), we also discuss
reading theory, what we know about how reading works
in these two different writing systems, and how having
this comparative perspective will help teachers in
teaching reading. Our work is based on sociocultural
theories of reading as a language process and the notion
that readers, when reading any text, bring with them
what they know about how the world is represented by
symbolic systems in written text. Our goal is to look at
what Chinese students bring to the reading of English
from their knowledge of written Chinese. We discuss
similarities and differences between these written
languages to provide classroom teachers with ways to
understand and support Chinese students in reading
English. In this article, we use the term literacy as an
umbrella term encompassing oral and written language,
but our focus is on written language (reading and writing).
Background
The Chinese and English writing systems may seem
to be entirely different from each other, but we will show
how a sociopsycholinguistic theory of reading
Alberta Voices
(Goodman 1994, 1996; Halliday 1974, 1985; Lee 2012)
illuminates the commonalities. We will also discuss the
differences that may be helpful for teachers to know.
The three major cueing systems used to read in all
languages are as follows:
• The graphophonic system—the relationship
between letter (graph) and sound (phonic)
• The syntactic system—the grammar of the language
• The semantic system—the making of meaning
All readers use psycholinguistic strategies based on
these cueing systems. All languages also have ambiguity,
and words do not always have the same meaning in every
context. For example, the word refuse used as a noun
means garbage, but as a verb it means “You are not given
permission.” The human brain has a mindset for these
ambiguities and for the many instances in which irregularities occur. The mind determines meaning from the
context, regardless of the language.
According to psycholinguistic theory, there is a
single process for making sense of print, whether in
alphabetic or nonalphabetic language systems. There are,
however, some differences between these languages that
are useful for teachers to know.
(Duan 1981). Each character reflects the world as
important, observed in nature and imagined in the
human mind. The Shuo Wen Jie Zi systematically
expounds the real and imaginary vision of Chinese
characters during the process of its invention and
evolution, providing an entire hermeneutics in both
literal and philosophical aspects.
Chinese characters are divided into two types: single
characters and integrated characters (two or more single
characters). For example, the pictophonetic character
qing (晴), meaning sunny, is an integrated character. Its
left component is the radical ri (日), meaning sun, which
can also be used as a single character. The radical is very
important, and its basic function is to categorize characters with similar meanings or ideas, which provides a tool
for comprehension. The radical works as a unit of
classification of characters, and it may be found on top,
to the left or right, or below a character.
As the meanings of the ideas are inherent in the
components of the character, in order to be able to read
Chinese, the reader must use graphical visualization and
conceptualize contextual cues. The reader cannot rely on
how to pronounce the characters.
Chinese Characters
Similarities Between English
Words and Chinese Characters
China has a long history of literacy using a system
of characters as the orthography. Although Chinese has
many spoken dialects and languages, its writing system
directly represents meaning, so it is possible for the
speakers of these dialects and languages to understand
each other’s writing without pronouncing the words
orally. In contrast to alphabetic writing systems, such as
English, the Chinese characters represent meaning
directly and are not based on a sound-to-letter correspondence that assumes that, in order to read, one needs
to connect the sounds (phonology) of the language to
the letters (orthography).1 Getting meaning directly from
symbols is similar to how the language of mathematics
works. A statement using the Arabic numerical system—
such as 1 + 4 = 5—can be read directly from the
numerals without a direct relationship to sound
(Goodman et al 2012, 6). This system is known as a
logographic writing system or an ideographic system.
Unlike phonetic alphabets, the Chinese characters
are ideographic symbols, which are endowed with an
explicit mechanism for imitation of nature and metaphorization. The ancient lexicon Shuo Wen Jie Zi (说文解字)
describes Chinese characters as “interlaced strokes”
Volume 12, Number 1
Just as words are essential to reading and writing in
English, characters are essential to Chinese.
