Homework Rationale

Entry #10

All homework should be meaningful.  Homework should be used as a means to practice skills already taught in the classroom, but where repeated practice will be necessary.  Homework can be used to apply knowledge and skills previously taught.  Also it can be used to research information that is needed for a future lesson.

Students should be told the reasons why homework and independent practice is beneficial to them, to increase motivation and sense of purpose. 

All students should be able to work on homework independently.  Therefore the homework should be clearly explained before it is taken home so that students know what is expected of them.  Homework expectations need to be differentiated to match the ability levels of students so that they are all able to be successful with the independent work.  Parents will need to interact with their child if this is the request of the teacher, for instance when emergent readers have to share books with their parents at home to develop reading skills.

English Language Learners will require accommodations to be made so that they are successful with homework.  These include making sure all directions are clear and short.  Give them time to ask questions and to receive further explanations.  Offer visual organizers to help record their work and therefore cut down on the amount of writing to produce.  Reduce the expectation of the student output, and match this output to their language proficiency level.  Reduce the task complexity as appropriate.  Increase the time to finish the homework.  Offer native language support. 

Students must receive feedback on how they got on with their homework.  The teacher should vary how the feedback is given.  This can be written feedback on the homework itself, stating positives and also one area to work on for next time.  Feedback should also be done orally from time to time, with a one to one between teacher and student.  This is also an opportunity for the teacher to check in with the student on attitudes to homework.  Peers should provide feedback and see the work of others.  Prior to this, students should receive coaching on how to give effective feedback to classmates.  Each week the teacher can fill in the dated section in the student’s homework folder, to show that homework was completed on time and received, and to show a brief comment that the parents will see.  To prevent a language barrier being a problem, the teacher can utilize a translation program, such as http://translate.google.com/  to communicate with parents about homework.

Teachers need to communicate to parents on their role in supporting their child to be successful with homework.  This includes ensuring their child has a dedicated space and resources, with no distractions for the time needed to get work completed.  Parents should help by supervising to ensure work is started and finished, provide prompts as needed, and give feedback to finished homework.  Encourage parents to use their native language to discuss homework so that explanations are detailed.  This can be detailed in the homework policy.

Teachers should provide a homework policy to parents and students at the start of each year.  It should include details about the purposes of homework for the grade level, expectations, the amount of homework that will be given, types of homework to expect, guidelines for the amount of time to spend on homework, consequences for not doing homework, and ways parents can support.  Translated copies should be provided in families’ home languages.  Parents should know that if there is a problem with their child completing homework, for any reason, then they should communicate this to the teacher.  At the start of the year it is also useful to give out the Checklist for Helping Your Child with Homework (U.S. Dept. of Ed., 2005), as part of the homework policy, which will emphasize to parents their role in supporting their child with homework, and will show the teacher’s expectations.  This can be downloaded from: http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/20476/

References

Hill J.D. & Flynn K.M. (2006).  Classroom instruction that works with English language learners.  Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

U.S. Department of Education (2005).  Homework: The basics.  Retrieved from: http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/20469/

U.S. Department of Education (2005).  Checklist for helping your child with homework.  Retrieved from: http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/20476/

Supportive and Challenging Features for ELLs in Fiction and Nonfiction Texts

Entry #9

Genre	Text Examples for kindergarten	Supportive Features for ELLs	Challenging Features for ELLs
Fiction	MONDO leveled reader Picture book Poetry	Language is kept simple. Uses high frequency words. Decodable words. Picture supports. Repetitive sentence structures that are gradually increased to more varied sentence structures. Picture supports. Vocabulary presented in a motivating context. Use as a mentor text to support activities to practice vocabulary from the text. Rhyming words help with phonemic awareness, onset and rhyme, and spelling patterns.	May be lack of background knowledge. Print concepts (depending on language distance – e.g. Chinese or Japanese). May be lots of new vocabulary presented at one time.  Teacher may need to support by reading slower, gesturing and reducing complexity of language. Complex sentence structures. May include cultural differences. Turns of phrase and expressions used in English. Past tense verbs. Lack of pictures. Some poems may be more abstract.
Nonfiction	National Geographic Young Explorers magazine Dorling Kindersley Readers (leveled)	Engaging photographs to illustrate facts. Clear headings and sub-headings to state purpose. Labels and captions on many pictures. Fact boxes with one single fact. Clear page layout. Labeled diagrams Contents page Glossary Index Limited text. Leveled text. Photographs to illustrate vocabulary. Headings	Challenging vocabulary. Variety of sentence structure. Challenging vocabulary. Variety of sentence structure.

