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Ingrid HeidrickKeymaster
Frannilba, it is very humbling to hear about your experience and your response can teach us a lot about how to extend scaffolding to ELLs, including ELLs with disabilities. Yes, communication is NOT just oral. When we take advantage of different kinds of communication, we create a multisensory environment. You also mention building your unit on students own experiences. That of course is extremely important for ELLs in particular. We can’t learn in a vacuum. We have to build up our students schema so that they have a context to apply learning in.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterSo, let’s think further – what ideas do you have about activating your students’ schema BEFORE reading?
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterFrannilba, this is so interesting. As a District 75 educator, you are teaching academic language in a highly scaffolded way. I love the use of pointing/gesturing, of using tactile objects etc. These are also effective techniques to use for newcomers. I’m wondering if there’s any assistive technology that would enable your students to be able to speak. For your students, then, reading text and being able to write takes on even more significance.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterRoxanna, I really love your techniques, especially the clarification, or ‘re-voicing’ technique. I’m interested to know more about what you mean by ‘talk moves’. Also, teaching them common acacademic phrases or sentence frames may feel ackward at first, but then it becomes part of their vocabulary.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterHow wonderful that you have this level of fluency in Spanish Rocio. You bring up an important point – even at this level of fluency you were not 100% sure of the diacritic marks in Spanish. Just like other punctuation, these are things that are students need to practice to become comfortable with.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterYes, there are so many dimensions of language. Fluent spoken language does not equal academic language! So many of our ELLs are fluent speakers of English, but don’t have the academic language skills to fulfill writing and assessment tasks.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterYou’re exactly right – English is your home language now. Language is all about activation. When you go back to Korea, your Korean will become activated at a different level and you will start to write in it again with more comfort.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterI think Rocio makes some very interesting points: we can use informal writing to guide explicit writing instruction. This is a very nice way to not only balance instruction of writing, but use informal writing as a kind of formative assessment tool.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterYour comments are all so insightful. Yes, I think we’re all in agreement: when it comes to teaching emergent bilinguals, flexibility is key, and no one style should dictate anything too rigidly. Explicit instruction of sentence and paragraph structure is important because it gives students the foundational skills to write, but informal writing assignments build identity as writers. Both are very important.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterYes – sounding out words is NOT easy for any struggling reader, much less an emergent bilingual. I love how you are thinking of integrating the different activities into vocabulary instruction in general.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterJee, I think when in doubt just give the spelling explicitly to your students. Of course, you can’t check everything and time is limited. Do what you can in small chunks, try getting them to self-correct or peer-correct if possible.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterThanks for the positive feedback Angela. I’m so glad the activities are useful to you. I’d love to know how they end up working out in your classroom this coming year.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterRocio, I really love how you have differentiated this activity. It’s so great that one group who needs more scaffolding can match a sentence to a picture – this reinforces everything: vocabulary, morpho-syntax, and comprehension of vocabulary! I am going to use your idea going forward when I suggest this activity to others.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterRocio, I really love how you have differentiated this activity. It’s so great that one group who needs more scaffolding can match a sentence to a picture – this reinforces everything: vocabulary, morpho-syntax, and comprehension of vocabulary! I am going to use your idea going forward when I suggest this activity to others.
Ingrid HeidrickKeymasterDo I understand correctly that you work with one group for Guided Reading for the entire 50 minute period? Because Angela is saying that she only has 15 minutes for GR in the workshop model. I’ve see it done differently in different schools. I’m glad to know there is GR happening because in some elementary schools, aside from the youngest grades, there is no GR unless it’s with a literacy coach or ENL teacher during pull out.
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