Children who are literate in Chinese can predict
meanings from the radicals in Chinese characters. Certain
radicals indicate particular concepts. For example, the
commonly used radical 木 indicates anything related to
wood. The radical 火 means fire. The radical is one
component of a character, and, as mentioned, a character consists of numerous components that give meaning
to that character. In the following examples, you can see
the radicals indicating wood and fire in the characters:
树 = tree
林 = forest
根 = root
烤 = roast
炖 = stew
燃 = burn
Words in English are similar in this way in that they
have prefixes, suffixes and roots that provide clues to
their meaning, such as un- or uni- (unite and union) and
anti- (antibiotic).
17
Another aspect of word composition is combination, and it exists in both Chinese and English. For
instance, 莓 means berry, as in 草莓 (strawberry), 蓝莓
(blueberry) and 黑莓 (blackberry).
These characteristics of Chinese characters can
benefit students if they apply them to the learning of
English words.
Syntactic Comparisons Between
English and Chinese
Most people see syntax as the structure of sentences, and the most important feature in the structure
of a sentence is the order of the words. Most languages
use one of the following word orders: subject–verb–
object (SVO), subject–object–verb (SOV) or verb–subject–object (VSO). In this way, Chinese and English are
similar, as they both use the SVO word order. This is
because Chinese and English belong to the same
linguistic family—the Indo-European language family.
Because of this similar basic syntax, English teachers
may notice that their Chinese students can predict the
main idea of a sentence as they draw on what they know
about the syntax of Chinese.
However, there are many differences between the
two languages with regard to syntax. Knowing a little
about these differences will help teachers of Chinese
students to understand the miscues they are prone to.
Word-Order Differences
As discussed, both Chinese and English follow the
SVO word order. With only these three major elements
in a sentence, we can express only limited information,
such as “I like it.” If we want to express to what degree
we like something—for example, “I like it very
much”—we can use an adverb to modify the verb.
In Chinese, the modifier would come before the verb
(“I very like it”).
In the sentence “I like it,” we have a clear agent—I.
In other sentences, the agent is not as clear. For example,
in “It is raining,” it may not be clear that it is doing the
raining; however, the syntactic rule in English is such
that we cannot have the subject missing. In Chinese, the
raining is stated, but it is not important who or what is
doing the raining. In English, we must use the pseudosubject it; in Chinese, there is no pseudo-subject or
pseudo-object. The same sentence in Chinese would be
“Is raining.” In English, you hear people say, “It is time,”
18
while Chinese people would say, “Time has come.” The
pseudo-subject it does not make much sense to them.
Questions
In English, when we want to turn the statement “It
is raining” into a question, we simply reverse the order
of it and is: “Is it raining?” We can also involve an
auxiliary verb and put it at the front of the sentence. The
rule for question formation in English is auxiliary verb +
subject + verb.
In Chinese, the rule for question formation is
simpler. You don’t have to reverse the order, and you
don’t have to find an appropriate auxiliary verb. Just keep
the same statement and put a question mark (ma) at the
end, and you have constructed a question. For example,
to turn “It is raining” into a question, simply say, “Is
raining ma?” in a rising tone. As for the who, what and
where questions, in Chinese you can simply say, “You like
what?” A speaker does not even have to put a question
mark at the end. For Chinese students learning English,
the composition of questions (reversing the order of
words and adding an auxiliary verb) seems complicated.
As far as disjunctive questions are concerned, some
speakers use a negative statement and a positive question
tag (“It is not raining, is it?”), or a positive statement and
a negative question tag (“It is raining, isn’t it?”). In
English, when the answer to “It is not raining, is it?” is
“Yes, it is,” yes is used to deny the sentence “It is not
raining.” The answer “No, it isn’t” is used to agree with
the questioner. For “It is raining, isn’t it?” the answer
“Yes, it is” confirms that it is raining, while “No, it isn’t”
denies that it is raining. In Chinese, the answer to such
questions is simpler. “Yes” (是) is confirmation and
agreement, and “No” (不是) is denial and disagreement.
Many Chinese students feel confused about questions
such as “It is not raining, is it?”—especially in oral
English, when they need time to figure out if they
should answer, “Yes,” to express the opposite meaning.
