Fundamentals of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages in the K-12 Mainstream Classrooms
Chapter 1 - Multicultural Education:
* "The notion of multicultural education is to encourage individuals to become aware of themselves,
their cultural group, and their place in the world at large, while at the same time acknowledging and appreciating other cultures."
* This chapter is outlining the importance of accepting and embracing other cultures. It
identifies the importance of bringing in the children's parents into the classroom and letting them share in their child's
schooling
* Write "Who I Am" poems
Chapter 2 - Culture in the Classroom:
* Ethnocentrism - each person's point of view (from their culture)
* Culture helps people know how to behave in acceptable ways.
- It may take a while for this to
be learned when a person moves to a new area.
Chapter 3 - Language Determines Culture, and Culture Determines Language
* Deep culture refers to the inside of cultures that aren't noticable at first glance
- Ethics, Family ties, Folk myths, Sex roles, Taboos,
etc...
* Surface culture refers to the things that first come to mind when one thinks of a particular
culture
- Food, Art, History, Holidays
Chapter 4 - Examining "American Values":
* Americans are less "people" oriented, and more "progress" oriented.
* Americans are less formal than other cultures, which can come off as rude. To many Americans,
it is rude to be formal!
Chapter 5 - Culture Shock: Reaction to and Unfamiliar Environment:
* Culture shock can surface in people in many different ways
- Feeling helpless, Feeling "home-sick", Depression,
Anger, Loss of appetite, Poor sleep, Impatience with nationals, Concern over mild aches and pains
* It is vital to remember that some of your students that have immigrated may be experiencing
this as well!
* No matter how broadminded or full of goodwill you may be, a series of props have been knocked
from under you, followed by a feeling of frustration and anxiety."
* There are 4 stages to culture shock
- Honeymoon, Hostile or Agressive, Recovery, Adjustment
* It is important for the teacher to expressive "positive value" in things that may seem different
* Bring in music from the child's culture and have it as background music throughout the day
Chapter 6 - Differences in Verbal Communication
* People process information at different rates, so it is important that the teacher allow for
that when asking questions
- Count to 10 before calling on students for answers
* All students need to be allowed the chance to share their thoughts
* In small groups, "place an object on the table where students are clustered. Before speaking,
the student must pick up the object. No one can speak without picking up the object. This system buys more time
for hte language minority speaker to prepare to speak."
* In the American culture, listeners require precise, logical speech. In other cultures,
spiritual, symbolic speech is prized.
Chapter 7 - Nonverbal Communication:
* Most communication is non-verbal
* Kinesics: study of body language
* Paralinguistics: set of vocal, nonverbal grunts and utterances that elicit meaning
* Haptics: the way people use touch to communicate
* Proxemics: how a person uses body space
* Oculesics: eye movement and position
* Chronemics: time usage
Chapter 8 - Teaching and Learning Styles: A Reflection of Cultural Backgrounds
* Language and culture go hand in hand
* Make sure your teaching reflects your own learning style as well as the learning styles of
your students
* Children need to know their own strengths in their learning styles, and be aware of (and tolerant)
of other students' as well.
* Constantly be aware and observing your student's reactions to different situations
Chapters 1-8 Quick Reflection
I absolutely loved these chapters. I am a huge fan of traveling internationally. Some of these
chapters helped me to understand what I was going through in my own experiences (such as culture shock). Knowing what
it is like to be the one that isnt familiar with the language is going to help me in the long run to be senstive to those
students I may have in my class that don't speak English as their first language.
Chapter 12 - Integrating Language and Content
* Language Immersion Program - regular curriculum taught through the use of the target language.
* Language is acquired most effectively when it is employed for communication in meaningful and
significant social situations.
* Experiential learning acknowledges that action must be a part of the learning process for the
learners to be able to fully produce and use knowledge.
* Service learning is a kind of experiential learning in which students engage in activities
that adress human and community needs together with structured opportunities designed to promote learning as well as language development.
* In content based language learning, teachers use instructional materials, learning tasks,
and calssroom techniques from academic content areas as vehicles for developing language.
- these strategies are essential: parentese, making input comprehensible,
organizing instruction from simple to complex, and scaffolding
* Sheltered English approach - ELLs are taught subject matter content entirely in English
- must simplify the language, adapt text material, and enforce new vocab.
