Religious Studies for International Students

The  material on my  students' resource website  and this teacher's blog can be theorised using  Beverley Bell's framework  which sees teaching as a sociocultural practice rather than just imparting of disembodied knowledge. I will use Bell's theories to examine some of the challenges of teaching RE to international students and to explain the reasons for recommending particular language teaching approaches. The first challenge involves the notion of truth embodied. Bell starts with the premise that “Knowledge may be seen as always being embodied, that is, grounded in bodily existence (Shapiro, 1999), with education starting from lived experiences. Centrality is given to situated knowledge that is inscribed in the flesh, with no abstractions and “separation of mind and body, thought and feeling, creativity and existence as in Western epistemologies and disembodied knowledge (Shapiro, 1999, p. xiii).” This premise aids our thinking around RE as a subject because God is i

(Taken from "How Languages are Learned" by Patsy M Lightbrown and Nina Spada. (2007) Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers). Useful for editing grammar items in RE assessments. This page is intended to help teachers identify the stages the ELL student is at in grammar acquisition. This research shows ESOL students master First,  -ing (progressive ), plural, copula (to be) Second,  auxiliary (progressive as in "He is going") Third,  irregular past Finally,  regular past -ed , t hird person singular -s , possessive's ( Krashen's (1977) summary of second language grammatical morpheme acquisition sequence) Negation He don't like it. I don't can sing. Stage 3-  You can not go there. He was not happy.  She don't like rice. (don't form not analysed) They come not [to] home.  Stage 4 "Do" is marked for tense, person and number. Auxiliary and verb can be still confused. I didn't went there. Questions Stage 1 Single words, formulae or

Apart from simplifying the language and re-contextualising religious concepts to fit an Asian cultural understanding, curriculum concerns are complicated by the nature of the enrolment process of international students. This means that the student resource website needed to take the following things into consideration:  Firstly, international students can be enrolled from Year 10 to 13 level. This means the material on core beliefs needs to be concise enough leaving enough time for senior students to also complete their NCEA credits. Other students who enter at junior levels and have more time to flesh out the basics, so more material is provided through hyperlinks. Secondly, international students with literacy problems may need to do RE at senior levels. This means material needs to be simplified and as jargon free as possible but specialised vocabulary needs to be intentionally taught. Basic reading, listening, essay writing, summary, discussion and comprehension techniques need to