Teaching Content and Literacy to English Learner Students
July 23, 2015 sponsored by REL Appalachia & Jefferson County Schools
Notes by Julia King, Warren Elementary
REL Appalachia, CNA administers REL through the Dept. of Education.
Workshops = Bridge events
IES (Institute of Educational Science) funds this conference.
REL Appalachia covers Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West
Virginia. Use evidence based information to advise policy-makers. Use
research alliances between REL Appalachia and education
stakeholders. Use strategies to prepare students for college and career
readiness and increase student engagement in school.
1st Session: Dr. Michael Kieffer, former middle school teacher
• Immigration Growth Centers: 21 states are experiencing rapid immigration
growth. Linguistic diversity is becoming more common. 62%
Spanish, 25% or dozens of languages represented, other percentages
are Arabic, Somali, Burmese and others.
• Linguistic diversity and growing up in poverty. These two areas
overlap. Children having linguistic diversity have underdeveloped
English language skills, but have cognitive advantages; but growing
up in poverty, children have chronic stressors. By 5th grade students
should be reading 115 words correctly per minute. Motivation is key
- how can we keep students motivates when they are attempting
something difficult.
• Code-based skills and Meaning-based skills change over time. There is a
difference between a first grade text, a 5th grade text, and a high
school text. How do we get high school thinkers to think on grade
level without giving them a 1st grade text?
Dr. Patrick Proctor - prior bilingual teacher 3rd/4th grade.
• Factors that Make ELL's unique are: benefit from resources of two
languages, they often have limited exposure to English, typically
children of immigrants, schools often have limited resources to
support ELL's.
• Rich home language and experiences help to develop phonological
awareness. Children develop these in any language they are brought
up in. Instruction in a home language transfers into
English. Cognates also help students map on to English. When
phonological awareness is developed, students can concentrate on
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using cognates to help create meaning.
Code-based and Meaning/Knowledge based factors all help with literacy
development. Reading capability determines reading
proficiency. (How can I, as an English Language teacher, help
students' reading capability?) Focus on Oral Language development
to facilitate literacy development.
Factors affecting children of immigration: schooling experience in home
country, variety of home languages, cultural disconnects such as
differences between parents' expectations and the school's expectation
and what school is - how students DO school here in the US
(example: eye contact). Psychological challenges of immigration;
some students are here illegally. These factors are challenges to most
students. Other challenges are that the curriculum is not designed
with ELL's in mind, lack of preparation and PD for teachers, and
assessments that do not provide correct information about students'
skills.
Case study: Pick 2 or three (from handout packet) and discuss challenges,
address needs, and other information needed. Theme: elementary intensive instruction from oral to written expression. This is a
challenge for all students. Students often write how they talk.
What are assessments telling us about the language proficiency of the
students? For example, are students low in both Spanish and English
language proficiency? Speaker encourages us as teachers to think
critically about the assessments used to determine these scores. Think
about the basic language skills students need with their language at
home, because this is not necessarily academic language. Make sure
assessments measure what they intend to assess. When students are
assessed in their home language, they may not have the academic
vocabulary needed to have a high proficiency score.
Leverage whatever access the student has to the language at their
level. Focus on meaning. In the lower language development,
focus on vocabulary (example: Google Translate using words
and language the student can already produce and then refining
this using precision of words in English. Also, create a cognate
chart - making sure that the students actually know what the
word means in their home language so that they can use them in
English. Also, explicitly teach word connections. Example:
carne - carnivore.) As proficiency levels increase, help students
think in the language using the vocabulary they have already
developed to help them define new words.
• Teaching Academic Content and Literacy To English Learners in
Elementary and Middle School - Practice Guide Panel. Book with
Academic Articles best suited for Elementary and Middle School
teaching practices. Also is linked to Facilitator's Guide and PLC and
associated videos. This will help long-term Professional Learning
Communities in schools.
• This book has many recommendations:
1
Teach a set of academic vocabulary words intensively across several
days using a variety of instructional activities. (strong) Speak,
use words in context with big ideas, and write using the
words. Choose a brief, engaging piece of text, as a platform for
intensively teaching the vocabulary. Teach vocabulary using a
depth of strategies. Use context and word parts to help students
to acquire new vocabulary. Choose high-utility words that
they will need to use across disciplines; choose a small set of
academic vocabulary. Teach vocabulary using language
domains, writing, speaking, and listening. Use student
dictionaries, role-plays, use words in extended writing. Help
build students' understanding using the context around the
world. Use word parts to expand students' knowledge to other
words that connect with the academic word being studied.
2
Integrate oral and written English language instruction into contentarea teaching. (strong) Help students make sense of the
content using videos, visuals, and graphic organizers. This is
needed in ALL content areas. Ask whether these tools are used
to "anchor" instruction? Are you creating a "shared" experience
for students that they can reference when they move from
watching a video to reading a more challenging text? Think
about high utility words like 'analysis', and high academic
words like 'photosynthesis'. How do we get students engaged
in the content. Explicitly teach content-specific vocabulary,
and general academic vocabulary. Provide daily opportunities
for students to talk about content in pairs or small
groups. Design writing opportunities for extending students'
content-area learning in writing.
