Reading and ELL Flex Session, November 7, 2012

This session addressed many of the challenges faced by English learners. It is helpful for teachers to understand these challenges so that they can provide support and teach students effective strategies. All students use three cueing systems as they learn to read. Those cueing systems include graphophonics, semantics, and syntax. ELL students have additional needs. Building background knowledge and vocabulary are two areas needed by English learners. Teachers can use various strategies such as mental images, visualization, kinesthetics, graphic organizers, and physical representations to help students. A third area of need is in learning language patterns. David and Yvonne Freeman have presented five syntactic challenges for English learners. They are modals, passive voice, comparatives and logical connectors, verbs with prepositional phrases, and relative clauses. There are many things teachers can do to help ELL students with these challenges. Some examples are scaffolding instruction, using graphic organizers, using hands-on activities, promoting oral language development, and providing opportunities for practice and feedback.

To access the powerpoint presentation, click here.

To access the bookmark, click here.

 

Freeman and Freeman (2009). Essential Linguistics, What You Need to Know to Teach Reading, ESL, Spelling, Phonics, Grammar. Heinemann Publishers.

Enhancing Reading in the ELL Classroom Through Comprehension and Questioning

At our ELL flex session focusing on comprehension and questioning, we had the opportunity to talk more about what supporting these two things across language levels looks like and how doing so provides support for language acquisition.  ELL teachers participated in the sharing of three big ideas throughout the session:  ELL implications on reading fluency, the comprehension strategy of questioning, and a chance to apply more comprehension strategies across language levels.

Fluency    We began by investigating how reading fluency consists of two components:  word identification or decoding and the comprehension or construction of the meaning of text.  Both of these components must be happening simultaneously for students to be considered fluent readers.  We considered the ELL implications on fluency disruptions, fluency support, and fluency measurement.

The find the Powerpoint presentation of only the Reading Fluency portion of this session, please click here.

Questioning      We discussed how to scaffold the reading strategy of questioning across language levels.  Teachers had the chance to think about how to access higher order thinking skills, even with low language levels, and rehearse the reading strategy of questioning at the same time.

Access this questioning activity and the resources for higher order thinking skills below:

Blooms Taxonomy

Depth of Knowledge Chart

Tiered Thinking Across the Stages of Second Language Acquisition

Comprehension Strategies   Finally, teachers had the chance to apply what partnering a research based comprehension strategy with higher order thinking skills looks like when scaffolded across language levels.

The strategy handouts and additional resources to support the strategies are:

Making Connections

Retelling

Monitor and Clarify 

Summarize

Graphic Organizer used to scaffold comprehesion strategies across language levels

Teachers shared their ideas about scaffolding comprehesion strategies across language levels in a Googledoc.  Check out their great ideas here.

To find the entire powerpoint, including all the information about fluency, questioning, higher order thinking skills, and comprehension strategies, please click here.