I would say that most of the students speak the same general dialect of English. The ESL student that I work with might speak in a lower dialect, but I'm not sure if that's what I'm hearing. The Practicum has to two ESL students, but I believe both only speak English and the native language has been lost. One of the students does have trouble with English , but it more of a confidence and fluency issue. Once when we were working on her personal ELL work book that is provided for the school, the book prompted me to ask her the definitions of the word. She read the word most of the English words with ease but when I asked her what they meant that is where I could see that she was having trouble with English.
The classroom has a Promethean Board which is used for a variety of things, note taking, videos etc. The teacher also has a mobile mic that she places in front of every student for out loud reading. The student's voice can be heard through out the classroom on the overhead speaker. Mrs. P also encourages internet use. Many of the students are presenting research projects that requires them to do research on the internet and cite their sources.
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That is interesting that you picked up on the child’s lack of confidence in their usage of the English language. It reminded me of chapter 9 in our text Working with Second Language Learners, and the environment the teacher creates in her classroom to make students more comfortable experimenting with the language. I know that confidence plays a huge role in learning, comprehension, and fluency. What things do you think can be done to make the child feel more comfortable exploring the language?
ReplyDeleteI'm using a lot of complements with her. She just needs some reassurance. We also work on her previous knowledge to help her relate to the vocab. For example we had the word "concealed" after a few fun sample sentences and physical cues like "concealing my glasses" the sentence she came up with was... " My friend concealed her froot roll up from Mrs. P" So we working on having up with it and just letting her know that she knows this stuff. With more time she'll open up and do fine I'm sure of it.
ReplyDeleteWhen the workbook prompted you to ask the definition and she struggled, do you think that was a confidence issue as well? It sounds like she can use certain words in the sentence (in funny sentences too!). I wonder if instead of checking for comprehension by asking definition if an alternate way would be seeing if she could make up another sentence and use the word correctly.
ReplyDeleteYep your right, Gena, that is another component of her vocab learning, however it is not used with the ELL/ ESL work book in my opinion its not a very good learning tool, but I imagine that its hard to publish a ELL/ESL workbook that works universally for all ELL/ESL students.
ReplyDeleteMobile mic! That sounds scary to me, and I could imagine students getting stage fright. But on the other hand, its a great way for students to really hear each other and especially for the ELL students to get more reinforcement on pronunciation, etc. In my classes, the students would get up and present to their class, without mics. Some jumped right up when it was their turn, and others were slower to get up there and made less eye contact with others.
ReplyDeleteYes Mia the mic does seem like it would be scary, but I've noticed that when the students do present in front of the class the tend to backup all the way into a little alcove that is a space created between the Promethean board and the old chalk board. So for this particular class the mobile mic works best (though I cannot speak for all of them) because they don't have to be in the line of sight of everyone.
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