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Directions: Please answer each question in 150 words and each response in 100 words

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Directions: Please answer each question in 150 words and each response in 100 words. This is due within 30 hours!

 

Discussion Question 1: If you were utilizing a reading strategy among students with intermediate English proficiency, what specific guidelines would be critical for you to consider when planning the lesson?

 

Response to Christopher:

Building and following a reading study routine every day is important for intermediate level ELLs in developing strong study skills and growing daily in their language abilities. A language practice routine helps to habituative the learning process, and the regularity and repetition of repeated practice helps reinforce understanding, activating the learner’s background knowledge while he/she continues to introduce new information and concepts. Keeping the learning process regular, but also not overcomplicating it with too much information at any given sitting, helps the ELL to form good study habits that are repeatable time and again. A routine of an hour of study time or less can be established that then breaks the overall learning time into smaller study segments, with scheduled time for listening skills, reading comprehension, grammar study, vocabulary expansion, and English-speaking opportunities (Beare, 2019). The key to this approach is to keep it relatively simple and repeatable, not to overload or overwork the learner with too much information at once or too much time spent on any one language learning activity.

 

Response to Amanda:

Hello Class,

When it comes to planning a lesson surrounding diverse learners, it is important to start with what standard and objective you are teaching to, decide what reading strategy best addresses that standard/objective and your students’ needs, and then from there you need to determine how are you going to assess if this objective is being achieved (Colorin Colorado, 2019). Once you have these basic lesson planning elements sorted out, that is when you can focus in on how to implement the reading strategy into the lesson.

If for instance you were going to use an interactive read-aloud or audio book as your reading strategy for the lesson, you need to start with prereading the text and looking at the vocabulary and concepts determining which areas will need to be pre-taught (Bolos, 2012). This will help teachers determine what support materials will be useful to aid students achieve the objective (Bolos, 2012). Another important aspect to consider when prereading a text is to think about chunking the text into appropriate, easily comprehendible segments that allow you to stop and have them answer a question or fill out an aspect of a graphic organizer, but the main idea behind these predetermined stops is to check-in on students understanding (Bolos, 2012).

Once the teachers has determined what vocabulary and background knowledge needs to be pre-taught before reading, has determined what support material to use to aid students while reading and at predetermined stops, then they are ready to implement the lesson plan. According to Colorin Colorado (2019), an effective lesson plan relies on teacher to be prepared to build background knowledge, use explicit instruction/modeling, implement some sort of guided, hands on practice, have them work with peers, and have an assessment designed beforehand to see how students are progressing. Like any lesson planning process, the teacher needs to set a purpose for what students are learning, make sure students are aware of the purpose, clearly explain and demonstrate the directions, and model for them what is expects (Bolos, 2012). You cannot just decide to do an interactive read aloud because without a purpose for it the benefits are the same. Every strategy that a teacher utilizes is only as effective as the planning behind it.

 

Discussion Question 2: When assessing ELLs, teachers must use a variety of assessments in order to get the most accurate snapshot of academic and language progress. What are some ways teachers can assess students in the classroom to include reading and writing?

 

Response to Amanda

Hello Class,

After reading through multiple articles on ways to assess ELLs, the consensus I saw throughout theses articles is that implementing some form of formative assessment, performance-based assessment, or portfolio assessment is beneficial to providing the most accurate snapshot of academic and language progression.

In terms of formatives, these can be as simple as having students verbally answer comprehension questions after reading a chunk of text, having them do a quick write or exit ticket every day to answer a specific question on the lesson or to recap what they learned (Gonzalez, 2019). Formative assessments are a way to take a snapshot of what students have learned and can be easily adapted to fit reading comprehension or to practice writing skills. According to Licain (2021), teachers can have students practice writing through creative and structure writing assignments (such as writing their own story or reading the start of a story and writing the ending), through editing assignments (give them a piece of writing with grammatical errors and have them try to correct it), reading response logs (having students write down answers to questions after each reading to assess comprehension), or content logs (having them write one or two things they learned, what they don’t understand).

Outside of those formative assessments are performance-based assessments which are rooted in classroom instruction and everyday tasks such as reading with partners, retelling stories, completing incomplete stories, using graphic organizers, using fill-in-the blank worksheets (Colorin Colorado, 2019). These everyday activities help show ELLs language proficiency and academic achievement in a more casual, less stressful way than test, and they also measure what they understand in a way that you can document in a portfolio.

Portfolio assessments are a compilation of formative and performance-based assessments (Colorin Colorado, 2019). They are made up of variety of written work, completed observation forms, exercise worksheets, and descriptions that demonstrate where the student began and where they are near the end (Colorin Colorado, 2019). This helps draw a picture for students, parents, and teachers where the student is on content knowledge, oral proficiencies, writing proficiencies, and reading proficiencies (Colorin Colorado, 2019).

The best way to assess students understanding of the content and the language is to integrate easy writing assignments, reading questions, and fun creative activities where they are able to express themselves. But with these types of learning activities, it is important to be clear with students what they are being graded on. If you are grading on if they understand the content, grade on that and not on grammar or spelling. We want to help students build up confidence in their skills and that is why you have to grade with purpose especially in terms of formative assessments or activities. These are there to help us pinpoint what they need help with not for us to criticize them with red pen marks.