                                                                        http://www.mondopub.com/

 

                                                                        http://ngexplorer.cengage.com/ngyoungexplorer/

 

                                       http://www.dk.com/us/level-1-beginning-to-read/

Sheltered Literacy Lesson Strategies

Entry #8

Strategies used in the sheltered lesson:

·         Lesson goal was clearly stated and was also written on the chart paper.

·         Students asked to recall reading strategies they knew, before reading.

·         Vocabulary from the text was discussed in different ways before reading.  Pictures were shown where these could illustrate a word, (e.g. bouquet); synonyms were given; a story example was used to give students the understanding of the word ‘resent’.

·         Connected to students’ culture by asking them to sing the Spanish song from the book.

·         Teacher read text aloud slowly and clearly.

·         During teacher/student discussions about comprehension, the teacher kept referring to the strategies that they were using and how this was beneficial to their understanding.

·         Teacher gave students clues from the author to help them infer meaning.

·         Teacher asked a variety of questions throughout the discussion.

·         Wait time.

·         Students applied their knowledge of the three reading strategies by identifying parts of the story where they used each strategy, and recording this on post-it notes.

·         Reading and writing connection: writing about sections of the story that matched with a comprehension strategy.

·         Use of the visualizer to show the text and highlight sections for discussion.

Comments

The teacher clearly stated the objective at the start of the lesson so that this was explicit to the class.  She activated their background knowledge of comprehension strategies before the lesson started by asked them to recall strategies they have used before, which really got them focused on these strategies.  She did an excellent job of front loading the unfamiliar vocabulary in a variety of ways to best aid student understanding of these new words.   The teacher sheltered the text by reading aloud to the class and stopping at phrases that needed discussion.  There were opportunities for teacher and students to discuss the text together to fully understand inferences.  The teacher did a good job at leading and directing this discussion and by asking a variety of questions to get the students thinking.  Many of the questions involved students using higher level thinking to engage with the text.  From the short video clips we saw, it seemed that the teacher was asking all the questions and the teacher did most of the talking at these times.  I would have liked to have seen more students involved at the discussion time, and trying to draw in some of the quieter students to ask their thoughts.  I would be interested to have seen the rest of the lesson components to know if the students had time to discuss the text with a partner as they read independently.  It is especially important for ELL students to have opportunities to talk, use the language of the text and to clarify their thinking about these inferences.  Using the post-it notes was a good idea for assessment to see how students were using each strategy to think about the text.  As the teacher said, those ‘I’m confused’ post-its make a productive start to the next lesson.  I wondered why the teacher did not choose inference as a strategy to put on one of the post-it notes, because this was the objective of the lesson.

ELLs Running Records/Miscue Analysis Results

Entry #7

I tested a Spanish speaking student who has just completed fourth grade.  I used a level M text which was above her independent reading level so to produce miscues. 

Her accuracy rate was 88%, error ratio was 1:9, and self-correction ratio was 1:5.

I noticed that her errors were predominately visual errors.  She used the graphophonic cueing system to guess words, and word similarities would usually match the beginning letter and often the end letter also.  She rarely used the syntactic or semantic cueing systems, but did show she could make self-corrections when there was a familiar word to her.  Her guesses were often non-words, for example:

            Book               Student

great                grote  

female              fleem

Native English speakers will also make visual errors, but they will be more likely to substitute a real word, or realize the word they have said is not a real word and try to work it out again.

