English Language Learners III

Alright, here's my final installment on what I learned in the Enriching Content Classes for Secondary ESOL Students class I took in Colorado Springs. The required text for this class was the study guide by the same name as the class, Enriching Content Classes for Secondary ESOL Students from the Center for Applied Linguistics and the Delta Publishing Company. The study guide really helped me structure the material being presented and concetpualize it's usefulness in the classroom. Specifically, it gave me a point of reference for some of the most important strategies that we learned in the class.

One of the strategies that we learned was a lesson modification called Teach the Text Backwards, which allows teachers to increase the comprehensibility of the text their students are reading. Basically, Teaching the Text Backwards gives students several previews of the text they're about to encounter. To demonstrate our learning, we had to produce a lesson plan that used this strategy. I worked with two very bright high school teachers--one taught automotives and the other taught foreign language. We decided to have students produce various car maintenance tutorials through iMovie based on the reading in their textbooks. For a copy of the lesson modification in Word, click here. It will help to make a little more sense of where I'm going with all this if you haven't taken the class.

For this strategy, we start by giving the students some relevance to the text through their lives or a tie-in to their prior knowledge. Demonstrations of labs are popular examples of this. Jim, our automotive teacher, started with a rundown of very common automotive fluids that could be checked, topped off, or changed very easily. Jim held each store-bought container up as he mentioned the fluid. This gives ELL students an opportunity to hear the content language with a visual representation.

With video guides in hand, the students (our classmates) watched an iMovie we produced which showed all the fluid fill and check locations in the car. Their task for this was to match the store-bought fluid containers that Jim held up with the fill and check containers from the iMovie. The iMovie contained audio sound effects that provided hints as to what went in each container, plus there were textual clues as many fill and check caps are labeled. This opportunity also allows students to preview the medium in which their projects would be produced.

That concluded the part of the lesson we were supposed to present to our classmates. From there, we simply explained the remainder of the lesson. Students would do a Think-Write-Pair-Share (a strategy that was modeled and discussed in the class) to review their video guides. Then in their same TWPS, students would identify the key concepts by previewing the Study Questions provided at the end of the chapter.

Each TWPS group would do a blind draw to determine the car maintenance tutorial they would have to produce (possibilities include changing a tire, changing an air filter, checking the fluid levels, checking and changing the spark plugs, etc.). We would make the reading more manageable for ELL students by having each group read the section that pertains to their tutorial, instead of the entire chapter. We would do a Numbered Heads Together exercise (modeled and discussed in the class) to check for comprehension and dissiminate the answers to the study questions. This provides students with a natural springboard to producing their own car maintenance tutorial through iLife.

We also worked with and created curriculum-specific models for using graphic organizers as a resource for ELL students. Graphic organizers are not just teacher to student instructional aides and Anticipation Guides, but they can also be used as student-back-to-teacher learning demonstrations or comprehension checks.

Here's a very quick review of some of the major instructional topics covered in the class:

• Three Principles to Help ESL Students
1. Increase Comprehensibility
2. Increase Interaction
3. Increase Critical Thinking Skills

• Specific Strategies
1. Teach the Text Backwards
2. Text-to Graphics-Back-to-Text Again
3. Demonstrations and Modeling
4. Think-Write-Pair-Share-Square

• Group/Pair Structures
1. Numbered Heads Together
2. Inside/Outside Circle
3. Search and Find
• Investigations
• Jigsaw
• Mix-and-Match

<<<Previous ELL Post

ELL 1
ELL 2
ELL 3 (Top of this post)