WK4 | Reading Reflection Response

“Reading, Writing, and Learning in ESL” by Suzanne F. Peregoy, Owen Boyle, and Steven Amendum”

Pg 164

“Content-area instruction is strongly influenced by state learning standards that ratchet up the academic language demands placed on all students, setting the bar high for achievement.”

This quotation comes from the section about academic language instruction for content areas. The book emphasizes the importance of identifying academic language in the content area that you are teaching and crafting lessons to ensure that the necessary vocabulary and concepts are understood by the students. If the students cannot comprehend the language that is being used to describe the content, they will not likely be able to understand the content very well. Unless there is crossover, it is not likely that the students will acquire this knowledge in their ELD classes or with social interactions.

This quotation is pointing out that the state learning standards set a high bar of achievement for ELL students. The state standards may require students to be familiar with concepts that require the fore-knowledge of vocabulary or other language that is used to describe those concepts.

For example, in the section “Academic Language Features of Mathematics”, the book gives the example of word problems. It is not the vocabulary alone that the students must contend with, but also the sentence structure, and the knowledge of which mathematical operations are relevant for the scenario that is described.

Interestingly, for most hurdles in education, the solution set often primarily includes differentiated instruction. There is no exception in this case, either, but there are other techniques to use as well. When teaching academic language concepts, the book offers the following advice:

• Pair verbal instruction with pictures, graphs, photos, realia, and demonstrations to promote comprehension.
• Use cooperative and collaborative group work such as think-pair-share, group discussion, etc.
• Assess your students before and after your lesson
• Preview your lesson, and review it after it is completed

All of these techniques work well to reinforce content that is being taught, so it is no surprise that these techniques would work well for teaching academic language.

The tricky part of this for teachers is obviously balancing the amount of time it takes to teach these lessons. It is obviously mandatory that students must understand the language that is being used to communicate the ideas of the lesson prior to engaging with that lesson. So it is perhaps a balancing act to try and incorporate these additional lessons within your normal curriculum without upsetting any overall timelines or learning goals.

Although I do not have ELL students, I have a very relatable situation. In my classroom, I am constantly getting new students. Students that show up in mid-april to an instrumental music classroom lack the basic skills that all the other students now have. The lessons that are being taught close to the end of the year require that the students have a certain level of basic musical skills and comprehension. There is a balancing act of giving the new students enough attention so that they can try to catch up, while not boring the rest of the class who already knows the information.

For example, I may do a lesson using a particular piece of music. I can put the notation on the board and the students can already read the notation and play it on their guitars. The new students, however, don’t even know how to hold their guitars or produce sound, much less read notation. However I can’t teach all of those skills to new students in a single day, they must acquire the skills steadily over time. So this requires that I find something that is do-able for the new student that day, that they can kind of play along with the rest of the class.

“50 Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners” by Adrienne Herrell and Michael Jordan

Pg 156

“The use of learning centers in the classroom is a powerful way to encourage students to practice the new skills they are gaining. Centers should be thoroughly explained to students so that they understand what is expected of them as they use the center. Both behavior and learning expectations must be made clear for the centers to support learning.”

This quote comes from the chapter about Language Focus Lessons. Language Focus Lessons are lessons that are about the content of subject matter, but are focussed instead on the language that is used for that particular lesson. These are particularly useful for discussing vocabulary, pronunciation, and learning to use vocabulary words in a particular context.

The book indicates that you may decide to plan a language focus lesson when you hear a student or group of students misusing, mispronouncing, or misunderstanding a word or a phrase. This quotation seems to be cautioning against breaking the flow of the student’s efforts to make a correction or mini-lesson. It is not ideal to pivot your focus from the moment that you hear an error to dive into a Language Focus Lesson, but rather to plan and prepare one for the future.

This quotation comes from chapter 22 on the use of learning centers in the classroom. The learning centers are creative stations that students can use to work on a project, or a portion of a project to practice the content from the lessons in class. There are a wide variety of possibilities for what the learning centers could be focused on, and the book gives many examples.

This quotation comes from the conclusion section, where it is emphasizing the need for rigorous expectations when it comes to the use of learning centers.

This very constructivist technique is an exciting way to let students explore, be creative, and freely interact with one another. The benefits to the students are obvious.

This quotation is interesting because it is cautioning against what most teachers would fear in any constructivist setting: the loss of control of the classroom. Students can very easily get off task, so the book advises that expectations are made clear so that there are guardrails to keep the students from straying too far.

I have yet to witness a constructivist approach work 100% in any classroom. I believe that it is possible, but it seems very difficult to keep students engaged in this framework. During my fieldwork observation from this past week, when the students were tasked with making a play-dough representation of a scene from the book they are reading, some of the students basically did nothing at all. It was very easy to predict which students were going to be the ones that just goofed off the entire class and ended up not making anything, because it is the same set of students that usually goof off the entire class.

This is a problem I have in my own classroom with personal or group projects. I have become accustomed to approximately half of my students completing their projects and the rest won’t even attempt to turn anything in. It is reassuring to see this behavior in other classrooms with experienced teachers because that means it is not only my fault that the students choose to not do any work.

All of that aside, this could be a fun way to work on a recording project with small groups in my classroom. I could have stations for each step of the writing and recording process, and they would not necessarily have to be linear, which is a great advantage to having everyone working at the same time.

