Strategies
Incorporating literacy skills into each lesson is essential to my students' success. This is especially true for adolescent ELLs who are reading well below grade level. If students receive additional reading instruction in the content areas, they will be able to transfer these skills to the other subject areas. I have seen this occur in my own classroom in which I am responsible for English and Social Studies instruction. The literacy skills students learn in English class are successfully transferred to our Social Studies class. My ultimate goal is to enable students to be successful both linguistically and academically when they are mainstreamed into a regular education classroom.
Proficient Reading Strategies
This unit will be taught during the early weeks of the beginning of the school year. All of the students are new to our school and class. They will need assistance to become proficient in the use of the reading strategies. They are able to learn these strategies by having a teacher explain, demonstrate, and apply them while reading. I will do just that with introductory cultural readings. It is vital to allow for opportunities to practice the strategies with the students, providing feedback and time for discussion. ELLs' use of proficient reader strategies (predicting, making connections, questioning, inferring, visualizing, determining the main idea, and summarizing) to assist them before, during, and after reading is critical to their comprehension of complex texts. All of these strategies can provide ELLs with the tools they need to construct meaning from the complex texts, such as some of the literature pieces that we have read in the New Orleans seminar that I will require them to read as well as the easier piece – the children's literature book of a country.
Graphic Organizers
A graphic organizer is "a visual and graphic display that depicts the relationships among facts, terms, and ideas within a learning task." 22 In my classroom, two of the first words students learn in English are "graphic" and "organizers"! Using graphic organizers helps to make content more supportive for students, scaffolding the information to be learned and giving them access to content that otherwise might be too difficult for them. This also helps to organize complex information into a much easier-to-read format 2 3 which is helpful to ELLs. In our case, we will use graphic organizers to organize the general information pertaining to culture so that they can get a visual picture of the important concepts related to this subject matter. Additionally, they will complete cultural graphic organizers of the information that they read as create them for their homeland descriptive writing pieces.
Collaborative Learning/Groupwork
Students need to learn how to work together to accomplish goals – those set by the teacher and by themselves. This is a basic requirement for many positions or jobs that they will hold in the future. Working together, relying on each other helps to build team working skills. In collaborative learning, each group member is accountable to each other, dependent upon each other and contributes the established goals. Everyone has some strength to share. 24 Together, more is accomplished. Opportunities to learn about each other before and while working help to promote the camaraderie and cohesiveness necessary to work well together. Individual and group evaluations are necessary to monitor the group's work (product) and their progress in teamwork.
Descriptive Writing
Much less emphasis is being placed on writing within our curriculum. It is area in which I continually seek counsel so that I can improve my teaching abilities. My ELLs need to learn how to write well. Descriptive writing, the ability to describe a person, place, thing, or event so that the reader can picture it in their minds is a type of writing that students will be able to enable students to focus on an area which too little emphasis is placed. Students will become informed about and practice writing that includes sensory details, figurative language, is precise and organized. 25
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