Skip to main content

ESL Class Ruminations

I have been using the Daily5 with my beginner to intermediate middle school students and have been fairly happy with the results: children who like to read and write. They are finding authors and series they enjoy and are discovering that writing can be a powerful way to communicate with others. I work with my students in a pull out situation.

Recently, though, I've been feeling pressure, mostly from myself and a little bit from observing my students, to change up some of what goes on in class so that there are authentic assignments that stretch my students as language learners. More specifically, I'm trying to determine which tasks are useful because they extend and enrich students' English language development, and which are just busy work and students are finding a chore to complete. The four standard weekly assignments are:

  1. Dialogue Journals - running conversation twice/week between my students and myself.
  2. Storytelling - about a personally significant event. This also involves listening to other students' stories, taking notes, and choosing one interesting story to write about.
  3. Filling out a graphic organizer about a story the child listened to on the computer.
  4. T-chart for read to self which includes writing from the reflection side of the chart.
I try to confer with students about their work immediately or as soon as possible the next day. I do a lot of teaching during these one-on-one conferences but I'm beginning to wonder if all four activities are equally valuable. Which ones can I cut or tweak to make them more authentic or more meaningful to students?

As a result of writing up this blog post, I have decided to ask students about the value of each activity to their growth as a language learner. I know which two assignments I find valuable and which one may not be as useful right now and may need some tweaking to make it worthwhile. Dialogue Journals are valuable in any setting and I may need to make some changes to the procedure in order to make them more accessible to students..

I will ask my students to write down what they like and what they don't like about each assignment, and to give a suggestion for how each can be improved. I will compile their responses and report back next time. In the meantime, do you think these assignments are valuable for beginning to intermediate ESL students? Why or why not?

Cross posted at A Slice of Life.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Partner Reading and Content, Too Routine (PRC2)

I'm a hoarder. There, I've said it. I try to deny that I'm a hoarder but it comes back to haunt me every time I move houses, or pack up my classroom at the end of the school year. I have old articles, lesson plans, handouts, folders brimming with teaching ideas, past issues of profesional journals. I hardly throw anything out though I've learned to be more selective over the years. My one rule of thumb, and I really try to stick to this, is that if I haven't used or referred to something in a year, then it's time to toss it into the recycle bin. One exception to this rule (you knew this was coming, didn't you?) is past issues of journals from professional organizations. However, with the ability to locate articles online through my professional memberships, even this exception is becoming less and less useful, which brings me to the topic of this blog post. I am currently reading a copy of The Reading Teacher from 2010. I've clipped a cou
Post a Comment
Read more

The Reading Strategies Book - Chapter 12, Supporting Students’ Conversations – Speaking, Listening, and Deepening Comprehension

The strategy lessons highlighted in Chapter 12, Supporting Students’ Conversations – Speaking, Listening, and Deepening Comprehension, in The Reading Strategies Book by Jennifer Serravallo are critical to students’ engagement and comprehension, as well as their ability to write literary essays, or even book reviews, summaries and reflective pieces about books. If students aren’t able to talk about books in a way that is invigorating and joyful, they will be less likely to develop an interest in growing ideas for writing about books. In her introduction to this chapter, Jennifer Serravallo, reminds us that when conversations go well, children are inspired by what they read and are motivated to keep reading. However, when conversations fall flat, then kids get bored and tune out. How do we avoid this situation and teach kids to  have  focused conversations about books?  The answer is easy: teach kids  strategies to help them develop effective conversational skills .  As in
Post a Comment
Read more

Are we listening?

A child sits alone with a ripped worksheet packet on his desk. He appears to be singing or subvocalizing something though no one hears him. Or, perhaps they're ignoring him. The teacher stands at the front of the room teaching on the SmartBoard. The children follow along in their worksheets. Except the child sitting alone. He is in his own world. No one engages him and he engages no one. My heart aches for this child. He is physically and emotionally removed from the class. I ask him why his paper is ripped. (It's not an accidental rip.) He says he did that on a different day. When he had been frustrated about the work. He tells me that he sometimes sits by himself because the work is too hard for him. He later tells me that he sits by himself because the teacher thinks he talks too much during the lesson.  He says he does that because he wants to find out about the "lives of the other children". My first impulse is to rescue him from the wrongheade
10 comments
Read more