LLED 360

The concept that I related to most this past week from the Zwiers Chapter 4 reading was at the very beginning of the reading:

“As experts in our content areas, we teachers often have ‘expert blind spots’ that keep us from realizing that much of our complex and abstract knowledge has become concrete and basic to us”.

Although I understood what Zwiers was talking about when first reading this statement, I didn’t really connect with it until we started making our lesson plans.  My partner and I are subject ‘experts’ in physical education and we were having a really difficult time trying to tie in language to a P.E lesson – I can say that until now I have never even thought about the role language plays in a physical education classroom.  How do we teach language when playing games?  Ironically, as Zwiers discusses in the textbook, I thought to myself that language was something that is focused on in an English classroom … if I want to keep my students active I can’t be constantly stopping to talk about language.  We even found it difficult to decide on what words to include in our lesson.

We chose to do our first lesson on invasive team games and started coming up with some language for that, such as: offense, advancement, width, mobility, and offensive depth.  This was a good start, but we still were not sure how to create language activities.  Doing the group work on Wednesday was extremely helpful as we were paired with some Home Ec teacher candidates.  They pointed out that even a word like ‘attack’ could be an issue for ELLs because outside of the classroom, attack means something completely different.  Both my partner and I had not even considered that!  As well, Chelsea pointed out to us that simply explaining terms like advancement and width as we did our activities was a way to incorporate teaching language in P.E.  As an active teenager, I never had trouble understanding the language that was used in my P.E classes and it was very hard to put myself back into a students’ shoes, especially when having to consider the subject from an ELL perspective.  I have definitely gained a new appreciation for the impact language can have on a classroom and an beginning to understand the subtle ways I can incorporate it into my classroom practices.  It was also really great to hear what individuals in a different subject context thought about the language we use in P.E – it really shows how collaboration across subjects can be used to enhance the learning of our future students and be incorporated into our inquiry.