Please take a moment to watch the video below (it is only 4 minutes long). As you watch you can either make a T-chart of your thinking or just take notes about what you notice the students doing as well as what the teacher is doing.
https//www.teachingchannel.org/videos/dual-language-learners-literacy-skills
Some of the things I noticed as I watched the video was the use of songs and clapping activities to get the children in engaged in their learning. Eric Jensen a specialist on Brain-Based learning states that some theory suggest that when students use gestures it actually lightens the cognitive load for the students as they are thinking of what to say. These songs also help students learn phonemic awareness skills. (Jensen, 2015)
During the Read Aloud portion of the text we see that the teacher has picked out a story that is repetitive in nature. Just like with our monolingual English speakers we want our ELL students to hear the repetitions in these books and use these as a basis for constructing new meaning, digging deeper into vocabulary and eventually using these new skills to form their own repetitive sentences. In Living Questions by Ruth Shagoury and Brenda Miller Power they highlight a teacher-researcher, Susan Harris McKay, who had a similar experience with a young Vietnamese Kindergartener who was learning English in her Gen. Ed classroom. She noted that this young boy would use the repetition from the stories to build meaning for his own writing. Here is a quote from the text that sums up some of McKay’s action research.
"He used the pattern in The Ghost (Cowley 1990)—“ I see the ______”— for many of his books early this year. Eric’s pattern in his first few books, however, was written “I C the ______.” It was a wonderful moment when I finally asked Eric to compare
the pattern in The Ghost with his own book. I asked him to find the word see in The Ghost and then look at it in his version. In his face, I saw that flashing moment of disequilibrium of which learning is made, and he diligently went about the task
of correcting his error throughout his book. If I had corrected it for him, would the moment he discovered his mistake have been as powerful?" (Shagoury & Power, 2012, Chapter 2, Kindle Location 876)
As the teacher reads she highlights the vocabulary in the text and has the students point out some of the words that they might be familiar with from previous lessons. You can tell as the students engage with the text that they feel comfortable using the English Language and the teachers has set up a safe environment for them to do so. The teacher then takes the new vocabulary the students have learned and applies that to a real-life experience.
During this real-life experience students are exposed to their native language so they can generalize their L1 to form meaning in their L2. The teacher then has them use the language from the story to create their own sentences. She also uses open-ended questions to have the students explore their receptive and expressive skills.
So what are other ways that teachers can help students learn vocabulary in their new language?
10 ways you can help your ELLs improve their vocabulary
1. Shared Group Reading
2. Independent Reading
3. Educational Television Viewing
4. Allowing Children to Act out new words
5. Visual Aids to assist with meaning (ie, content walls, word walls)
6. Opportunities to compare and contrast words
7. Dictionaries
8. Real-World Applications
9. Questions and Prompts to Help Students Think Critically About a Word
10. Using gestures (Whole Brain Teaching)
(TESOL, p. 18-24)
References:
Learning Words in a Second Language. Teaching Vocabulary to English Language Learners. (pp. 10-34). Retrieved from TESOL at http://www.tesol.org/docs/books/bk_teachingvocab_750.pdf?sfvrsn=2
Jensen, E. (n.d.). When Clear Instruction And Visual Aids Are Not Enough. Retrieved June 16, 2015, from http://www.jensenlearning.com/news/when-clear-instruction-and-visual-aids-are-not-enough/brain-based-learning
Teaching Channel: Dual Language Learners Developing Literacy. Retrieved June 15, 2015, from https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/dual-language-learners-literacy-skills
Shagoury, Ruth; Power, Brenda Miller (2012-01-28). Living the Questions, second edition: A Guide for Teacher-Researchers (Kindle Locations 876-881). Stenhouse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
