WK6 | Reading Reflection Response

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

Chapter 8 - Pg 272

“Because good writing exhibits numerous characteristics, these characteristics vary according to writing genre and purpose, and individual development of these traits will be uneven, it is not easy to characterize developmental levels. For example, one youngster may write short pieces with correct spelling and punctuation, whereas another writes elaborate, action-packed stories with little punctuation or capitalization. Both are beginners, but neither writer has consistent development in all aspects of good writing.”

This quotation is from the section entitled “What are some beginning and intermediate multilingual learner characteristics and teaching strategies”. This lengthy section describes beginner writers and provides a list of useful strategies for them, then describes intermediate writers and provides a list of useful strategies for them.

The quotation here is reminding us that in a multivariate skill such as writing, individual students will accomplish different aspects of the skill at different times, and in different ways. This concept applies to most skill-based subjects. A student learning guitar may be excellent at playing chords, but terrible at reading notation, whereas another might be particularly good at improvising and memorization, and struggle with rhythm. A third student might be able to sight read extremely well but have terrible instrumental technique. This variation is totally normal, because different individuals have different interests and backgrounds. Students may gravitate towards quickly accomplishing skills that are easy for them and struggle with skills that are more difficult.

This is a helpful reminder to incorporate a wide variety of teaching techniques in your classroom. One day you may focus on spelling and capitalization, and the next day you may focus on vocabulary, etc. etc. Because there are so many factors with a skill like writing it may take a long time to progress, but you will be surprised when you look back at the progress of your students how quickly they can master the subject if you are effectively teaching them.

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

Chapter 8 - Pg 284

“One of the most powerful reasons to use this showing and not telling strategy, in addition to its ease of learning, is that multilingual Learners are able to transfer this knowledge to their own writing.”

This quotation is from the section of chapter 8 that provides a list of strategies for intermediate writers. Intermediate writers have at least a basic fluency but need to build on their skills to extend their understanding of discourse. In addition, they must continue to build up all of the other basic skills related to phonics, morphology, syntax, semantics, as well as expand their vocabulary so that they can ultimately become a more advanced writer.

This strategy, “Show and NOT tell” is such a fascinatingly useful strategy for intermediate, advanced and expert writers. Obviously this lends itself to fiction or poetry writing, but it is also useful for journalistic writing or journaling.

I would argue that even professional writers could use some practice with this technique. It seems difficult to become intuitively familiar with this strategy initially, and likely that everyone could use a good reminder of this from time to time.

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

Chapter 42 - Page 272

“In the process of creating, practicing, and presenting the group report, students have several opportunities to acquire new vocabulary, to write and re-read English and home language summaries of the material, and to communicate in English for a meaningful purpose.”

This quotation is from the chapter on Collaborative reading. In this strategy, students are essentially doing individual research that they will then share with a small group to complete a presentation project. The students are provided a plethora of texts that have a variety of levels of difficulty. The groups are set up such that each group is made up of a variety of different reading skill levels, which helps to scaffold for the readers that are more novice. The group must present their findings to one another in order to build their presentation, which practices their social interaction skills, and this encourages them to read for understanding. Finally there is a presentation before class, which practices their public speaking skills.

As the quotation indicates, this robust technique practices many different language skills and it is useful for having students of a variety of skill levels to work together. Because of all the different techniques used, this is an excellent way to build vocabulary for ELL students.

The most intriguing part of this chapter is that the subtitle is: “What to do when they can’t read the textbook”. Oddly, this is not elaborated upon within the chapter. While this is a good solution for solving this particular issue (students not being able to read a textbook), This technique is so useful that it doesn’t really matter if they can read the textbook or not. (That is to say, even if students CAN read the textbook, this is a very useful strategy). Because so many skills are worked in this strategy with a heavy emphasis on social interaction, this should be regularly employed by teachers.

The one question that I have about this strategy, and other strategies that employ this characteristic is the stratified groups of different skill levels. I understand that students of higher skill levels can help scaffold for students of lower skill levels, but I wonder if that is the ideal situation for learning.

