Based on these conversations, I'll rephrase some of the concerns/questions/challenges that surfaced:
- How can a teacher identify ELLs without stigmatizing them?
- How can teachers provide the kind of individualized attention that ELLs need when there is so much pressure to cover a broad range of standards?
- How to "know" the students, their language backgrounds and literacy experiences?
- How to connect with your students and help them feel confortable to be able to work more closely with them?
- How to know what vocabulary or other language to focus on with students, so as not to assume they know more than they do and not to insult them? How can teachers help ELLs build language without sounding patronizing?
- How can student teachers implement an academic language project in a class dominated by lecture, especially if the student teacher mostly just observes the cooperating teacher (CT)?
- How can a student teacher work on academic language if a CT doesn't get the point of doing language teaching in history class? i.e. How to persuade a content area teacher to change their practice and to focus on language as well as the content?
- How can you help ELLs keep apace in a lesson... e.g. they might be trying to figure out what was discussed earlier in class when the teacher has already moved on to something different?
Certainly, teachers need to hold their curriculum to high standards, but we've got to balance these choices with knowledge of the young people within the classroom. What experiences do they bring? What topics and questions motivate them to learn intrinsically? What texts do they choose to read on their own? What school-based texts are difficult--and in what ways? What school texts are interesting and why? The English Language Proficiency Benchmarks and Outcomes (ELPBO) is a good referrence tool but it's not going to answer these questions. And I have been in more than one curriculum planning session where the standards get used as the tool to decide what should be taught, rather than a piece of the discussion informed by teachers' knowledge of actual students. I understand that the primacy of standards is something that gets pushed from a number of fronts, the cumulative effect being something of a cultural juggernaut that drives the conversation.
OK, let me get off the soapbox. So, after the first set of trainings, we added a short piece to discuss some ideas to better know students' language and literacy experiences. We suggest that student teachers develop a short survey for students to help them better know the pupils, and we share a list of some topic areas they may want to cover (see list below. Thanks to Kevin O. for generating the list for our trainings). But this is rushed in an hour and a half, and needs more sustained attention.
A List of Suggestions to Getting to Know Students--Topics to help shape surveys/interviews/informal conversations to better understand students' language and literacy backgrounds.
- Country of origin
- Age
- Length of time in the US
- Intended length of time in the US
- Parents’ occupation
- Parents’ education
- Language spoken at home
- Languages used at home for reading/writing
- Number of languages spoken
- L1 proficiency
- L2 proficiency
- School history
- In the US
- In home country
- Current school experience
- Student population- minority and majority
- Attitude towards L1 and L2
- Personal goals for L1 and L2 literacy
- Motivation
- Interests
- Responsibilities outside of class
- Language preference for reading and writing
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1 comment:
Hi Alex
This attention and focus also puts me in mind of Lilia Bartolome's article on the methods fetish. First, we conflate immigrant students with English Language Learners, this comfortably narrows in the focus of the educational thought and is premised on the questionable claim that fluency in language will translate into academic success which will then translate into societal success (meritocracy). Then, we devote a lot of attention to the right language perspective and try to teach teachers how to do this. This obscures two basic principles: 1) success in schooling, let alone society, is far more culturally and economically complicated than that, and 2) language fluency in the registers of power is central to success but is also far more complicated than reducing to a variable, whether that's academic language, functional grammar, or another slice of this perspective.
So, Bartolome suggest moving in the direction of rehumanizing students, as did Freire, by knowing them, in detail. The series of questions from Kevin are much like what she recommends and a good start. How will this go and take off in the trainings, when the umbrella is one of intervention, which connotes adjustment of a variable to right students who are not developmentally where we want them to be.
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