Task 2: Readings – Freeman & Freeman Chapter 8 & 9
Pre-Posting – Read both of these chapers (8-How Should We Teach Reading to Emergent Bilinguals? & 9-How Can Teacher Help Ells Develop Academic Language?) and consider what they confirm or add to your knowledge of working well with English language learners.
Posting – Review the applications section at the end of each chapter p. 223 & p. 256) identify 2 you would like to try/explore in the future. Please explain why you chose it, what its relevance is for you personally, and your plan for the application you chose. Clarify what you see as the key to English language learners
Page 223: #5
ReplyDeleteWhat are some ways you can use bilingual books in your classroom. This week choose one of the ways and use a bilingual book in your teaching. Bring the book to class and be prepared to explain how it went.
Although I choose this question I struggle to find a good way to use this approach in Health or Physical Education. I think it would be best suited for Health and finding bilingual material to discuss personal values and personal health. I think finding a book regarding to bullying from a different cultural would allow all students to see that bullying effects all different people. It would also help the students from that specific culture to identify with the story and gain more appreciation for the class and other topics.
I think one important thing to note is that working with ELL student does not guarantee that they read their home language. Many of the families that I work with may speak their home language but are not been able to read or write in it. This is often true from when the parents were foreign born but the student themselves are first generation American.
Page 256: #1
Interview five teachers. Ask them to explain the differences between social language and academic language.
For many reasons this would be a fun activity. First if you were working at a middle or high school level and you ask a teachers from different content areas, would you find more commonality with the social language (because they are serving students of the same age) and great differences in their choices for academic language. Would they pick content specific words for their academic language or would you also see similarities in their choices for academic language: analyze, compare, synthesize, describe. As I continue to learn more and more about academic language I am curious to what other teaching professionals would respond to this question.
Im glad you touched on this! I am most curious as to how academic language relates to your field, because physical activities are usually done by students as a form of play and recreation, so the "academic" language from your content area about these activities may become synonymous with the students' social language. Does that make sense? What are you thoughts?
DeleteI agree that interviewing teachers would be a great activity! Not only would you reap the benefits of all that knowledge and conversation, it would also be a good way to build up relationships in your school setting and get to know your co-workers and the community around you. Furthermore, people like feeling respected and admired and I think that your fellow teachers would enjoy being a little bit in the limelight when you ask them these questions. It would also prompt them to start thinking about the important issue of social vs. academic language and have a ripple positive effect on their students, and then other teachers they may talk to.
DeleteI also wanted to note that the chapter was about students that were bilingual. My comment about the students who may not read their native language was in response of what I have seen at my current school. In addition it would be difficult to choose one bilingual book when so many cultures are represented.
ReplyDeleteI know Michelle used this, but I have so much to say about it because I just taught a lesson about it! :-)
ReplyDelete(Page 223: #5 to be EXACT) :-)
The ESL classroom has so many great applications for bilingual books! I think most people forget that bilingual does not necessarily have to refer to SPOKEN language. The definition of language does not say anything about needing to be spoken. The best types of bilingual books that I have used in the ESL classroom are those with rebus-type pictures. These are pictures of an item that replace the word in the sentence. (Instead of the word cow, there is a picture of a cow) While these books do not improve the English reading skills for the rebus-ed words, they do in fact increase the understanding and enjoyment of the reading process. I just read a book to kindergarteners with rebus pictures, and at one point during the story, one student got HUGE eyes and shouted, "I see the word "my"!" I was so shocked that he was following along with the words in the sentence because he understood the pictures within the sentences. Michelle touched on some great points referring to the actual native language of the student with bilingual texts, I just wanted to expand upon it from a different angle!
The other section that interested me because of its relevance to my current volunteering is the writing of cohesive paragraphs. The paragraph seems like a daunting structure to the young writer. We need to make sure that as the teacher, that we can create ways to help students structure paragraphs without making them feel overwhelmed. In the classroom I am in now, we made a large poster about the types of sentences that should go into a paragraph (topic, supporting details, closing). The paragraphs that the students are writing are very simple, but they need that scaffolding from the teacher in order to prevent a total freestyle from occurring. A key component about the cohesive paragraph that my students are struggling with right now is that each sentence has to build off of the one before it. The students were just listing random details because they had written them down on their brainstorming sheet. The scaffolding process is so important at this stage of literacy development because it sets the precedent for future writing skills!
Erik,
DeleteYou touched on paragraph writing, which as a hopeful Language Arts teacher, is a topic of much interest to me. On the one hand, I think it's necessary for students to have a basis of what goes into "the paragraph" i.e. topic, supporting details, closing - as you mention. However, I struggle with the stifling of creativity that is happening these days as students are taught to write only for the purpose of dry and horrible state wide writing exams, and blah essays for which they are not interested in the topics.
