Knowing exactly what it is like to be, and to feel what it is to be an English learner, I try and maybe without much effort I slow down my speech when teaching to my students. For any or
all teachers, comprehensible input is very important technique in order to help the English
learners understand what they are teaching.
My students were at a beginning level of English proficiency when they came to my class, and some of them are still there, but we are working on that. The Language for Learning that we
are doing in SRA is a great help, because it is working on improving that level of Language. The
students are getting used to that part of working on language. That is also helping our science journal writing on weather. First, we talked about all different types of weather we have for this season and wrote them on the cards with pictures on them. Next, we check the weather, and we
made a sentence starter, "Today the weather is.....". They knew exactly what to do, and did it every day until they could write today's weather without copying the sentence starter from the board. They even started writing what they will do after school if the weather is good.
Variety of Techniques used to make content concepts clear is what some people do naturally.
I had an uncle who became deaf at around lower elementary school age. Everybody talked to
him using normal voice, but with their hands and lots of body language. So, I know very much
how important it is get your point across with both voice and lots of gestures, body language and
objects to make someone understand what I am trying to say. I guess we all knew what SIOP is,
right now we just need to put it into words.
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Hi Fannie,
ReplyDeleteI like how you reflect on yourself as a second language learner and on the activities that you are structuring with your students. It is this kind of reflection that will help you think deeper about your students and how they respond to the activities that you design.
I liked your comment on a variety of activities to get the concepts across.
Best of all, I like what you said that you all knew what SIOP is, that you just did not know the language. (the vocabulary to talk about it)
That is what we will do, learn the new vocabulary together, and be able to use the vocabulary to discuss, reflect and provide feedback to colleagues.
Great reflection!
(Maria, we copied and pasted your comment back onto the main blog!)