Author: cwalley

In the social studies subject area there is a wide range of text that students will be exposed to; everything from very old primary source documents to textbooks and even images. Often, primary source documents are very challenging for all students to read because, depending on the text you choose, they can be very dense and use irregular and unusual phrasing. This would be especially difficult for ELLs who are struggling with modern English techniques. Textbooks can be slightly less confusing as students are exposed to textbooks in a range of subjects and are likely to have had some experience reading them, certainly more than with primary documents. I think that the most interesting area in terms of ELLs would be ‘reading’ visuals. Visuals are a type of primary document that can be easily overlooked in the daily lessons, but they represent a potentially powerful alternative source of information.

Images, be they photos, videos, paintings or political cartoons, represent a very specialized form of reading which may be more easily accessible to ELL students if they are properly introduced to the techniques required. Certainly, they offer ELLs the opportunity to make use of skills that require less processing of confusing text, instead offering a more direct approach to learning about historical events and perspectives. Many of the skills needed to process primary source images are also required when considering primary text documents, and images can become an important stepping stone where students can learn the techniques they need before having to use them on more complex, confusing materials.

I think that group discussions can be both a beneficial and challenging activity to implement in the classroom. Students often enjoy the idea of group work because they want to work with people they know and don’t always use the time to discuss the topics and goals assigned. I think that the activity we did in class could be very useful in a high school classroom; providing sentence starters and conversation guides will help students stay on track and make use of academic language. It is also important to consider having the teacher determine the groups, especially when beginning to establish a pattern of group work in the class. Teaching students how to have effective and meaningful conversations, where students are respectful, cooperative and think critically, is another major issue. There needs to be a strong classroom community if we are to expect students to be comfortable contributing and taking risks within their groups. If students are shy or unsure about how their ideas will be received, they are less likely to engage with the discussion and benefit from the small group format. Learning how to listen to others and contribute fairly to a group is also something that many students will need to be taught. While it can often seem like a simple activity, group discussions have a lot of challenging aspects. To be a meaningful exercise where all of the members learn cooperatively, rather than taking the divide and conquer approach that is so common with most group projects or activities in school, there must be some scaffolding of what group work should look like in advance.

I think that often one of the most difficult things to do in a class discussion is to allow adequate response time for all of the students to consider a question and formulate an answer. Oftentimes it can be hard to slow down the pace of a discussion if there are a number of students who are really engaged and interested and who respond quickly. It seems to be that there would be a very delicate balancing act as a facilitator if you were trying to provide time for students to consider while also not slowing down the discussion to the point that some students lose interest or focus.

With oral activities, especially ones that move fairly quickly, it can be quite challenging to follow the discussion and hold both the question and response in your mind while you wait for your turn. I thought the suggestion that you have students jot down notes, questions, and thoughts was useful, especially in the sense that it would help ensure that students take note of what you are asking them. There is a potential challenge to this approach, however, because if students are focused on keeping some sort of record of what is going on then they may not have the time to consider a response or could even lose track of parts of the discussion as they write. To that end, it would be interesting to see if it were possible for the teacher to note down the questions asked, while still being able to facilitate the discussion (and without students falling into the need to copy down everything the teacher puts on the board).

The idea that students can only effectively learn 8 to 10 new words a week seemed like it was a rather low number in comparison to the actual amount of new words that students would be exposed to. This is especially true when you consider that each class, which depending on the school’s term system could be anywhere from 4 to 8 in a week, would have its own new concepts and words for students to learn about. This doesn’t even take into account the number of non-‘vocabulary’ type words, the everyday words students are expected to already know and are not explicitly taught as part of the class.

The emphasis on exposure to new words through reading was also a point that caught my attention, because as a student I was always reading everything I could get my hands on, and it opened me up to a huge array of vocabulary that I did not get exposed to at school, or in everyday interaction. When I was in elementary school I remember being told by my teachers to pick out books for silent reading from the library with two conditions: there could be no more than 5 words on the first page that I did not understand, but there had to be at least 1 or 2 new words that I would need to look up or ask someone the meaning of. I think that this sort of guideline worked really well to make sure that students didn’t get too frustrated by a lack of understanding and no longer enjoy reading. It also acted to ensure that students were still challenging themselves.

In reading “Functional Language Analysis” it became very clear to me that this would be a challenging process for me to implement in the classroom because it is something that I have never before experienced or seen modeled. Much of my learning is best absorbed through observing someone actually implement a practice rather than just reading an explanation of what it should look like off a page. Another challenge is that while you gain so much experience working with texts in your discipline during your undergrad, you never consciously break down the process into clear and distinct steps that can be presented to students as a potential method that they can follow. It is very much like the feeling of being a fluent English language speaker and writer, but being unable to identify some of the key grammatical structures because they were not taught in the classroom, but rather through socialization and conversation. Being able to do something can almost hinder the process of learning how to do perform that task in a systematic way.

I found that the article certainly broke down the process of explaining and modelling analysis to students, and was very helpful in pointing out some of the practices that I employ when reading complex texts. Awareness of what you do as well as how and why you do it are the first steps to bringing that knowledge to the classroom and using it to teach students the tools they need to succeed in breaking down the increasingly complex language they encounter in secondary schools.

I found that Zwiers’ chapter on understanding how students use language made me think much more about the challenges in acquiring a language like English. I had the opportunity to teach English in Nepal in May, and that experience highlighted just how difficult English can be to use and understand. There are so many words that sound similar, and words that are the same but have different meanings depending on their context. While understanding the ‘bricks’ of language was an area of concern, my experience in Nepal highlighted that it is often the ‘mortar’ that is so much more confusing.

Sometimes it is hard to remember, at least for native English speakers, that much of how we construct sentences has been acquired through years and years of observation and mimicry. In working with English Language Learners I found that it can sometimes be difficult to know when or where to draw the line between evaluating the correct content of their speech or written work and evaluating how precise or correct their use of language was. If the student achieved the correct answer and used reasonably good grammar and sentence structure was that enough? Should consideration be given to their level of proficiency, and whether their current work was improved relative to their previous work? Should all students be marked based on the exact same standards? If your goal is to teach a specific subject matter, and the student demonstrates that they understand, how much weight or attention should be given to language quality?

In the end, I feel that it comes down to ensuring that students feel empowered and that they are capable of learning and improving. Different students respond in unique ways to a variety of feedback and marking styles, and strategies for improving their learning need to focus on the specific needs of the students, to the best of our abilities.