Morphological Change
To show what morphological change is, let’s look at
the following sentences:
1. Tom is punching Jerry.
2. Tom punches Jerry.
3. Tom punched Jerry.
4. Tom has punched Jerry.
The four sentences are the same except for the
changes to the verb: punching, punches, punched and has
Alberta Voices
punched. Such changes are called morphological changes.
As we can tell, a change in these morphemes changes the
meaning.
Chinese does not have all of these morphological
changes. To express the same meanings, the Chinese
sentences are as follows:
1. Tom (right now) punch Jerry.
2. Tom (always) punch Jerry.
3. Tom (yesterday) punch Jerry.
4. Tom (already) punch (le) Jerry.
Each Chinese character is complete by itself and
does not allow for any morphological tempering.
Changes in tense are expressed through additional
characters as tense markers. For example, in (1), right now
is placed in front of punch to show that the action is
ongoing. In (4), the character le is added to punch to show
that the punching has already happened.
Punctuation
There are also similarities and differences between
Chinese and English with regard to punctuation marks,
as shown in the table.
English
Chinese
Period
.
。
Comma
,
,
Exclamation mark
!
!
Colon
:
:
Apostrophe
’
n/a
n/a
、
Italicized
words
《》
?
?
“. . .”
“. . .”
Slight pause mark
To indicate a published work
Question mark
Quotation marks
Four Cueing Systems
Though Chinese and English literacy involve
different systems, children who are literate in Chinese
bring certain skills to the learning of English as a second
language. The most effective and widely used of those
skills is prediction. Children who have already attained
the foundation of Chinese literacy are used to making
Volume 12, Number 1
predictions, and they use this knowledge of syntax when
they are learning English. Prediction involves several
factors, including spacing, contextual clues and syntactic
structure.
Spacing
One component of any written language is spacing.
Chinese character spacing is visible, but word spacing is
not. There are spaces between characters in Chinese, but
there is not always a space between words. For example,
in 我每天去学校 (“I go to school every day”), the
invisible word spacing is 我／每天／去／学校 (the
diagonal line indicates the Chinese word spacing). No
spacing between words makes reading in Chinese a
complex cognitive process that requires abstract reasoning and logical thinking. It also involves complex thinking skills, such as understanding words, phrases and the
larger meaning of a passage. When reading in English,
Chinese students who are capable of dealing with the
complexity of Chinese characters can easily determine
that English has individual words with spacing between
the words. It is similar in that way to Chinese. Therefore,
when children start to learn to read in English, they
recognize the concept of an English word.
Contextual Clues
Chinese students have learned a great deal about
context when reading.
Because a Chinese character represents more than
one word, it represents a variety of meanings, depending
on the context. For example, the meaning of hé (和)
varies in different linguistic contexts. In the phrase 你和
我 (you and me), 和 means and. In the phrase 和面 (knead
dough), 和 changes the pronunciation to huò, which
means knead.
To determine the correct meaning that one character
represents, Chinese students predict the meaning with
the aid of contextual clues. The contextual clues may
include key words such as the objects or patterns in the
text and the character’s relationship with the other
characters. By using contextual clues to analyze the same
character in different linguistic contexts, Chinese students can predict a suitable meaning for the character.
When reading different genres of texts in English
(such as stories or expository texts), Chinese students
apply the same reading strategies to make sense of what
they are reading. They construct meanings by drawing
on their knowledge and experience of Chinese and using
them to assist their understanding of English.
