Hi Olga, I feel your frustrations as I have them too. I loop 2nd-3rd grade in a school in Hawaii that has the largest ELL population. This year I'm teaching 2nd and I've only 3 native English speakers. The rest of my classes comprises students whose L1 is Marshallese, Chuukese, Filipino (Tagalog and Ilokano), Samoan, Tongan, and Laotian. Because of NCLB's punitive measures, we're deemed a "failing" school although everyday I see my eager students make approximations towards reading and writing in English. My little Marshallese boy beamed with pride this past week because he was able to say the ch digraph (the language distance between Micronesian and English is so far apart that many of them have great difficulty articulating the consonants). But this, in the eyes of federal law, is not considered "student achievement." Your question regarding how do we bring a child whose second language is English (L2) on par with a child whose first language is English (L1) was our point of contention when we saw our state assessment test. It's written in English with complex sentence structure, some questions having multiple choice answers each 2 lines long (that even befuddled us teachers), no visuals or realia to accompany the text, etc.....all this flies in the face of years of research on how to effectively teach English language learners. And yes how generous that the NCLB gives our non-English proficient (NEPs) and limited-English proficient (LEPs) students 2 years to acclimate before they're "thrown" into our school's count, but this too flies in the face of ELL research that it takes anywhere from 4-7 years for a child to be English proficient because of all the factors affecting second language acquisition (motivation, L1 development, language distance, access, age, learning style, etc). I always found it ironic that the Feds are telling us to make sure we adopt "empirical, research based" practices when the principles on which NCLB is founded and the one sole assessment we are required to administer isn't "research based" itself. The state assessment we give is itself invalid because of its bias towards our linguistically and culturally diverse students. To expect my new student from Chuuk who speaks not a word of English, to attain 90% proficiency in the reading section of our state assessment is beyond comprehension.
But like you, I'm not an "excuses person" so we paid more attention to our ELL student population in the development and implementation of our comprehensive school reform efforts (our school adopted the America's Choice school design). Because of this and the NCLB's mandate to choose research based practices , we've implemented Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol SIOP Institute - Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol. We're responsive to this because it is not another "add-on" but rather a lesson planning model which allows us to continue our use of the reading strategies put forth in Mosaic as well as our Phonics Study (Pinnell & Fountas) in our Readers Workshop, while at the same time the SIOP lesson model makes sure that we implement the 8 components found effective for English language learners. In component 1 (Lesson Preparation) of the lesson plan we make sure to incorporate both the content objectives and language objectives. I state language objectives, particularly predicting/visualizing/questioning/clarifying/summarizing/making connections/inferring/sythesizing, even in math, science, soc st, music, art, and PE so that my students can access the academic language found in these content areas. I incorporate component 2 (Building Background) by explicitly linking these concepts to my Micronesian, Polynesian, and Asian students' experiences. The other components of Comprehensible Input (making sure I explain academic tasks clearly, speaking at a slower rate with simple sentence structure, and using a variety of techniques such as TPR, visuals, realia, gestures, etc), Strategies, Interaction, Practice/Application, Lesson Delivery, and Review/Assessment are all incorporated in the SIOP lesson design. What's the best thing about our SIOP professional development sessions? It totally validates all the effective instruction we were already doing at our school before NCLB-- but now, we are all consistent across grade levels as to implementing sound and research-based components for our ELLs. We just got our quarterly benchmark assessments (our students are tested at the end of every quarter leading up to the state assessment given in March) and after we studied our students' scores, we were content knowing that our ELL population made gains in reading and math, albeit small, but still it's progress in our eyes. kat ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2/10/07 1:14:31 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > And I am not an excuses person but I really don't want > to become a "practice for the test type teacher". > So if anyone has any suggestions-please let me know. > It's a dilemna because there's a belief that if we > train low socioeconomic children to do worksheets and > practice taking tests and improve scores it translates > into becoming good learners. > How do we honestly bring English Language Learners on > par with English only speakers? > Can I realistically expect my ELL first graders to > perform as well as my only EO student??? > _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