Chapter 13 - Curriculum Design and Day-to-Day English Language Instruction
* Five generic principles that promote achievement of high academic standards for English language
learners
- Facilitate learning through joint, productive activity among teachers and students
- Develop students' competence in the language and literacy of instruction throught all
instructional activities - language development must be a part of every lesson
- Contextualize teaching and curriculum in the experiences and skills of home and community
- Challenge students toward cognitive complexity - small increments of knowledge are curcial
to ensure academic success
- Engage students through dialogue, especially in instructional conversation - Teaching
must become a warm, interpersonal, collaborative activity.
* In choosing a theme, teachers should always take into consideration the students' interest
as well as teacher interst, relationship to the curriculum goals/objectives for the grade level, or age of the class,
and the potential for the application and development of language
* Cognitive domain involves mental operations from the lowest level of simple recall to information
to complex, high-level evaluative processes..
* Six levels of mental operations: Knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis,
and evaluation.
* Teacher Reflection: Ask these questions
- Did I capture the students' attention with my initiating activity? If no, what
would I have done differently?
- Were the activities sequenced effectively? If no, how would I seqauence them differently
the next time?
- Were my material appropriate? What would I add/delete?
- Did I make input comprehensive? How? Were my strategies effective for my second language learners?
- Were students actively involved in the lesson?
- Did I make learning concrete?
- Was my pacing adequate to accomplish my objectives? If no, what changes would I
make?
- Did I obtain my objectives?
Chapters 12-13 Quick Reflection
These few chapters were really interesting because they began to address the different methods of teaching
English language learners. They were layed out in a way in which the instructor can evaluate all of the methods objectively
and decide which would work best for his/her classroom and particular students.
Chapter 14 - Listening Development and Instruction for Second Language Learners
* Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying.
* List of microskills of listening
- Predicting what people will talk about
- Guessing at unknown words or phrases without panic
- Using one's own knowledge of the subject to gain understanding
- Identifying relevant points; rejecting irrelevant information
- Retaining relevant points (note-taking, summarizing)
- Recognizing discourse markers (e.g., well, oh another thing is)
- Recognizing cohesive devices (e.g., such as, which)
- Understanding different intonation patters and uses of stress
- Understanding inferred information
* Visual support can help in listening comprehension
* Top-down processing is the listeners understanding of the big picture of the message
* Bottom-up processing is when the message is interpreted based on the incoming data.
* For second language learners, when they are learning a new language, it is best for them to
be able to listen to the new language without responding orally for an amount of time.
* Being a successful listener is the ability to concentrate on the message and maintain attentnion
in listening to the lesson.
* Memory can contribute significantly to the difficulties that ELL learners experience
* Transferring: Listeners transform the message they heard in the form of drawing pictures
* Actions, gestures, and visuals are important accompaniments to the messages they hear.
Chapter 15: Second Language Oral Development and Instruction
* When the message is the reason for speaking, the message must be understood
* Students should not be overly corrected when they produce partial sentences or incomplete phrases
* What we hear is a combination of these internal processes of a person:
- Peoples thoughts are an outgrowth of their feelings desires and needs
- Speech involves the conversion of thoughts to language
- The sounds, words and forms used are stored in internal cognitive networks
- The speaker' competence is brought into play as they begin the conversation of
thought into speech
- The listeners can hear the result, the performance skill, in action
* For second language learners, the act of speaking is a display of their competence of the second
language. Not all competence can be seen through their performance.
* During puberty the wiring of the brain is complete and the muscles surrounding the vocal cord
harden, both of with result in nonnative speakers' difficulty in pronouncing sounds with a nativelike accent
* Teachers should allow ELL students to be a part of the class doing things such as class helper
and distributing papers during the time in which they do not feel comfortable speaking.