19
Syntactic Structure
Another strength Chinese children bring to reading
and writing in English is an understanding of syntactic
structure. Chinese students can grasp the fundamental
syntactic structure of English because it is the same as
that of Chinese. They may not understand every word in
English, but they can predict the meaning based on their
understanding of the structure. For example, with the
sentence “I like apples, but I don’t like avocados,”
Chinese students may not know what avocados means, but
that does not hinder them from predicting its meaning
by analyzing the syntactic structure, because the English
and Chinese structures are basically the same:
I
like apples, but
I don’t like avocados
我 喜欢 苹果 但是 我 不喜欢
鳄梨
S
V
O
S
V
O
The similar syntactic structures provide clues for
Chinese students to predict the meaning. However,
similar syntactic structures can also bring confusion to
Chinese readers. A child may have difficulty predicting
the meaning of a sentence such as “I didn’t call you
because I wanted to see you.” According to contextual
clues, two meanings are possible: “I wanted to see you,
so I didn’t call you” and “I called you not because I
wanted to see you.” It is challenging for Chinese students to construct meaning when negation is used in
English. When writing, because of the similarities in
syntactic structure between English and Chinese,
Chinese students may find it helpful to write in Chinese
first and then translate into English.
The Evolution and Philosophy of
Chinese Characters
Chinese philosophy is embedded in the language
and in the construction of the Chinese characters. The
following logographic characters can give us some idea
of how Chinese characters have evolved and how they
express traditional understandings, inspirations and
judgments.
The character for speech, 言 (yan), has evolved over
centuries:
甲骨文
金文
小篆
oracle bone
bronze
small seal
inscription
inscription
inscription
It also has similarities to the character 舌 (she), which
means tongue. The character 口 (kou), which means mouth,
20
is also similar. These three characters all relate to a
similar concept.
舌 (tongue)
口 (mouth)
甲骨文
甲骨文
oracle bone inscription
oracle bone inscription
From the oracle bone inscription, we find that 言
(speech) is one more horizontal stroke on the tongue (舌),
which means that we should use our tongue to speak.
However, it also suggests that, before speaking, we need
to learn how to control our tongue, and all of these
should be controlled in a big mouth. Thus, 言 is a good
illustration of image imitation based on a metaphorical
connection between the concrete objects (舌 and 口)
and the abstract written symbols. This example suggests
the interplay of three aspects of reading: reading of the
written symbols, meaning construction and sociocultural
influences on reading (Hung 2012).
The characters used in this example reflect the
philosophical essence of Chinese. Some traditional
Chinese philosophies advocate or value silence. Among
them, Confucianism has exerted an important influence
on Chinese teaching and learning. From The Analects
(论语) of Confucius (2008), we see that he often warns
us: “Be cautious when speaking” (慎言) and “He who
learns but does not think is lost; he who thinks but
does not learn is in great danger” (学而不思则罔，
思而不学则殆).
Opening a Space for Silence in
Teaching and Learning
In China, many classrooms are teacher centred, and
many teachers believe that students should learn how to
be silent in the classroom so that they can focus on
learning. Silence involves techniques of “body discipline” (such as students placing their hands flat on the
desktop or extending their arms around the chair back).
It is believed that body discipline contributes to the
temperance of talk, which supports the idea that schooling is the culture of orderly listening. This is the optimum classroom discourse system, in which learning to
listen is learning to keep thinking.
Silence is deeply rooted in traditional cultural values
of order. The space for silence advocated by Confucius
is part of the Chinese culture of teaching and learning.
Silence is welcomed by teachers, since it not only
guarantees order in the classroom but also provides the
space and quiet for the teacher to focus on teaching. The
Alberta Voices
activities of silent reflection and meditation are called
muksha (悟).
Silence provides students with a huge, quiet space in
which to think delicate and profound thoughts. In this
paradigm, the learning space does not depend on the
stimulation of dialogue or on verbal fluidity. It becomes
an inner space of contemplation, self-reflection and
knowledge internalization.
Implications for Teachers
In Western culture, teachers highly value interaction
and oral communication between students as an important part of classroom performance. However, Chinese
educators question whether this kind of verbal participation is the best way to demonstrate knowledge and to
respect each other’s learning. Therefore, Western
teachers of immigrant students from Asia should think
about how their classroom pedagogy can reflect those
students’ learning experiences.
Based on the points discussed in this article, the
following are some implications for ESL teachers as they
teach Chinese immigrant children in Canadian
classrooms:
• Meaning is the essence of reading in both English
and Chinese. Determining meaning does not require
accurate recognition of individual words. The
teacher can draw on the strengths of students when
teaching reading, such as their ability to understand
contextual clues, main words and syntactic
structures.
