LLED 360

Chapter 8

I like the idea that teachers need to teach grammar in context. As a former ELL student, I felt the disconnection between the grammar I was supposed to learn from the grammar worksheets and the essays I was writing in the English and Social Studies classes. One of my former students whom I tutored expressed her concern that while she was able to get correct answers on the grammar practice worksheets, she lacked the skills (ironically) to write grammatically correct sentences for her essays. Furthermore, I like the point that ELLs need to draw linguistic knowledge from good essay models. Teachers need to spend time with the students to point out the qualities that make a good essay for ELLs to model after. Since ELLs do not have the linguistic capital that mainstream speakers have due to their lack of exposure to a wide range of texts, teachers need to provide them the products that they are asked to create. Finally, teachers need to explicitly tell the students the difference between oral communication (which uses basic interpersonal communication skills or BICS) and writing in academic language (which requires cognitive academic language proficiency or CALP). Teachers need to tell the students that while the teacher may repeat key points during the lesson, such repetition is discouraged in formal essays. It is important that teachers do not assume ELLs to naturally pick up on the differences in the rules between the different genres (personal writing vs. formal essay) and modes of communication (writing vs. speaking).