* Some ways of helping students grow in their language abilities are Show and Tell, Recording
Studio, Riddles and Jokes, Choral Reading, TV, Videos, and CDROMs
* Global errors affect overall sentence organization and significantly hinder communication
* Local errors are errors that affect single elements in a sentence and do not usually hinder
communication significantly
Chapter 16: Second Language Vocabulary Development and Instruction
* Explicit instruction involves diagnosing the words learners need to know, presenting words
for the first time, elaborating word knowledge, and developing fluency with known words
* If a student is unfamiliar with certain words, they should break down the unknown word into
parts and determine if the meaning of the parts matches the meaning of hte unknown word. Also teach students to use
dictionaries
* When working with vocabulary words:
- Identify the vocab words that students will need to comprehend in the reading
- Preteach only 3-5 words
- Connect the new words to concepts that students already know
* Words learned intentionally though reading are better retained than words learned incidentally
* When teaching unfamiliar vocabulary, teachers need to consider the following:
- Students need to hear the pronunciation and practice saying the word aloud
in addition to just seeing the form
- Students should avoid learning words with similar forms and closely
related meanings at the same time
- Students should be encouraged to study words regularly over several short
sessions instead of studying them for one or two longer sessions
- Students should study 5-7 words at a time, dividing larger numbers of words
into smaller groups
- Learners remember words better when a word is associated with a visual image
* Word families help learners to handle learning new word in a managable way because students
can be taught to separate onset and rimes in a word
* Use picture and native language flash cards
* One of themost important factors in learning a word is the number of times that the learner
retrieves it
Chapter 17 - Second Language Reading Development and Instruction
* Reading Process: fluent reading is rapid, purposeful, interactive, comprehensive,
flexible, and develops gradually.
* 6 general components of reading: Automatic recognition, vocab and structural knowledge,
formal discourse structure and knowledge, content/world background knowledge, synthesis and evaluation skills, and metacognitive
knowledge and skill monitoring
* Psycholinguistic perspective: Construct meaning from written texts by using three cueing
systems: syntactic, semantic, and graphophonic.
* Schema Theory of Reading: Oral and written texts can only provide directions for interpretation
but meaning is constructed by the background knowledge that the reader brings into the process of reading.
* Rosenblatt's Transactional theory of Reading: Efferent means to carry away. When
reading instructions, readers may take the efferent stance as the focus is on obtaining info.
* Good readers recognize letters and words rapidly which frees their cognitive space for thinking
about the meaning of what they read. Good readers automatically recognize words and do not rely heavily on context
guessing to arrive at an interpretation of the text.
* Social-Interactionalist Perspective: Children learn language and process from one stage
to another by interacting with others
* Teachers can utilize scaffolding strategies such as graphic organizers and cooperative learning
structures to stimulate critical thinking.
* Reading aloud: Teachers can ask several prereading questions. At the same time,
some children with little or no experience with books can learn how to hold a book. As teachers read the book, they
can point to the ext so that students can see the direction of hte print.
* Thematic Units: Integrates content from different areas of learning and helps students
make connections between areas of knowledge. It helps teachers integrate language arts and content lessons in a flexible
way.
Chapter 18 - Second Language Writing Development and Instruction
* Social Nature of Writing: Individuals' conceptions of writing are always developed relative
to their previous situations and experinces with writing, as well as previous encounters with texts and contexts of writing.
* Emergent Literacy Perspective: Children develop literacy before they even enter school
(environmental print)
* Kids at early ages recognize that...: Printed words represent spoken words, letters are
strugn together to form words and sentences are made up of words, writing has an organized structure, conventions for writing
are different for oral and written language (question marks, periods, exclamation points), there are many exceptions of letter-sound
correspondences in English
* Development of Alphabetic writing - Begin with using wavy lines and forms that look like writing
to represent ideas, go onto Psudo letters, then to letters, then to psudo words, then to copied words, then to self-generated
words, and finally to self-generatid sentences.
* Process Writing: Stage 1 - Prewriting, Stage 2 - Drafting, Stage 3 - Revising, Stage
4 - Editing, Stage 5 - Publishing
* Paragraph Pyramid - from very broad, to more specific, and finally very specific
* Creating Suitable Writing Tasks - reflect on the content, alnguage functijons and genre types that
students have learned and must know, engage students in thinking and composing processes, allow writers to choose their own
topic, provide a context that defines teh writers purpose and audience
* Come up with a rubric so students can self-assess their writing.
Chapters 15-18 Quick Reflection
These chapters were incredibly interesting. They really got into the meat of how to teach ELL students.
There were many great examples that really spanned the entirety of subjects. They also provided great diagrams that
I'm definitely going to use for the students to be able to self-assess their work.