• The reading process has universal features
(Goodman 1996), as a psycholinguistic process, that
are reflected in the reading of Chinese (Xu 2012).
• In Chinese, character spacing is not word spacing.
Therefore, when Chinese students are reading
English, they can easily distinguish individual words
with the spacing between words.
• It is very important for teachers to understand the
culture of their students. This will help them to
know their students better and to close the gap
between them.
• Teachers should encourage Chinese students to
bring new thoughts and values into the classroom.
• Because of the Chinese practice of silence methodology, Chinese students are often perceived as
passive learners. Therefore, teachers should try to
find more opportunities to communicate with their
Chinese students.
Volume 12, Number 1
•
Teachers should provide silent time for children
to think before they are asked to talk in the
classroom.
• It is essential for teachers to understand what silence
means to their Chinese immigrant students. Silence
does not mean that students don’t understand;
silence might mean that they are thinking. Teachers
should strike a balance between silent and active
reflection in the classroom. They should allow
students to think before they talk, instead of
expecting them to talk all the time.
• It is helpful for teachers who teach Chinese immigrant students to learn some of the similarities and
differences between English and Chinese. This will
help teachers to predict the miscues of their students and provide ideas for addressing such concepts as plural form and verb tense.
• Teachers should support multiliteracy in the
classroom:
• Value students’ literacy in Chinese. Ask them
about it.
• Have books (varied texts) from students’ first
language in the classroom.
• In writing practice, ask students to first write their
ideas down in their mother tongue and to then
use that to write in English.
• Encourage students to write and read dual-­
language texts.
Conclusion
In this article, we have discussed the historical and
cultural background of Chinese characters and words,
compared the syntactic structures of English and
Chinese, and outlined the cueing systems Chinese
immigrant children apply when they learn English. Then,
we talked about an important aspect of traditional
classroom culture in China—silence—and how important it is for Western teachers to understand silence so
that they can better teach Chinese immigrant students.
We also looked at similarities and differences between
Chinese and English, as well as the strengths that
Chinese immigrant students bring to the reading and
writing of English.
Language learning is always a social behaviour
embedded in specific ideology and cultural meanings.
When teachers teach Chinese immigrant students who
have some Chinese reading and writing literacy knowledge, an understanding of the history of Chinese
21
language development and its sociocultural context will
help teachers better understand the process of students’
English learning. Teachers need to not only teach
immigrant students to read and write in English but also
understand the role that students’ first language plays in
the process.
Goodman, K, S Wang, M S Iventosch and Y Goodman, eds. 2012.
Reading in Asian Languages: Making Sense of Written Texts in Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean. New York: Routledge.
Note
Hung, Y N. 2012. “Similarities and Dissimilarities in Reading Chinese
and English: Goodman’s Reading Model Perspective.” In Reading
in Asian Languages: Making Sense of Written Texts in Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean, ed K Goodman, S Wang, M S Iventosch and
Y Goodman, 32–44. New York: Routledge.
1. This view that alphabetic languages are read by connecting
sounds to letters is also challenged, but that is not the focus of this
article and does not affect our discussion.
References
Confucius. 2008. The Analects. Trans R Dawson. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Duan, Y (Qing Dynasty). 1981. Shuo Wen Jie Zi [Origin of Chinese
characters]. Shanghai: Guji Press. (Orig pub 1815.)
Goodman, K. 1994. “Reading, Writing, and Written Texts: A
Transactional Sociopsycholinguistic View.” In Theoretical Models
and Processes of Reading, ed R Ruddell, 1093–130. Newark, Del:
International Reading Association.
———. 1996. On Reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
22
Halliday, M A K. 1974. Language and Social Man. Schools Council
Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching, Papers, Series
II, no 3. London: Longman.
———. 1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.