Problematic areas she showed, that can be common to all readers, include not knowing the different ways that the vowel sounds are represented in words.  For example, she read por for pair, and read crals for crawls.  She consistently mixed up the words ‘for’ and ‘from’ because of the visual similarity.  She didn’t notice to pronounce the nasal /n/ in the words crunches, munches and hang.  In spelling, children often have difficulty hearing the nasal sound, so they don’t write the /n/ sound.  She also made many errors by either adding an ‘s’ to the end of a word to make a plural, or by not pronouncing the ‘s’ at the end of a word where there was one.  I tried to find out if Spanish speakers pronounce plurals differently, but I still don’t know if this is a factor special to ELLs.  Does anyone know? 

My reader made an error that I think was affected by her being a Spanish speaker.  On two occasions she read the word ‘happens’ as ‘open’, and this may be because in Spanish the letter h is silent. 

1) The main learning target I would have for this student would be to have her focus on making meaning from the text, and be taught to monitor her own reading for meaning.  She should be shown how to use context cues to help with unknown words.  I would use an exercise such as giving her a cloze passage which forces her to use the other words in a sentence to guess a suitable word to go in the blank.  Also use a maze exercise which is similar to the close passage, but this time the blank has three possible answers.  This way the student will be forced to think about grammar (the type of word needed), as well as focusing on building meaning. 

2) Focus on building spelling awareness for the different ways to make the vowel sounds.

Work on problem-solving spelling exercises such as searching a text to find words that show different ways to make the vowel sounds.  Add these words to class lists, as well as having the student keep her own personal list.  Words can be added to the lists as the student comes upon more words.  Freeman & Freeman (2004, p.112) recommend this method as being more effective than memorizing spellings.

3) Phonemic awareness listening exercises for hearing the /h/ sound in words.  For instance, listen to a list of words, when you hear a word that begins with an /h/ raise your hand.

4) Explicitly teach plurals, and being aware of noticing and pronouncing the ‘s’ and ‘es’ at the end of words.

The second student was a Nepali speaker who had also just completed fourth grade.  The Nepalese language has a different alphabet system to English.  This student read a level P text, which was above his independent reading level.  His accuracy rate was 91%, with an error rate of 1:11.  He made no self-corrections.

He actually read aloud very well and at a reasonable pace.  He had a good sight word recognition, and was able to read words like – ancestors, obey, and predator – without slowing down.  When he made an error, he used more of the semantic and syntactic cueing systems combined, compared to how often he used the graphophonic cueing system.  This shows that he is trying to make meaning as he reads and he is using context cues.  For instance he read:

                Text                             Student

            Live indoors                live in neighborhoods

            Human families           human female

As with the other student, he also made many errors with missing out the letter s at the end of plurals.  Whether this is affected from his first language, I was unable to find out.  He made five errors by simply reading over a word and missing it out, and also errors with reading small words incorrectly, such as saying ‘a’ for ‘an’. These errors are common with native English speaking readers too.

He did find new vocabulary difficult to remember how to pronounce, such as the word ‘instinct’ which was in the title.  Even when he was told the word by the teacher he would mispronounce it throughout the text.  He also found two western names difficult to decode and pronounce.

For this reader the main targets would be:

1) Focus on making meaning from the text, and be taught to monitor his own reading for meaning.  We want to encourage self-correction by realizing that a sentence did not sound right.

2) Explicitly teach plurals, and be aware of noticing and pronouncing the ‘s’ and ‘es’ at the end of words.

3) When student skips over simple words he knows, ask him to reread the sentence and point to each word so he notices all of the words, and explain that all words are important to read.

4) As with all ELLs, explain and discuss new vocabulary before reading.  Listen to and repeat pronunciations of new words.

