Right off the bat, the trainers introduced a term that I had never heard of in my life: clunk word. So I asked what the difference between a spelling word and a clunk word was. The trainer explained that a clunk word is one that the student doesn’t understand from the comprehension text.
Understanding the meaning of a clunk word is important because the School-based Remediation 2.0 programme aims to teach students to make better sense of what they are reading via the Click and Clunk strategy. If they understand everything within a text, it all clicks for them. Hence, the name for this strategy. If they come across words that are foreign to them, they can apply this strategy, which in turn comprises three fix-up strategies:
1) look for smaller words and prefixes/suffixes
2) reread sentence with clunk to look for details
3) reread sentence before and after the clunk to look for details
I thought that Fix-up Strategy dovetails with the Word-within-a-Word trick that is imparted to students to learn spelling as it gets them to examine an unfamiliar word closely. In primary school, students are taught the meaning of various prefixes and suffixes but I feel that many students won’t remember such knowledge as I think the Stellar programme hardly consolidates the key prefixes and suffixes in the P6 curriculum. So I think we will have to teach prefixes and suffixes to our students from scratch. I think we used to teach Year 2 students affixes ‘un’ and ‘ment’; maybe we can revive the teaching of affixes.
Instead of just using I Do-We Do-You Do, the SDR 2.0 uses MGI (Modelling, Guided Practice and Individual Practice) to denote the various stages of the Gradual Release of Responsibility model. I think it’s a classic case of old wine in a new bottle (换汤不换药). But having said that, the curriculum developers put in a lot of thought for the MGI initiative. The lesson plan comes with actual lines that we can use with our students when we want to teach them the Click and Clunk strategy.
The second half dealt with getting students to Answer Inferential Questions before Asking their own Inferential Questions. I can honestly say that in all my years of teaching, I have never expended energy on teaching students how to answer inferential questions because I have always been preoccupied with getting them to pick the low-hanging fruits (i.e. literal questions) successfully. But the Psychological Services Branch came up with a formula (appeals to the Science teacher in me) to help students to answer inferential questions.
What is in the text + What I know = Inference
I guess this formula is worth a try although I can imagine that for exam-taking purposes, it would be hellish to convince my students that the lines they lift from the comprehension passage and fervently believe to be the answer do not in fact address the question requirements and hence, require some deductive thinking.
