Phillips Friday Focus
January 25, 2019
Lifting Language Learners, part 1
The next few weeks I am going to share bits and pieces of an article on instructional strategies for our ELL students. After our Princeton ISD visit last week, we saw and heard their philosophy was much the same as ours: immerse ELLs in English early and allow them opportunities to use language with native-speaking peers as much as possible. I am excited and confident we are on the right track to help this growing population on our campus and in the district.
Empowering English Language Learners Through Language Dives
by Kevin Jepson and Anne Vilen
If you step into a language arts classrooms at Lead Academy in Greenville, South Carolina, you'll hear English language learners (ELLs) deep in conversation with small groups of their classmates, both native speakers and other ELLs. They'll be talking about how English works, discussing why an author chose specific words in a key sentence, and trying out their new understanding of syntax and usage in sentences of their own.
One student started out the discussion with a telling comment: "I like looking at stuff and wondering." That spirit of inquiry set the tone for a lively discussion about who the author means by "you" and "they" in the sentence. Students figured out that the first "you" means "the reader." By the end of the dive, both ELLs and native speakers realized that in English, "you" and "they" can refer either to a specific person addressed by the speaker or to a general group, depending on the context. This is a sophisticated insight into English, especially when contrasted to many languages that have different words for singular and plural—and for familiar and formal—pronouns.
These conversations, called "language dives", are based on the "juicy sentence" research by Lily Wong Fillmore and Charles J. Fillmore of the University of California at Berkeley. Language dives can be designed by any teacher at any grade level in any subject area. When used consistently, these exercises not only equip students to meet required academic standards, but they also have the potential to turn quiet, passive students into curious, empowered, and more proficient communicators. Teachers will need to experiment and practice for language dives to become effective in teaching them, but the benefits for ELLs are worth the effort. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you put language dives to work in your classroom.
Choose a Sentence that Offers Multiple Opportunities for Learning
The first step toward designing an effective language dive is to choose a sentence that you think will be purposeful and meaningful for students. A worthy sentence unlocks the meaning of the text students are reading and fortifies the meaning they are making themselves as writers and speakers. A language dive sentence should meet the criteria below. To explain these criteria, we'll use a sample sentence that 5th graders at Lead Academy study as part of a unit on human rights: Everyone has the right to own property alone, as well as in association with others.
A language dive sentence should
- Come from a complex text, often from a primary source, from authentic literature, or a real-world nonfiction text. In this case, the sample sentence presents a main idea in the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is a central text in these students' unit on human rights.
- Be relevant to the content and skills of the unit students are studying. For instance, the sample sentence helps students answer the guiding question of the entire human rights unit: "What are human rights, and how can they be threatened?"
- Contain language functions (or purposes for using language) that relate to the content and tasks at hand. In their examination of human rights, students at LEAD must discuss a human right as part of a writing assessment.
- Contain complex language structures. The complex structures in the example above include as well as and in association with. The sentence also features an implied ellipsis. After as well as, the authors intentionally omitted the structure to own property because readers don't need the structure to understand that the author is still talking about owning property: Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as [to own property] in association with others.
- Contain academic vocabulary or figurative language. In the sample, academic vocabulary includes association, a word that is used rhetorically in academic text to mean "along with" or "next to."
Get Students Talking Purposefully
To become proficient in English, ELLs need lots of opportunities to speak to and listen to other ELLs as well as their native-speaking peers. Teachers can turn the conversation over to ELLs during language dives by using conversation cues that invite students to join the conversation in ways that foster dialogue and extend ideas. Conversation cues, based on Sarah Michaels and Cathy O'Connor's Talk Science Primer(2012), are tied to specific purposes for talking, which include:
- To share, expand, and clarify thinking
- "Can you say more about that?"
- "So, what are you saying?"
- To listen carefully to one another
- "Can you repeat what X just said?"
- To deepen reasoning
- "Why do you think that?"
- "Does it always work that way? Can you think of another example that's a little different?"
- To think with others
- "Do you agree or disagree? Why?"
- "Would anyone like to respond to that?"
- To explain what someone else means
- "Who can explain what X means when they say XYZ?"
- "How do you think X came up with that answer?"
Sarah Mitchell, instructional coach at Lead Academy, says "conversation cues have been one of the single most important drivers of equity. The neat thing is they are not just something we do when we're doing language dives. Conversation cues promote equity at all grade levels in all subjects. Any teacher—from Spanish to physical education to math—can use conversation cues. They are based on our core belief that all students have something important to say
Staff Shout Outs!
Shana Holder- allowing another teacher and principal in the district visit your classroom
Heather Kinney and Sherri Bell- coming up with our fun 100th day activities for our campus
Winter, Debra, Lydia, and Debbie- managing your every changing caseload and schedule, thank you for your hard work!
What's Ahead...
January 28- SST meetings, Latino Family Literacy Project begins, 5:30-7:30
January 29-1st grade GT day
January 30- 2nd grade GT day
January 31- 3rd grade GT day
February 4- PLC Day
February 5- 4th grade GT day
February 6- 5th grade GT day
February 7- "It's Nacho Normal Math Night" 5:30-7:00
February 11- Telpas practice begins, Telpas writing calibration after school, 6:00 school board meeting (Dabbs will be honored for TOY)
February 12- GT Field Trip (grades 1-3),Writing calibration if needed after school
February 13- GT Field Trip (grades 4-5), 4:00 Teacher meeting
February 14- 8:05 Support staff meeting in room 2, Valentine exchanges