References

Freeman D.E. & Freeman Y.S. (2004).  Essential linguistics: What you need to know to teach reading, ESL, spelling, phonics, grammar.  Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Learning View vs. Acquisition View

Entry #6

After reading chapter 2 of the Freeman text I sorted the activities from the end of the chapter under either the learning/word recognition or acquisition headings.  Here is what I decided upon.

Learning/Word Recognition

Students

·         look up words in the dictionary to write definitions

·         read in round-robin fashion

·         practice sounding out words

·         correct peers when they make a mistake during reading time

·         identify words on a big book page that start with the same sound

·         group cards with classmates’ names by a criterion on such as first or last letter

·         divide words into syllables

·         on a worksheet, draw a line from each word to the picture that starts with the same sound

·         make alphabet books on different topics

Teachers

·         preteaches vocabulary

·         makes sure that students only read books that fit their level

·         has students segment words into phonemes

·         asks students to look around the room and find words starting with a certain letter

·         uses decodable text

·         teaches Latin and Greek roots

·         conducts phonic drills

·         uses a variety of worksheets to teach different skills

I chose the above activities to go under this heading because they are associated with explicit teaching and learning of the skills for reading and writing.  Teachers who believe in the word recognition view of learning, focus primarily on systematically teaching phonics, sight words and the structural analysis of words, so that students can recode writing.  Many of the above activities focus on practice with identifying letters and sounds, blending and segmenting sounds.  The use of decodable texts also helps to practice phonics skills.  Reading focuses on reading accurately, and errors are corrected.  New vocabulary words are pretaught so that students will recognize the words when they come to them.  According to Freeman & Freeman (2004) teachers with the word recognition view of reading have the goal of helping students to identify words.  I see activities like phonics as the building bricks of language that students need to be taught to be able to recode writing.

Acquisition

Students

·         make a Venn diagram to compare two stories

·         write rhyming poetry and then discuss different spelling for the same sound

·         ask the teacher how to spell any word they don’t know

·         read a language experience story they have created with the teacher

·         work in pairs to arrange words from a familiar chant into sentences

Teachers

·         does a shared reading with a big book

·         writes words the students dictate for a story and has students help with the spelling of difficult words

·         sets aside time for SSR (sustained silent reading) each day

·         has students meet in literature circles

·         chooses predictable texts

·         teaches students different comprehension strategies

·         does a picture walk of a new book

These activities belong with the acquisition view because they all focus around the goal of making meaning from text.  Many of these activities involve discussion with either the teacher or other students, which is an important part of learning and making meaning.  Entering information on the Venn diagram creates a lot of discussion about stories, and arranging words into a sentence is problem solving to make meaning.  Literature circles will bring together different student ideas about a text, which creates a deeper understanding of text through the discussions.

The teacher does not inhibit student writing just because they don’t yet have all the skills to be accurate.  Rather the focus is on writing for a purpose, such as writing about an experience with the teacher, or writing the rhyming poem and looking at the way sounds are represented afterwards.  Freeman & Freeman (2004) explain the theory of acquisition as readers acquire literacy by focusing on meaning.  By giving students time to do sustained daily reading, readers pick up new meanings for words and learn new ways that language is used.  The acquisition view teaches other ways to make meaning, not just relying on decoding skills.  By choosing predictable texts, for instance, students will use their background knowledge to make predictions.  By doing a picture walk students will make inferences about what is happening, as well as using background knowledge.  I see the acquisition view as the mortar that makes the meaning stick.

I don’t know for sure if each one is in absolutely the correct place, so feel free to ask me about one if you have a different opinion, or if I need to be clearer.

Reference

Freeman D.E. & Freeman Y.S. (2004).  Essential linguistics: What you need to know to teach reading, ESL, spelling, phonics, grammar.  Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Cultural Aspects in Children's Books That May Affect Comprehension

‘Thanksgiving Day Thanks’ by Laura Malone Elliot

This book is a picture book with a fiction story for young children based around the Thanksgiving tradition.  Cultural aspects that would make it difficult for ELL children to gain a full understanding of this story would be:

1.      Lack of background knowledge of the Thanksgiving history, as the story mentions Pilgrims, native Americans and Wampanoag tribe.  Because this book would be read at Thanksgiving time, the teacher would need to show pictures and tell the history of the first Thanksgiving so that all children have background knowledge.