Lee, J J. 2012. “Understanding and Facilitating Literacy Development
Among Young Chinese-Speaking Children.” In Reading in Asian
Languages: Making Sense of Written Texts in Chinese, Japanese, and
Korean, ed K Goodman, S Wang, M S Iventosch and Y
Goodman, 193–210. New York: Routledge.
Statistics Canada. 2013. Immigration and Ethnocultural Diversity in Canada:
National Household Survey, 2011. Ottawa: Minister of Industry.
Also available at www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/
99-010-x/99-010-x2011001-eng.pdf (accessed June 29, 2015).
Xu, N. 2012. “Making Sense of Reading Chinese.” In Reading in
Asian Languages: Making Sense of Written Texts in Chinese, Japanese,
and Korean, ed K Goodman, S Wang, M S Iventosch and
Y Goodman, 68–85. New York: Routledge.
Alberta Voices
Studying Grammar in the
Technological Age
Marlow Ediger
Marlow Ediger, a retired American professor, is a frequent
contributor to Alberta Teachers’ Association specialist council
journals.
When I was a student (1934–46), grammar was
heavily emphasized in English classes, particularly from
Grade 4 through the senior year of high school.
Evidently, teachers and school administrators back then
saw a theoretical way to assist pupils in writing achievement. However, as time went on, grammar was taught
within the framework of practical written work. In
today’s technological age, with texting and the Internet,
where does grammar fit in?
There certainly are a plethora of learnings that may
serve as objectives in the study of grammar integrated
with diverse purposes in pupils’ written work.
Grammar should be functional and relevant to the
lives of learners. What is acquired must be useful in
school and in society. Then, attaining the objectives of
instruction will have a purpose. Too often, learning
grammar has seemed dull and uninspiring. This need not
be the case when numerous activities are provided that
stimulate and motivate (Ediger and Rao 2005).
Learning the parts of speech might well interest
many pupils if the following activities for understanding
the concept of verb, for example, are provided (Ediger
2011):
• Dramatize through demonstrating actions (such as
running, jumping, singing, hopping or writing).
• Create illustrations depicting diverse actions.
• Write a couplet using action words.
• Cooperatively, write free verse using action words.
Adverbs modify verbs, as well as adjectives and
other adverbs. This can also be dramatized initially, with
semi-concrete and abstract learnings following in
Volume 12, Number 1
sequence as pupils’ understanding advances (see Tiedt
1982):
•
•
•
•
She walked slowly. (Slowly tells us how she walked.)
The man spent money lavishly.
The girl slept soundly.
Molly ran up the stairs. (Up the stairs is an adverb
phrase telling us where Molly ran.)
In the last sentence, up is a preposition. Up could be
substituted with other prepositions (such as down), or up
the stairs with other phrases (such as in the street).
Prepositions, too, can be dramatized to indicate a
relationship between the object of the preposition and
another noun, such as the subject of the sentence (for
example, Molly and stairs).
Pupils enjoy playing with words, relating them to a
concrete situation, in that other subjects or prepositions
may be used. The subject, too, may change through
using another part of speech, such as a pronoun. For
example, instead of Molly, the pronoun she may be used.
This, too, might be dramatized in the classroom in a
concrete situation.
Illustrations can be used to show the relationship
between the subject and the object of the preposition,
such as a boy sitting in a desk. The preposition in relates
boy to desk. Other prepositions can be used to show a
relationship between boy and desk, such as on, in front of,
behind, beside and near. Adverb phrases that begin as
prepositions but also have an object, such as those
noted, allow pupils to study the concept of word order.
Would it be correct to say, “In the desk, the boy sat”? It
does make sense; however, there is a more acceptable
word order—“The boy sat in the desk.” Word order—
syntax—is salient in writing, as many errors in interpretation are possible.
23
Adjective phrases are especially susceptible to
misplacement. For instance, the statement “The boy
rode the bicycle with a red scarf ” raises the following
question: Did the boy or the bicycle have the red scarf ?
We can assume that the boy is wearing the scarf. Thus,
the adjective clause with a red scarf should follow the boy,
since it modifies the boy, not the bicycle.