Firstly, any group of students will have mixed skill levels, and therefore scaffolding is possible. There will always be one student in every group of students that has higher reading comprehension than the others. Is it the case that increasing the difference between the skill levels allows for more scaffolding? I’m not certain of this.

Secondly, there is the problem of lack of contribution from the students who have lower skill levels. As the following chapter states:
“K-12 researchers have concluded that, to succeed, group work must be carefully structured; students must be thoroughly prepared through social skill-building activities; assignments must be open-ended rather than have preset answers; and the task must be such that a group, rather than an individual, is required to accomplish it”

My experience with small group projects is that there are always students who don’t really do anything. Establishing a mixed group where there are 1 or more students who are stronger readers than the others seems to be establishing a situation where this problem is ripe to surface.
If you put all of the strongest readers together in a single group and the weakest readers together in a single group, would it be so bad for either group? I’m not sure this is better than a mixed group but I’m not clear that it is a problem either.

Another consideration that I use in my classroom to avoid activity is to put groups of friends together when the individuals involved are very shy. I often find that if I mix a group of introverts and extroverts together, the extroverts do more of the heavy lifting than the introverts. But if I segregate the extroverted students with one another and the introverted students with one another, they have an easier time conversing with each other. Presumably this is because they have similar working styles.

At the end of the day, it is probably ideal to mix groups in different ways, or just do it randomly at times. That way students get more experience interacting with those that they do not normally interact with.

Using Photos With English-Language Learners
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/ell-engagment-using-photos

The PWIM uses an inductive process (in which students seek patterns and use them to identify their broader meanings and significance), as opposed to a deductive process (where meanings or rules are given, and students have to then apply them). It takes advantage of student prior knowledge and visual clues and builds on the key strength of inductive learning—the brain's natural desire to seek out and remember patterns.

This article is a list of useful strategies to incorporate images into lessons with ELL students. Opening with a reference to the popular idea that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, the article describes how useful and necessary images can be to support learning. The use of images can help students understand a context and usage for a given word. It is an incredibly useful tool for adding differentiation to your lesson.

The article makes the point that PWIM uses inductive reasoning, which I find to be unusual.
This strategy is very powerful, but all of the kinds of reasoning processes are probably used in an activity that is as elaborate as PWIM. The main difference between deductive and inductive is that inductive involves an element of probability, whereas deductive reasoning does not. I’m not sure why the PWIM is named as it is (“Picture Word Inductive Model”), as it does not seem to explicitly involve inductive reasoning. Students are working together to piece together labels for a photo, but this relies on prior knowledge of vocabulary. A student might hazard a guess about a word that seems appropriate for the photo if they are unsure of whether or not the word is appropriate, but this teaching strategy doesn’t seem to force that kind of interaction to occur. It is more likely that a student will use knowledge of words that they already know to apply it to the image. Inductive reasoning would be used if a word is put onto the image that they do not know the meaning of, and they can use the context of the other words that they know and the relationships to the image to construct a definition for the word they do not know. But again, this interaction is not assured by the PWIM strategy.

The part of the activity that involves the Cloze sentences requires students to make inferences, which may incorporate inductive, deductive, or abductive reasoning, depending on the kind of sentences that are being generated and what kinds of thinking is required to fill in the blanks.

The latter part of this exercise, when the sentences are structured into paragraphs involves all the types of reasoning. The creative choices made will involve both inductive and abductive reasoning, and the technical aspect of ordering the sentences to create meaning requires deductive reasoning.

Overall, PWIM seems like a really robust and interesting technique to use to teach vocabulary. Because it spans multiple days, involves aspects from multiple other strategies, and requires high levels of student engagement, this strategy is sure to be very effective.

The Components of Effective Vocabulary Instruction
https://www.colorincolorado.org/article/components-effective-vocabulary-instruction

Discussion can clarify misunderstandings of words by making the misunderstandings public. For words that a student knows partially, or knows in one particular context, the give-and-take of discussion can clarify meanings. When misunderstandings are public, the teacher can shape them into the conventional meaning.

