Let me explain my title. I teach teenagers English at a secondary school. In short, regular classes. The weakest-progress students are pulled out from these regular classes to form a class of their own. They typically have dyslexia and/or language disorders. I teach them English too, but my role is more of a literacy coach because I am tasked to teach them foundational literacy skills.  

So, for these weakest-progress students, I am both their English Teacher and Literacy Coach. This throws me off array because I wear both hats at once and feel conflicted about which role to pursue at any one time. Though I admit that last year, I just focused on preparing them for the Mid-Year Exams because I didn’t know any better.  

Now that I have had more time to assimilate into my unique identity, think the most important thing I should do is to clarify these two roles. Because if I’m unclear about my place in the classroom, I would always be sacrificing the forest for the trees. I need to ensure that the seedlings will blossom to form part of the vast canopy in the forest. Wouldn’t you know? I just learnt how to create a table in Markdown yesterday! Let me apply what I learnt.

I’m confused, Sensei As you should be. Take point 2 for example. I don’t mean to suggest that I shouldn’t use gamification to help my literacy coaching students instil good learning habits. However, given that my time with them is limited, I need to prioritise. My duty to them is to make sure that they at least know how to use the Spell Check for Microsoft Word.

I should then move on to other assistive technology tools:

Expounding on point 3, it takes a lot of effort for weakest-progress students to learn seemingly simple words from the Dolch Word List. So much so that I decided to use my son’s coloured letters to help them memorise these words. I’m talking about 14-year-old teenagers not knowing how to spell the, how and are.

This means that for these students, I simply don’t have the space to teach them the difference between when and went or want and one. I mean, I try but it’s honestly not a priority.

In regard to point 4, the literacy coaching students have not mastered the art of dividing a word into its constituent syllables. This means that I may not have the bandwidth to get them to deduce the meaning of an unfamiliar word from its affixes.

Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes I come into class, with guns blazing, because I want them to learn the meaning of selected suffixes. Take for instance this list of words: mindfully soulfully healthfully As for the last point, I have learnt that the tried-and-tested GRR model doesn’t work for these weakest-progress students. What I find works for them is fast iterations coupled with spaced repetition. This means that I taught them the first three lines of an informal email:  

Dear X

How are you? I’m fine.
I was disappointed.  

Seriously, I just got them to churn out these three lines during the first writing lesson. Subsequently, during the next week, I added one more sentence to their cognitive load:  

Dear X

How are you? I’m fine.
I was disappointed. A bad thing happened to me.  

I do this consistently every week until we reach the end of the email.