Amber Prentice Jimenez

PART II: Reading Content Instruction for ELLs

Reading in the Classroom

A print-rich environment is making sure that students see words everywhere, so I have posters up in my room of vocabulary words, and even after they've mastered the vocabulary words, I keep those posters up because they're good references for them. I had a student today that asked me "How do you spell 'buffalo'?" and another student said, "Look at the poster, it's on the poster."

And that just makes me excited to know that they're using those things. Another easy way to have a print-rich environment is to have a word wall, either by content words or the way I use it, is for sight words, for common sight words that my students use.

So having books and just having labels of things, in an ELL classroom if you can label "light switch" and "bookshelf" and "TV" and all of those things, it's just, students should be seeing words everywhere to help them learn how to read, help reinforce the skills they learn, and as much as I try to make my classes as interesting as I can, students eyes wander. Let them be wandering over words in English instead of wandering over walls, bare wall space.

So it's important to teach newcomer students phonics explicitly. Some of the students have literacy in their native language, the majority of my students don't. So for them even the concept that a letter represents a sound is something that's new.

And so one thing that I do with my students is we look at the sounds that a letter makes. And we once a week we just chant the alphabet, we say the letters, but then we go saying the sounds through the alphabet (phonetic "a"-"b"-"c"-"d"). It's also important to teach chunking skills, looking at words with their word parts, breaking it down into syllables and using word families as a form of chunking. It's also it's also important to teach them some of those phonics rules like word families but also the short vowel sounds, the long vowel sounds, the fact that "e" at the end of a word like the vowel consonant vowel that the other vowel says its name.

It's important to teach kids those rules because if you don't teach them, they're never going to learn them and you can pick up some of those rules just from reading a text and reading along while a teacher reads. But you need that explicit instruction just to help break those steps.

And I think that's something that a lot of adolescent teachers, we just don't have the training in doing, but it's important for us to go back and try to remember some of those elementary skills because we are teaching students how to read.

Independent reading

Independent reading is extremely important in schools. But independent reading with a few caveats, you can't just have students flipping through a book that's way too hard for them. I had one of our brand new students wanted to check out Jurassic Park from the library this last week.

And I had to tell him, "You know what? Not a book that's going to help you be successful." At the same time we don't want students reading the "I see a bird, I see a dog, I see a cat," forever. There's a time and place for those books, it's important for students to be reading books that are at their level which means they're a little bit hard for them, but not much.

They should be able to read them at a 95-96% accuracy so that they're learning new words and learning skills for fluency and learning how to be interested in books. If you read something that's too hard, that's no fun. If you read something that's too easy, that's no fun. We want to hook students into a love of learning and reading books that they choose, that they're interested in, that are at an appropriate level for them.

One thing that I do is teach my students the five finger rule. They needed to pick a page in the book. If it's a very short page, then I'll tell them to pick one that has more words and they need to read that page out loud. If they came to a word that either they don't know how to say or they don't know what it means, then they need to put up a finger.

If they have zero or one finger up, the book is too easy for them. If they have, two or three fingers up the book is probably just right for them, but if they get to five or four fingers, the book is probably too hard for them. And so they need to find a book that's better for them. It's a quick and easy way to teach students how to find a book that's at a right level for them.

Vocabulary

As ELL teachers, our big job is to teach students vocabulary and there are various strategies that I use to teach students new vocabulary. The most important thing that I would say is, in teaching vocabulary, is to give students lots of exposure to vocabulary words and in different modalities.

So students need to write the words, student need to write what the words mean. Students need to use the words in sentences, students need to read the words. Students need to manipulate them somehow physically with their hands or use TPR (total physical response) to act them out and you play somehow with the words. The more ways a student sees it, writes it, plays with it, hears it, has fun with it, the more ways that they will use the word, remember the word, and have that word in their long term memory.

Another thing that I think is a great way to check students' understanding and also show that you value their knowledge, is to ask students how to say vocabulary words in their language. Sometimes in my class, for example, I'll have a word like "needle" and I'll explain it, it's something that you use for sewing. "It's sharp," I'll try to draw a picture, but to make sure that they really do understand it, I'll ask them, "So how do say this in Hmong, how do you say this in Oromo, how do you say this in Karen, how do you say this in Spanish, how do you say this in Cambodian?" and all the other languages that we have.

And if they can tell me, I know that they understand the word. If they don't know, then I know I need to do some re-teaching to make sure that they do understand the word.

Cognates

Cognates can be an effective tool for English language learners, especially you have a lot of students who speak just one language. As someone who knows Spanish, it can be really nice to be able to just tell students, "What do you think this word could be?" For example, when we're talking about outer space and I can say, "There are many different constellations in the night sky. Do you have anyone have any idea what a constellation could be?" And I can look at my Spanish speakers and say, "It's sounds really close to a word in Spanish and then they're like, 'Oh'!" And their eyes light up and they can figure it out.

Concept sort

A concept sort is just one of many vocabulary strategies or vocabulary activities you can do with students. It's where a teacher picks out vocabulary from a text and either vocabulary that has a natural sorting pattern or grouping, or vocabulary that you can let the students decide what to make for groups. So you can either give the students the concept that you want them to group into or you can have the students look at the words and put them into their own grouping.

