Teaching Strategies
Visual Analysis
Visual analysis is a strategy of observation and interaction with an image that promotes inquiry and thought. Visuals are highly effective in the MLL classroom, as they are communicative and evocative; more importantly, they offer concrete spaces on which to affix language. Students with limited English proficiency can experience success in making observations of images by simply describing color, objects, and people. These observations offer myriad opportunities on which to build more complex language and ideas that simultaneously lead to grade-level understanding as their English language development advances at an appropriate pace.
Inquiry-Based Research
Setting a purpose for reading is a critical piece to reading a text carefully, and one that bolsters text comprehension. Moreover, when students can form their own questions to guide their research, it animates their motivation to read and comprehend a text that may seem otherwise uninteresting. Inquiry-based research is a strategy in which students formulate their own questions in response to an image or experience that they want to know more about. In this unit, students will interact with a series of images that they may have little to no background knowledge about. After visually observing and analyzing an image, students will generate WH-questions about the image. Students will then read a short, level-appropriate text to seek answers to these questions. By implementing this strategy in the classroom, students will feel more ownership and motivation to comprehend informational texts and students will conduct meaningful research that contextualizes the history of an image and supports their understanding of the artist’s theme.
Collaborative Writing
Collaborative writing is a highly-scaffolded approach to teaching writing that ensures students have multiple experiences to engage with writing at varying levels of cognitive demand. The first scaffold in a collaborative writing sequence begins when the teacher models the writing process in front of the class. For example, if students must write a description of the photo, it is essential to model how to draw on observations and words used to describe the photo while constructing the sentences that will form the completed description. This provides students with an example of the metacognitive thinking, application, and revision skills that occur during the writing process. In the next part of the collaborative writing sequence, students will work collaboratively to produce a writing product that is similar to the class example. Students will work together to negotiate meaning, application of grammar, and revision of sentences, in much the same manner that the teacher modeled. In the final step of this strategy, students will produce writing independently. They will have two experiences with the type of writing they are expected to produce, as well as two examples that they can use to format their independent writing. This strategy is especially effective with newcomer MLLs, who are emerging writers in English, and need multiple interactions with grammar and writing forms before they are able to produce written texts that meet the requirements of the writing prompt.
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