For example, I could set up the following stations:

• Writing/Ideas: pens and paper, guitars and keyboards. Students come up with their ideas here and write them down.
• Rehearsal: the groups can rehearse with a band set-up to try to get their ideas to a performance level. Writing can also occur here.
• Guitar/Bass recording station: This is a station where students can record the guitar parts separately
• Keyboard/Synth recording station: This is a station where students can record the keys parts separately
• Vocal Booth recording station: This is a station where students can record the vocal parts separately
• Drums/Percussion recording station: This is a station where students can record the drums parts separately
• Mixing station: this where students can put everything together and finalize it.
• Artwork station: this is where students can create their own artwork to accompany their project.

The stations could be modified as the students progress through the project to accommodate their needs. For example, the rehearsal station could be converted into a recording station or a mixing station.

What is Syntax.pdf

Linguistics takes a different approach to these categories and separates words into morphological and syntactic groups.

This document separates words into 2 groups: open class and closed class. The closed class words consist of determiners, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. The open class words consist of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

The open class words may be subcategorized by the way that they interact with other words within a sentence.

The use the example of transitive and intransitive verbs as 2 subcategories of a type of open class word.

Overall I find this document very difficult to understand. For example there is a box within the Open Class Words table that contains the following:

Det. Adj. _____ (this is called a Noun Phrase) "the black cat"

I cannot parse what this is trying to communicate from the information in the document itself, so I had to research many of these concepts on other sites.

This quote, on its face, seems contradictory to the organization of the pragmatics as discussed in the lecture video, but this document is speaking about the method that is used to categorize words.

“Syntactic” in this case refers to the relationship between a given word and the other words in the phrase or sentence around it. If we consider the sentence: “The dog went to the moon” we cannot replace the word ‘dog’ with the word ‘happily’ and still have the sentence be grammatically correct. This difference is a syntactic difference and can help us understand the function of the words.

Morphological refers to the relationship between the parts (or possible parts) of the word. For example, if we consider the sentences: “The dog went to the moon”, we can add a plural ‘s’ to ‘dogs’ and the sentence still makes grammatical sense, but we cannot add a plural ‘s’ to the word ‘wents’. This helps us define the limits of what is possible for a given part of speech.

Syntax_English Sentence Structure.docx

For this web page, sentence will be taken to mean: 'a sequence of words whose first word starts with a capital letter and whose last word is followed by an end punctuation mark (period/full stop or question mark or exclamation mark)'.

This document is an easy guide to writing high quality sentences. It explains the concepts of subject and predicate, independent and dependent clauses, and compound and complex sentences.

After explaining these concepts, it gives a few common examples of things that should be avoided when writing sentences. It explains run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and rambling sentences.

This definition of ‘sentence’ provided at the top of the document is useful because this definition is inclusive of sentences which are not grammatically correct in many ways. This overly broad definition is required when discussing all of the ways that a sentence may become problematic.

This document is an important reminder that when teaching grammar for ELL students, it is important not only to teach what is true and correct, but also what is incorrect. This is useful categorization for students in all subject areas.

For example, you can teach a student the correct way to hold drumsticks in the matched concert grip, but this does not automatically imply that putting drumsticks in their friend's nose is the wrong way. Oftentimes middle school students will be inclined to experiment with such absurdities. Children are inherently creative and it is important to make a distinction between what is a useful variation of the rule and what is not useful.

For example, a student may intuitively discover that turning your wrist over so that your thumb is facing up can be useful in certain situations, like when you are playing a ride cymbal. This kind of creative exploration and discovery is useful, but you can also prevent them from doing something that will hurt their wrists.

Just as students may intuitively discover that sentence fragments don’t seem to work well in their writing, but they may also ‘discover’ certain ways of writing that may seem correct from their perspective. It is useful to categorize what is incorrect about the writing so that students can understand the distinctions.

“A Short Overview of English Syntax” by Rodney Huddleston

The fact that the two types of sentence are distinguished in terms of clauses implies that we take the clause to be a more basic unit than the sentence, which reflects the fact that in speech it tends to be more difficult to determine the boundaries between sentences than the boundaries between clauses

This document describes how clauses are defined and organized. The document describes 2 primary categories: canonical and non-canonical clauses. The canonical clauses consist of a subject and a predicate, and each of those pieces may be classified as a phrase associated with one of the parts of speech.

This quotation is referring to the fact that an independent clause can stand alone as its own sentence. For example, “I am extremely wealthy” is an independent clause and can stand on its own. A dependent clause cannot exist as a sentence. For example, “Because of all the dollars in my bank account” is not a complete sentence. This independent clause needs to be coupled with another clause in order to make a complete sentence.

I think I am missing some formatting from this document, because the document refers to underlined phrases, while directing attention to clauses where nothing is underlined. (i.e. ‘the underlined clause in [iiib] is subordinate and hence non-canonical.’)

That minor point aside, this document is very easy to understand, but this content is very difficult to remember the details of. I never learned any of this content in school that I can remember. This is all new to me.

These rules and categories are very useful for explaining why something functions as it does in the English language. When teaching grammar and syntax to a person who is learning English as a second language, it is useful to have these categories and rules to give a broader context to whatever concept you are trying to teach. When students have a map (in the forms of rules and categories) of the content that they are learning, it is easy for the content to be digested and memorized.