3
Provide regular, structured opportunities to develop written
language skills. (minimal) This means that their is little
research to show how students can use expressive language in
written form. Writing needs to be happening and we need to
experiment with how to best use this in the classroom. Reading
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is a receptive skill, and writing is an expressive skill. 90% of
talk in the classroom is teacher talk. To help students express
their language, they need more opportunities to practice
this. This also carries over into language; students need
supports to facilitate students' entry into and continued
development of writing. Use pairs and small groups to work
and talk together as a precursor structuring thinking and
planning before attempting to write. Length is a predictor to
quality. When you see more language, you expect better
quality. An exit slip can assess students'
comprehension. Provide writing assignments that are anchored
in content and are used to develop academic language as well as
writing skills. This means teach from a genre - what do you
need to know about a genre to write using that
genre? Example: write a scientific procedure. There are stages
of the procedure that uses steps, materials, and has a goal at the
end. This uses adjectives and mapping language to objects; it
also uses the imperative tense and understood 'you' (example:
Pour 50mL of distilled white vinegar into the flask.) Use
graphic organizers and sentence starters to support students'
entry into and continued writing. Another example is: the
teacher has students read Sadako and 1000 Cranes. Then has
students respond in writing. Then, the teacher has the students
discuss their writing and opinions with a small group. Last, the
teacher has the students write again. The level of writing
increased in length and quality the second time they responded
to the writing prompt. A separate example is in Science: a
teacher wants students to find evidence to support a claim. She
gives them cards to have students identify which ones have
evidence to support the claim. This helps students create
discussions about which ones are the correct evidence, and the
cards draw the students back into the text. These examples help
students to prepare for writing in content areas.
Provide small-group intervention to students struggling in areas of
literacy and English language development. Use available
assessment to identify struggling students. Design instruction
to target students' needs. Limit group size to 3-5
students. Focus on foundational and vocabulary knowledge,
listening and reading comprehension. Provide scaffolding with
concepts in different contexts to make sure that students retain
information. Make sure that students have time to practice
what they have learned.
Breakout session: Dr. Michael Kieffer - What does it mean to know a word
well?
• Precision of language. Even when a word is used metaphorically, we
know what the word means. We know the definition, how it functions
in a sentence, and how it relates to other words. Pragmatics in
linguistics means "how do the words get things done?" How do
words accomplish what a speaker or writer wants them to
accomplish? How we use words to accomplish the meaning we say is
different from how we use words to accomplish meaning in writing.
• The way we know words is that we have a web in our brain. Words are
connected to other words. It is not that we know a word, it is "how
well" do you know a word?
• Build knowledge piece by piece: Day one - spell, sound, looks like. Day 2
- What do I already know, definition. Day 3 - meaning, how to use it
to talk about the article or text. Day 4 - multiple meanings of the
word, how to represent the word graphically. Day 5/6 - different word
parts inside the word and their meanings, different forms of the word
and how they are used. Day 7 - different meanings of the word in
context, how to write and talk about the other topics. Day 8/9 - How
to use the word properly and precisely in written language.
• Focus on important words, words that are useful with written print. We do
not talk the way we write. There are 2x's the amount of rare or
uncommon words in children's books than found in speech. Reading
is a valuable place to learn vocabulary.
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Use academic word lists - (Marzano) words that appear often across
content areas, but are not apparent in everyday
speech. Example: Analyze, approach, concept, constitute...
have more abstract meanings, more multiple meanings, more
syllables, more difficult to pronounce. Also, these academic
words can be changed with Greek and Latin roots to be
different words. The academic words have these roots; the
everyday speech was influenced by German and Old English
roots. We associate words with Greek and Latin roots with
higher order language.
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Preparation: Start with ideas and content worth learning about and
discussing. Choose complex texts that support those
discussions. Make sure the texts include words worth teaching.
(These are research-based approaches.) A traditional approach
is to start with a list of words or a vocabulary workbook; then
provide minimal context; one or two sentences.
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Focus on doing a smaller number of activities in greater depth.
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Choose target words: frequency, central to understanding, appear in
other content areas, affixes, multiple meanings and uses, crosslanguage potential (Latin/Greek roots, cognates).
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Think about words that are found in multiple texts. Require
students to use the words to respond to oral and written
assignments.
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We need to help students pick up and use new words (because it is
difficult to teach ALL the words that ELL's are going to need to
know to catch up to their peers.) Teach students to pick up new
words through: Context, Word Parts (morphology), and
cognates. Example: Shakespeare "invented" new words using
morphology (Some say he did not necessarily invent them, he
just wrote down the speech that was being used during his
time). We enrich students' knowledge through
morphology. The point is that if you know the word parts, you
can figure out the meaning of new words. Students are then
thinking metacognitively.
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Have students take a word, write it in context, and then write
another sentence using a different form of the word. Example:
investigate, investigation. (Teach syntax and proper
grammatical structure, diagraming sentences, classifying words
in parts of speech chart?)
Have good routines to check for students' understanding: questioning, proper
planning, pick out key ideas and important concepts, use exit slips.