Inner Voice Coaching - Andy Cox

Monday 18th April 15.50

Andy Cox gave a useful session aimed at helping teachers improve students' reading and writing skills by using their inner voice.  This was based on action research carried out at International House in London.

Andy has noticed that often written work produced by students is of a different level to the more challenging authentic texts they are expected to read for exams.  He asked 'Can listening skills support reading skills?'  He recommends reading texts aloud to students because a reader's inner voice comes from being read to - as in the case of young children in their first language.

He read a passage from The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis to us.  He read it so well that we didn't want him to stop!  We then did a range of activities based on the text designed to help activate the inner voice.

The activities were:

• Focusing on how information is woven together into sentences by chunking 4 sentences and putting them into columns (so that the first phrase was in the first column and so on).
• Focusing on adverbial phrases by finding nouns and looking at the position of the noun in the phrase and finally categorising phrases by usage (e.g. to talk about places).
• Simplified texts: texts were split down into simple components for students to link together to make longer phrases.
• De-punctuated texts for students to punctuate (using their inner voice).

More activities can be found on www.ihlteachers.com

Andy told us that using these activities with his students has resulted in faster reading and improved understanding of text.