In some situations, word order does not matter as
much, such as in the following statements: “The horse
ran into the barn” and “Into the barn, the horse ran.”
Nevertheless, the former would be more acceptable,
conventionally. Semantics deals with the meaning of the
communiqué. The sentence may be grammatically
correct, but if it requires interpretation, it should be
written more precisely (Kanti 2011).
The concepts of noun, adjective and adverb clause
should be taught, sequentially, at the secondary level or,
if readiness permits, in middle school. Learners must
develop a good attitude toward learning grammar.
Rather than pushing grammar down pupils’ throats,
teachers should watch for pupils’ readiness to profit
from its study. The study of grammar should be interesting and result in improved written work.
Faculty members in a school should discuss the
following ideas for teaching grammar:
• Should pupils be asked to label words in a sentence
as nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections? Interjections
are relatively easy to identify, since they usually
consist of one word showing a strong feeling (such
as ouch, wow and hurrah). There might well be a
debate about whether a modifier should be placed in
the sentence to clarify meaning. This might be an
adjective or an adverb, as a single word, phrase or
clause. Grammar should make writing more precise
and meaningful, with critical and creative thinking
involved, as well as excitement. During my schooling
in public schools, labelling words with various parts
of speech was a frequent activity.
• Should pupils be asked to place one line under the
subject and two under the verb (predicate) when
analyzing sentences? A good discussion may be
inherent in this activity. All scolding and satire
should be eliminated when teaching grammar to
pupils. Each response must be accepted, with
diagnosis involved. Respecting learners is part of the
24
•
equation of good teaching. This activity is traditional, but it implies that pupils can be aided in
writing by having a subject and a predicate in a
sentence.
When readiness exists, should pupils experience
diagramming sentences, in a sequential pattern
throughout the grades? In my public school years,
much attention was given to diagramming sentences.
There can be considerable thought involved in
placing words in a diagram (see Bartini 2008).
My colleagues at the university level believe that
solid, demanding courses in grammar help pupils do
quality written work. Others are not so sure. Whatever
beliefs are held, learning activities in grammar should be
meaningful, interesting enough to secure learner attention, purposeful and sequentially presented. Above all,
relevance is salient in the cognitive and affective domains
when the grammatical skills that are obtained are put to
use in written work (see Steele 2010/11).
In Conclusion
Grammar can be taught well by using psychological
tenets whereby interest, meaning, purpose and relevance
are involved. However, the use of computers and
innovative technology must also be encouraged. Harmony
between the two is necessary (see Levine 2010).
References
Bartini, M. 2008. “An Empirical Comparison of Traditional and
Web-Enhanced Classrooms.” Journal of Instructional Psychology
35, no 1 (March): 3–12.
Ediger, M. 2011. “Shared Reading, the Pupil, and the Teacher.”
Reading Improvement 48, no 2 (June): 55–58.
Ediger, M, and D B Rao. 2005. Language Arts Curriculum. New Delhi,
India: Discovery.
Kanti, K S. 2011. “A Study of Values of Prospective Secondary
School Teachers in Relationship to Teacher Attitude and
Teacher Aptitude.” PhD dissertation, Acharya Nagarjuna
University.
Levine, A. 2010. “Teacher Education Must Respond to Changes in
America.” Phi Delta Kappan 92, no 2 (October): 19–24.
Steele, C F. 2010/11. “Inspired Responses.” Educational Leadership
68, no 4 (December/January): 64–68.
Tiedt, I M. 1982. The Language Arts Handbook. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
Alberta Voices
Book Review
Polly Wants to Be a Writer: The Junior Authors Guide to Writing and Getting Published,
by Laura Michelle Thomas
Reviewed by Bill Talbot
With Polly Wants to Be a Writer: The Junior Authors
Guide to Writing and Getting Published (FriesenPress, 2013),
Laura Michelle Thomas is attempting something unique:
to create a guide to writing, in the form of a novel. And
she is successful, mostly.
