Marmara Elt Resources

Reading Text-Eyes of a Blue Dog
Then she looked at me. I thought that she was looking at me for the first time. But then, when she turned around behind the lamp and I kept feeling her slippery and oily look in back of me, over my shoulder, I understood that it was I who was looking at her for the first time. I lit a cigarette. I took a drag on the harsh, strong smoke, before spinning in the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. After that I saw her there, as if she’d been standing beside the lamp looking at me every night. For a few brief minutes that’s all we did: look at each other. I looked from the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. She stood, with a long and quiet hand on the lamp, looking at me. I saw her eyelids lighted up as on every night. It was then that I remembered the usual thing, when I said to her: “Eyes of a blue dog.” Without taking her hand off the lamp she said to me: “That. We’ll never forget that.” She left the orbit, sighing: “Eyes of a blue dog. I’ve written it everywhere.”
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How to Read Your Way to Foreign Language Fluency in 30 Days or Less

The Four Basic English Language Skills
As any well-versed English or other foreign language teacher knows there are four basic skills to most foreign languages. These are reading, writing, listening and speaking. You might note that I just said “most foreign languages”. Why? Because, believe it or not, there are some languages which do not have a well-defined written form, or NO written form at all. There are in fact, a number of languages which have a purely “oral or spoken” tradition. In such cases, there is no literature to speak of. There may well be a strong tradition of story-telling however, frequently accomplished through skilled historians / story-tellers called “Griots”.

Literacy in English and Other Foreign Languages

Most foreign languages by far, do contain an alphabet or characters which allow the foreign language to be written. The written character forms may be unique and highly different from the Roman alphabet used in the English language, therefore initially incomprehensible to foreign language learners at first, but that will be acquired over time with intensive study and not a modicum of patience on the part of the foreign language learner. Consider Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Eastern European languages, for examples of other alphabet and spoken language character sets. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever thought that within a single afternoon you could lose your sense of security? Have you ever taken into consideration changing completely the way you look at the world around you? That happened to me, and I’m still paying for the consequences of somebody else’s action. The feeling of security and serenity, that everyone should have, is often taken away with brutality for the price of a few dollars. Unfortunately, this happens over and over throughout the world, and it is hard for the victims of criminal actions to recover from their deep wounds.

It was just a day like any other, if possible, even better because it was a Saturday, the end of the working week, and one of the first nice and sunny days of Rome’s spring. My best friend and I were in the shop that she owns. It was the middle of the afternoon; we were both pretty happy and making plans for the weekend, and the atmosphere was extremely relaxed, almost lazy. Suddenly a man entered in the shop. We knew, somehow, that he didn’t look like one of our usual customers, but we welcomed him politely anyway. Without any hesitation he pulled something out of his coat that we did not recognize immediately, but when he ordered us to go into the back with him, there was no doubt that this “something” was a gun. We were so scared that we could barely understand what was going on. My heart was beating so franticly, that I thought everyone could hear it. Suddenly, while watching the entire scene in astonishment, a shiver ran down my spine.
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How reading fluency and comprehension relate to ELLs
English language learners (ELLs) have great difficulty attaining fluency in reading without the proper instruction on the four dimensions of fluency:

* accuracy in word decoding
* quick and automatic recognition of words in connected text
* expressive and meaningful interpretation of text
* a holistic comprehension of what they just finished reading

For ELLs, success in reading in English at second and third grade reading levels depends on assessing the student in several areas:

* basic decoding skills in English or in their primary language
* word knowledge in English (vocabulary)
* prosody (their intonation, pronunciation of words, stress, pitch, and smoothness)
* basic comprehension skills (rereading, self-correction, thinking about meaning)

After proper assessment, a second or third grade teacher can begin by teaching/building on these skills.
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