I don't know. I'd also like to see a lot more creative writing taught - especially to ELL! I had a hispanic and tibetan student my first semester of field experience and those girls were so creative and if they could get that out on the page in any way, just to get them used to and enjoying writing, I wonder if that wouldn't be a better first step then giving them the generic outlines. I don't actually have an answer for this - it's just something I think about and would like to play more with.
Form vs. Content, essentially...what matters more to teach first and push more towards our students? And, would it be different for ELL vs. standard language students, I wonder?
Eric,
DeleteThank you so much for your view point of bilingual books. I would have never though of rebus as a form of bilingual. We have a few of these at home and my son (4 year old) really enjoys naming the replaced word (picture). I always focus my thought on high school aged students and not all of the k-12 students. Although this is not teaching him to read the word it is helping understand how to read a book, following the lines and going from left to write. He really enjoys these types of books.
Another good example of bilingual books Skippyjon Jones. It mixes both English and Spanish in the same book, even in the same sentence. I tend to struggle by my own fear of mis pronouncing the words but we still enjoy reading them because you can understand the story line. I can assume that Spanish speaking student may really enjoy reading words spoken at home while also strengthening the English they are learning.
I have not heard of the skippyjon books! I will have to look them up. I think something like that would be perfect to use! Do you know if they have them in different languages?
DeleteThe two points I'd like to touch on are as follows:
ReplyDelete#2 - Teachers can scaffold instruction to bridge from conversational to academic language --> There is a level at which people with a certain amount of education usually speak. Students expect a higher level of academic speech from their instructors, and I am fairly confident I can achieve this in my classroom. In my field experience I try to never talk down to my students, rather let them ask me if they don't know a word. We learn to speak through talking to one another, so I feel that the best way to get my students used to and fluent in academic language is to slip it casually into our conversations. The more and more I use academic language conversationally the more blurred the line becomes for the student, I hope. They won't see academic language as distant and other if I can get them to the point where they use it in conversation with their friends and family, as well. I'm sure there are many specific ways to do that for various content areas, but mine is one of the easier ones. I can encourage students to discuss certain literary terms in their readings and then apply those to movies. That way, on the weekend when they're at the cinema, they might call up terms from our class to use in analysis with their friends afterwards. Or, perhaps at a stage play with their parents. I would also encourage their parents to promote academic language at home - either through letters I send to them, or in conferences, or over there phone. There's so many ways I can sneak knowledge and academic language into these kids lives, they won't even notice the change! :) It's like when parents slip vegetables into their kids entrees... So, I don't actually know that this is so much 'scaffolding' instruction, as 'sneaking' instruction, but I thought it was relevant and a point I've been thinking about.
#5 - What are some ways you can use bilingual books in your classroom? In literature, books from other countries and in other languages are a huge thing. One of the reasons I have trouble getting hired at Minneapolis' small publishing companies (I think) is because I am monolingual. People now want more and more from other cultures, as our own becomes so diverse. Therefore, it is a priceless skill to be multilingual in literature. I will, thus, highly encourage my students to read translated books, and if they speak multiple languages play around with translating some work of their own. It's amazingly good brain work, aside from the inherent positives of being able to work in different languages. Translating prepares students for such exciting careers as government decoders, and works out the logical side of the brain - My Latin teachers told me all of this, and I believe it because translating Latin was always a heady mental workout. I want my students to see how things are lost in translation, also, and then relate that towards empathy with other cultures, and other people...you don't know them 'til you walk a mile in their shoes, etc. Ideally, my future classroom will have a whole unit on bilingual/multilingual literature/language/translation. After all, without it - I would have missed out on so many great novels over the years (Russian, French, Spanish, etc. etc.)!
Frustrating... it just deleted my post!
DeleteSara,
I was commenting on your point about #2. I recently witnessed a conversation between two teachers and a student. One of the teachers was reprimanding the student and used a few "Big" academic words. The other teacher stepped in to ask the student if he understood the meaning of one of the words she had used. I was impressed that she was teaching academic language in a non lesson/ classroom setting but recognized that the word needed to be defined to the student.
I think it is great that you ask your students if they understand what words mean but also present the more challenging words into the discussion.
I was very interested by your point about students learning what is lost in translation! I think that doing this would be very helpful for them to see why resources like google translate are not always a great option. I have read the first three Harry Potter books in English and Spanish, and I thought it was pretty cool how some things were named something completely different, while other words were just directly translated into Spanish. It is not like any major plot details were changed, but it is hard to convey the same meaning for certain words that are obviously a play on other English words. (Diagon Alley = Diagonally. Get it? This wouldn't work in another language.
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