As a fantasy novel, the book works well. It has
dragons, magic portals and a mysterious villain with a
nefarious plot that Polly and her friends at the writers’
guild must stop. The story is engaging and keeps us
reading to find out what will happen to Polly in her quest
to tame her dragon (who represents writer’s block) and
become a writer. The strongest and most exciting scenes
are when Polly is being held prisoner in Dr
Mammozarack’s depression clinic and when she attempts
to reunite all the young writers with their dragons.
Thomas has created sympathetic characters in Polly,
Scrum (Polly’s dragon) and Felix (the dragon of Yulleg, a
young writer). It is easy to identify with Polly, as she is
constantly frustrated by her lack of perseverance in her
writing, as well as by her failure to control Scrum. We
can also empathize with Scrum as he learns more
self-control and becomes helpful, and we can especially
sympathize with Felix as his motive for cooperating with
Dr Mammozarack becomes clear.
Volume 12, Number 1
Some of the other characters are not as easy to
identify with, however. Ms Whitford, a writer who visits
Polly’s school, comes across as preachy; Polly’s father as
somewhat selfish; and the dragon Quill as merely silly.
Dr Mammozarack’s ruthlessness, on the other hand,
makes her a menacing villain, although her motives are
not exactly clear.
While the book is an earnest attempt to help young
writers, and using a dragon as a metaphor for writer’s
block is a clever idea, attempting to integrate writing
advice into the plot of a novel is problematic. Using Ms
Whitford (and even Scrum) to explain the writing
process and give advice, without intruding on the action
and sounding pedantic, proves to be difficult. The worst
example is Scrum’s musing over the definitions of
situational, verbal and dramatic irony in the middle of the
mission to rescue the girls from the depression clinic.
Luckily, these intrusions are merely annoying rather than
fatal.
Judging by comments on the Internet, many young
writers find the writing advice useful and the book an
enjoyable read. While some readers might be put off by
the intrusions of Ms Whitford, Thomas’s book seems to
work for the aspiring writers for whom it was written.
25
Guidelines for Contributors
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• promote the professional development of English
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Submissions are requested that have a classroom
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transfer copyright of the manuscript entitled
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Alberta Voices
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Volume 12, Number 1
27
Diversity • Equity • Human Rights Diversity • Equity • Human Rights
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Alberta Voices
English Language Arts Council Executive 2014/15
President
Laura Schmaltz
[email protected]
Past President
Sharalynn Anderson
Bus 403-578-3661
[email protected]
Conference Codirectors 2016
Carey Klassen
Bus 780-674-5333
[email protected]
PEC Liaison
Jason Schilling
Bus 403-345-3383
[email protected]
Deanna Smith
Bus 403-328-4111
[email protected]
ATA Staff Advisor
Gaylene Schreiber
Bus 780-447-9447 or
1-800-232-7208
[email protected]
President-Elect
Chandra Hildebrand
Bus 780-462-5496
[email protected]
Conference Director 2017
Tannis Niziol
Bus 780-441-6000
[email protected]
Secretary
Toni Romanchuk
[email protected]
Website Manager
Carey Klassen
Bus 780-674-5333
[email protected]
Treasurer
Vic Mensch
Bus 780-674-8500
[email protected]
Journal Editor
Margaret L Iveson
Bus 780-492-3658
[email protected]
Writing Contest Coordinator
Catherine Euston
Bus 780-674-8500
[email protected]
University Representative
TBA
Beginning Teacher Liaison
Meghan Clifford
Bus 780-434-0464
[email protected]
Alberta Education Representative
Leisa Townshend
Bus 780-449-6478
[email protected]
Regional Presidents
Calgary and District
Siobhan Feeney
Bus 403-500-2012
[email protected]
Central Alberta
Jessica McMillan
Bus 403-343-2568
[email protected]
Edmonton
Chandra Hildebrand
Bus 780-462-5496
[email protected]
Greater South
Deanna Smith
Bus 403-328-4111
[email protected]
ISSN 1705-7760
Barnett House
11010 142 Street NW
Edmonton, AB T5N 2R1