Author: Ms. Lowe

Zwier’s chapter for this week relates directly to a lesson I taught for a Composition 11 course last week. According to my SA, this course is intended to enhance academic writing and act as a supplementary course to their required English 11; it is largely targeted towards students who just emerged from ESL.

Zwiers points out that graphic organizers can be very useful in teaching students how to write academically, as structure becomes critical in this genre of writing. In order to help the Comp 11 students organize their thinking and understand the structure of the standard 5-paragraph essay (which I don’t entirely agree with, though this is what is taught by most teachers), I suggested using graphic organizers. My lesson was comprised of modelling how to identify the thesis statement and topic sentences in a sample essay, and transferring that info to a graphic organizer. The visual I used was the common sandwich/hamburger template for organizing essays, one which I’m sure many of us have encountered. I then broke the students into groups with the task of creating their own graphic organizer to better remember and eventually internalize the essential components of a 5-paragraph essay. Some interesting ones took the form of a human body, a caterpillar, and a house.

Hence, teachers can use graphic organizers (and encourage students to make their own) to teach the structure of academic writing, which can be just as important as the language used in academic writing.

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.

One activity mentioned in the textbook that I thought was useful was conversation circles. This is the activity where students form a circle inside another and pair off to talk about a topic, and then rotate partners by moving a certain number of people to the right or left. I like that this gets students up from their desks and talking to others whom they may not necessarily choose to talk to if they were allowed to pair up by themselves. This fosters a sense of community in the classroom and allows students to see a greater range of perspectives.

One potential problem is that students may end up saying the same thing to each partner they face and could get tired of repeating themselves. A workaround for this is to have students think of (or write down) a number of points they want to bring up and present one point per partner.

There is also the issue of students not paying attention to or understanding others’ comments. Teachers should encourage students to (1) paraphrase what their partner has said, and (2) reflect on what they said. Here we can teach students how to frame their responses using language suitable for respectful discussion, such as: “So you’re saying that…” and “I like your point on… which makes me think of…”

Finally, there are some logistical concerns with the conversation circle activity that are difficult to solve. I have noticed that during think-pair-share sessions the class gets quite loud and often it difficult to hear and be heard. With conversation circles students may be standing quite near to one another (especially due to space constraints) which could aggravate the problem. Also, this activity requires a large open space, usually necessitating desk rearrangement. Moving around desks takes away a fair amount of time that some might argue could be better spent. Still, I think the conversation circle activity would be a great addition to a lesson if it were planned out well.

Vocabulary can be a huge part of ELLs’ struggles in the classroom, especially since most subject areas have highly specialized terminology specific to that field. In English, one of my teachables, ELLs have to deal with many brick terms that pertain to both language and literature. Because of this divide, it is almost like there can be two registers used in English, and these students may have a hard time distinguishing which register to use. For instance, they may be more familiar with terms like noun, verb, clause, and paragraph, but become confused and even disengaged when they find out their English class is studying alliteration, assonance, personification, and meter in poetry. To make matters more difficult, often English teachers will throw in grammar lessons between larger literature units. This means ELLs must quickly learn to switch registers back and forth.

Another interesting point about English relates to this week’s article by Lehr et al. They make note that many vocabulary words actually mean different things depending on the subject. They give the example of the word “volume,” which refers to a book or set of books in English class, but loudness in Music, and an amount of space in Science. We can actually take this example one step further in the sense that certain words have multiple relevant definitions within the same subject. For instance, the term “genre” has at least two uses in English. Genre can refer to the form of text, such as novel, short story, play, or poetry. Yet, genre can also be used to classify texts based on content, such as comedy, tragedy, dystopian, etc. Hence, as teachers we must be aware of not only how our subject’s vocabulary can be used in other subject areas to mean different things, but also how some words can have more than one definition within our own field.

Jessica L.

Much of today’s presentation dealt with grasping the concepts of brick and mortar terms that are used throughout types of academic language. One of my teachable subjects is English, and it is extremely important in this subject to be clarifying brick and mortar words to our students. In English, bricks can be thought of as specific vocabulary used in literary analysis, such as genres, literary devices, types of poems, etc.

One of the activities our group of English teacher candidates came up with is a simple definition-matching game (which would also work great for other subjects, so feel free to adopt it). Students can be divided into groups of 3-4 and each is given a sentence or group of sentences on a piece of paper. Our sample sentence was, “In tragedy, conflict is often a theme.” Then, for each brick term (tragedy, conflict, theme) you prepare cards with the definitions written. Students then work in groups to match the brick words with the correct definition card. Groups can have the same or different sentences. As a class you can then go over the answers.

I think this a good way to introduce unfamiliar terms to students in a way that is more engaging than simply reading them off a glossary.

The difficulty arises when teaching mortar terms. In English, these are often linking words within a sentence, such as transitional words and conjunctions. One technique I can think of is to group words by similar meaning. (Ex. to show contrast: however, yet, still. To add on: furthermore, moreover, also.) Another way to clarify the meaning of these words is to try hand gestures as Zwiers (2008) mentions, though these may be unidentifiable to ELLs of other languages and cultures. Indeed, I think many of us would agree that it is the mortar terms that are most difficult to explain.