This article is mostly a list of strategies for teaching vocabulary to ELL students, but it covers a wide range of considerations for the practice of teaching vocabulary. Not only is there information about what things you should do, there is information about things you should try to avoid. There are also discussions about how important teaching vocabulary is, and how lessons could be structured.

This quotation comes from the section titled “Instruction that works”. There is a study mentioned where a 5-day vocabulary instruction program was monitored. The study revealed that:
“...twelve encounters with a word reliably improved comprehension, but four encounters did not. The instructional approach, which involved active processing of each words' meaning, had significantly greater effects than did a definition-only approach on measures of comprehension but not on measures involving the recall of definitions.”
This is important because it indicates how important repeated interactions and context are for successful vocabulary instruction.

The quotation is part of a passage that explains how beneficial discussions can be to educating students about vocabulary.

There are a couple of parts about this section that raise my eyebrow a bit, or at least I would be worried to try out without ensuring that I am being extremely careful.
Firstly, I think that open classroom discussions are useful only for certain students, because there are many students who simply do not pay attention when they are not directly involved, and shy students that do not volunteer information. A solution to these problems would be to ask questions directly to these students to force them to engage in the lesson, but the switch between voluntary engagement and forced engagement is pretty significant. When students are voluntarily engaged, they may discover the meaning on their own, which we know to be a valuable tool. At the very least, classroom discussions that either leverage voluntary engagement or forced selection of students could benefit from being bolstered with other strategies.

This quote emphasizes the usefulness of discussing a student’s misunderstanding in public, however this has some pitfalls. I would be worried about triggering a trauma response in a student who has experienced trauma. If the student is overly shy or is bullied, exposing their misunderstandings may deter them from engaging in class in the future.

Surely there is a way to do this without making a student feel like you are drawing attention to their flaws, and rather trying to help them directly and the rest of the class at the same time.

Selecting Vocabulary Words to Teach English Language Learners
https://www.colorincolorado.org/article/selecting-vocabulary-words-teach-english-language-learners

However, to know a word means knowing it in all of the following dimensions:

• The ability to define a word
• The ability to recognize when to use that word
• Knowledge of its multiple meanings
• The ability to decode and spell that word

This quotation is from the article that defines the 3 tiers of vocabulary words from the ‘Colorin Colorado’ website.
The 3 tiers of vocabulary words are:
Tier 1 = common words that have simple 1:1 relationships with their definition and can be described easily. Such as ‘house’, or ‘flower’.
Tier 2 = words that are common, but require further explanations because their meanings are difficult to explain, or they have multiple meanings. Such as ‘disingenuous’, or ‘wave’’
Tier 3 = words that are uncommon and are only relevant to very specific topics. Such as ‘Semi-quaver’ or ‘factorial’

The article does not state this outright, but the tiers should be tackled in numerical order, tier 1 being more appropriate for beginners. Tier 2 and tier 3 for more advanced learners. Tier 3 differs more in kind as compared to tier 2, and tier 3 words should only be taught when they are directly applicable to a lesson. Tier 2 words should be taught to ELLs directly, not just on an ad-hoc basis as tier 3 words are. Some words in Tier 2 are very common words, but are perhaps more complex than tier 1.

This quotation outlines the components it takes to know a vocabulary word. For example, if we consider the word “date”. We know that there are many definitions to be familiar with, and each definition comes with its own usage context. Because date can be used with one meaning as a noun, and with another meaning as a verb, different syntax will apply to the sentence based on the definition being used. And even though ‘date’ is fairly easy to spell and pronounce, it is still something that must be known by a language learner.

For a word such as “alleviate”, the spelling and pronunciation will be a larger factor, but the meaning and usage will be simpler.

It is very interesting to consider what it takes to know something like a vocabulary word. The knowledge of a word is not as simple as knowing the definition of a word. You could say similar things about almost any topic. To know what multiplication means when you are only talking about integers is one thing, but when you have fractions, negative numbers, and variables, it can take on different forms. So to truly comprehend the concept of multiplication, you must be familiar with these other contexts in which multiplication is found.