Facilitating Academic Reading
Comments(2) This blog post is written in response to question #1: What reading strategies do you remember helping you when you were in school? Although I have never taken part in an ESL class, I do recall my experience learning French throughout my high school years. One of the biggest challenges for me and many of my other classmates was having such a limited vocabulary and trying to make sense of passages of writing. Depending on the level our ELLs are at, we may find them also struggling with the vocabulary in our course subjects, both brick terms as well as general vocabulary.
One important aspect I remember from my French classes is that my teachers would often read and then reread passages very slowly, emphasizing words we needed to know. If the word could be acted out or pointed towards, the teacher would do so as she was reading. I think this could be a useful strategy for us teacher candidates when reading aloud to our ELLs. As mentioned in the chapter and in class, we can use hand gestures to try to make the material more understandable. We can also use visual cues like pointing and making actions to describe nouns and verbs as they come up in the text, or simply give students a definition verbally. I like the use of visual cues because it allows students to internalize the word both through listening and watching. They key with using such visual cues is to make sure students are both looking at the teacher and following along with the text. This is made easier if the passage can be put up on the board or screen as the teacher is reading it, instead of having handouts that pressure students to put their heads down and not look up.
I could relate to some of the comments made in this post. While I have never been an ELL myself, I can relate the learning of another language to the French classes I took in elementary and high school. I too remember struggling to translate passages from French to English because I hadn’t mastered the vocabulary yet. It was extremely frustrating and it makes me think about how frustrating it must be for ELLs in our classroom to be excluded from learning because they haven’t developed the vocabulary base that English language speakers already benefit from. The worst part is that many ELLs have the ability to understand the concepts we are trying to teach, but the only barrier to this understanding is the English language.
One strategy I remember my French teachers using to help teach us vocabulary was vocab lists. I never found this extremely helpful because a list of words on their own is essentially meaningless. We were supposed to memorize what each word meant and would then be quizzed on it. But just listing a bunch of words with no context or information on how to use these words, such as putting them into sentences, made it a lot more difficult to learn the words. I also remember teachers in my English classes (not English language, but classic English) as well giving us vocab lists to learn, and some teachers would put the words in a sentence or provide context, while others would not. This is a helpful point to reflect on because we need to be aware of what strategies we are using to help our ELLs in our own classrooms. Are we actually being successful at helping them develop skills to engage in academic reading, or are we letting them get left behind? I think this is a question we will have to constantly re-evaluate once we become teachers. I found some useful strategies in Chapter 7 that I could see myself using with ELLs in my own classroom, such as using verbal and visual associations, using “right away” activities and using kinesthetic, auditory, and tactile connections.
I can definitely relate when you claimed one of your biggest challenges in learning another language was having a limited vocabulary and trying to understand passages of writing. When I first moved to Canada almost two decades ago, I was an ELL for two years. I struggled trying to make sense of everything I read in my elementary class because I lacked the vocabulary necessary for everyday language. Other ELL students and I would be required to leave our regular classroom, and learn from another teacher who is responsible for teaching us English. Other than attending an ESL (what they called ELL during that time) class, I never received much support for learning English within my regular classroom. I found it very difficult to keep up and understand what my teacher was talking about because she spoke much faster than what I was accustomed to in my ESL classes. Reflecting back on it now, I also believe one of the reasons why I struggled so much was because she lacked the use of visuals during her lessons. I find it much easier for me to understand terminology and concepts if a visual was shown as it was being taught. I tend to remember things easier if I had an image to relate back to, and in the future I will definitely incorporate visuals as much as I could in my classroom. I’m not sure if you did this, but I related back to my own experiences of when I was learning a new language as I was completing my lesson plan for this course and I found it to be extremely helpful!