2.      Knowledge of contemporary Thanksgiving traditions.  The story mentions a feast, decorations, pumpkin pie and a parade – all of which may be unfamiliar to students of a different culture, and certainly the way the Americans do it.  The class could discuss these traditions, while the teacher shows pictures and a short video of an American parade.

3.      Understanding the big idea of the story which is giving thanks.  In the story the class had to think of their own reason to give thanks.  The story also mentioned a “Thanksgiving food drive for the needy.”  The purpose of Thanksgiving would be discussed in the class and children can talk about their own reasons to be thankful and share these.

4.      There is specific vocabulary in the book associated with the theme of Thanksgiving such as, donated, parade, harvest, celebrate, feast, Pilgrims, etc.  The meaning of these words would be discussed in the previous activities, and labels with pictures on the wall would help for reference.

‘Charlotte’s Web’ by E.B. White

1.      The farm setting would need discussion since this is the main setting in this story, and may be unfamiliar, even to city children with no experience of the country.  Show a short video of animals on a farm.  As an activity, give children pictures of animals and get them to sort them into sets of farm animals, domestic animals kept for pets, and wild animals.  This way they will become familiar with the names of the farm animals that are the main characters in this story.

2.      Another setting in the story is at the Fair.  The concept of a country fair would need to be seen in a video to show the different elements, such as the rides, food stalls, and competitions.

3.      This story has some higher level vocabulary.  The teacher can either transpose an easier word in while reading aloud, or quickly provide an easier word after the harder word, e.g. the tranquil days – the peaceful days.

4.      Some cultures do not have the same regard towards animals as we do.  It would need to be explained how people in America care for animals and have deep feelings for their pets, and how wild animals and farm animals are protected by laws.  Since caring for the pig is one of the central themes in the story, this concept may need to be explained.

Making Meaning from a Second Language

Trying to read a newspaper article in Portuguese was extremely challenging.  I was able to get the gist of the main idea from a few words, but certainly did not understand any of the details as I could not translate any of the sentences.  So what helped me was first of all noticing the photograph that accompanied the article, which was of broken ice floating on a river.  The caption read ‘Rio Chicago’ which is easy to translate into the Chicago River.  The title, ‘Homem morreu’, had two words that I used my knowledge of French to help translate, because I know homme is French for man and mort is French for dead.  So the title must begin with ‘man dead’ or ‘man died’.  In language, many words have an origin in either Latin or Greek, so there may be similarities with a first language and a second language, or as I did, I used a second language to help with the third language.  There were also cognates (words similar in both languages in L1 and L2), such as Americano (American), reportou (reported), hospitalizado (hospital).  I recognized the words ‘rio’ and ‘amigos’ because I knew them in Spanish.  If I knew enough nouns and verbs in one sentence, I would be able to use my knowledge of grammar to piece together the information, but my lack of knowledge of these nouns and verbs, which carry the bulk of the information, meant that I couldn’t build this meaning.  Having said that, grammar rules differ between some languages, so it becomes difficult to always make an accurate translation.  The most words that I could confidently translate were: ‘Um americano do Minnesota morreu’.  To get more meaning from the article I would have to use either an English/Portuguese dictionary or use a translation program for those key words that hold the meaning.  So I went to translate.google.com and it was simple to type in the Portuguese and the English translation was instantly provided.  It translates whole sentences.  So the rest of the headline read ‘when trying to take the mobile phone.’ So from there I guess that a man died in the Chicago River because he was trying to get his mobile phone?  By not being a native speaker there may often be some element of misinterpretation when trying to make a translation.  You have to use some guess work and your background knowledge to find the overall meaning.