::A Geek in Korea::

One of the differences between kindergarten students and new students at my day job is their familiarity to English. Most new students at an academy can read at some level or another. They might not be able to do phonics, but they know the ABC’s, and everyone of them can read Korean. Five year old students in kindergarten are usually entirely illiterate.

I had a class where I had to teach about vegetables to two five year old students that had no knowledge of English language at all. Don’t know the ABC’s. Stare blankly at any words in English. They don’t know a word.

My task was to hold their attention by reading a science book about vegetables. EX-CI-TING! The students flipped through the book and laughed hysterically at a man with a moustache eating a piece of corn for around five minutes. Sadly, that ended, and I had twenty five more minutes to try to organize into a class of some kind.

The first thing I tried was shadow reading. The students put their finger on the word I was reading, and then I had them say it with me. The idea was that as I moved my finger around the page, they would read the words with me when they recognized something. They didn’t pick up anything after the first two pages, and one of the them was just rubbing his hand on the book. Failure.

The next thing I tried was just trying to get across the meaning of ONE word. This is often what happens in a kindergarten class. Everything you attempt to do is outstripped by their lack of understanding in English and you have to strip back your goals to the most basic.

We did a “Where’s Waldo?” for the word “Vegetable”. Every page, I would count the number of times the word “Vegetable” would appear. Then the students would search the text for the word. When they found it, they put their finger on it and said, “VEGETABLE!” as loud as they could. Then I’d give them a high five, say, “Good job!” and move them to the next page. There were a few false positives, but by the end, the two students could consistently find the word vegetables, or any other word starting with the letter “V” and point.

That might seem like a minor accomplishment, but they went from not knowing anything to understanding that a series of characters represented a word, and that if they found the word they could read it. They have no idea WHY that series of characters sounds or means what it does, but that’s for later, when they study the ABC’s. I picked the word “vegetable” because it was literally on every page of the book.

If I had picked something that appeared less often, I don’t think this would have worked. I’d only recommend this activity for low word count books. If I have to use the same book again, I think I’ll pick the word “Eat”, which is also a simple word the students know in Korean and can use in both English and Korean easily.