I worked on the "The Great Kapok Tree" and in that book there are great descriptions of the ways animals talk and great descriptions of the way animals move. And so I had the students look at the words and try to decide if it was the way an animal moved or if it was the way an animal spoke or an animal sound. And the students, some of them you know, had never seen these words before, so they needed to use their own judgment, their own ideas.

We'd been talking about onomatopoeia so try to see if they could figure out which words went in there. And it's great for English language learners because it makes them look at the word, say the word, think about the word, think about what the word might mean and then and you're giving them a parameter for it either means this or this. And afterwards they need, they can go back and they already have some familiarity with the word and you're helping them refine their ideas that they know more about the word.

Possible sentences

Possible sentences is another strategy that I use sometimes to preview vocabulary that students will learn. I give them a list of vocabulary words that we will be reading about in their textbook. And we briefly go over what the words mean. Then I tell them that they get to be the writers of the textbook, they get to put themselves in those shoes and think about the topic at hand and create a sentence that could possibly be in their textbook, that's why it's a possible sentence. Then the students, after they write the word or the sentence that they think could possibly be in the textbook, they need to go look in the textbook to find that word in a sentence and compare how close were their sentences.

Digital cameras

Another really effective way to help teach vocabulary in a way that students just find inherently fun is to give students cameras. I wrote a grant a couple of years ago and was able to get seven digital cameras for my classroom. And that's enough so that when with my students I can have three or four to a camera. Or if I have a very small class, each student can have their own camera.

And you can use that to create a shared experience or to build vocabulary. In my classes with my brand newcomers, the first couple months are all about school words and school places. So the second day of school, we went outside of the school building and I had the students take pictures of everything that they saw.

Then when we bring those out, we can look at those pictures and the students first of all love taking pictures with the camera and it gives them those technology skills of using a digital camera and how to delete pictures and how to zoom and those things. But then they also love coming in and saying, "Oh, that's my picture!" And then they can also just see the words and have a visual representation and creating those shared experiences helps build community as well.

Background knowledge

It's really important to do all that you can to access students' prior knowledge before you teach a lesson. Our students need to have some of the shared vocabulary, they need to know, to remember some of the concepts that they have learned in their native language, but may not have the vocabulary for.

And so some of these strategies like doing picture walks, like giving them vocabulary words beforehand, letting them have the cameras to go around and take pictures, helps them get their brains ready for learning and helps them remember the concept knowledge that maybe they have in their native language.

There are many different ways that ELL teachers can use to find out how much students know about a topic that you're about to study. When, a lot of times when I'm introducing a new topic, I will either have a student draw a picture or write what they know about the topic.

If they have native language literacy, at that time I will let them write in their native language because I, the words in English are not as important as knowing the concepts. It's also a time where I'll say, "Turn and talk to someone who speaks your own language," and let them have a chance to explore the topic in their own language.

After that, after they've had a chance to think about it, get their ideas in order, then I'll bring it back to the larger class. "Tell me about, for example, weddings. How do weddings happen in your culture? Who prepares the wedding? What do the people wear? What do, what foods do you serve? What kind of party do you have?"

And from there, the students, because they've had a chance to talk about it, write or draw about it, think about it in different ways, then they're sharing with the class and I can really gauge, "Oh, this person has had a lot of experience with this. They know a lot. Ah, this person's never been to a wedding before, maybe I need to go and give them some more information." And it also is a great way to bring in the cultural piece because things are different in different cultures and it's fascinating to me. And if I'm fascinated, the kids get fascinated.

Sometimes I'm just shocked by the holes in background knowledge that my students have. As part of my reading curriculum with my newcomers, we talk about the different places in school and I try to augment that with a little bit more vocabulary building.

And so at times we've studied the cafeteria and I've looked at, "Ah, great way to throw in some vocabulary about food." And one way of course to categorize food is to use the food groups. Well, I thought that my students would know about different kinds of food and I would just be teaching them how to say the words in English.

And so I asked my students, we talked about grains and asked them, so what things are grains? They had no idea that bread was made out of flour that was made out of wheat. They didn't know that pasta was made out of flour, they didn't know what kinds of things were grains.

So then we went to dairy and the only dairy thing, the only thing that they knew came from a cow was milk. And I said, "Well about cheese?" And they said, "What about cheese?"

"Well that comes from a cow too, that's made out of milk." And so for me, I had to stop, I had to go back, that lesson that day kind of flopped because I spent more time explaining what all the things are that are made our of milk. Or what are all the things that are made out of grains that I just knew I needed to go way back and build that background knowledge that, in my mind, I assumed they had.

And as an ELL teacher you need to be flexible to recognize that when students don't have that basic knowledge that you thought they had, it's your job to go back and give it to them, they won't get it any other place. Your students will surprise you with what they know and with what they don't know. You need to be able to adjust your lessons and roll with the punches.

Standards

One problem that ELL students have is that there is so much information and they don't know which information is the most important and they don't know how to sift through the information to know what it is that they actually need to learn. So give them a help with that. Give them some sort of organizer that helps them know this the key information.

And in that same vein, don't expect your English language learners to know all the little details. Pick out your power standards, pick out your most important information and make sure that that's what your English language learners come away with.

All of us in this era of big testing are responsible for our state standards and for our national standards in whatever content area we teach. It's important to look at those standards and look at the grade-level expectations and know that although our students might not have the language to meet those standards, that doesn't mean that they can't learn the content-area knowledge.

When we scaffold, we take those expectations and we break it down into manageable chunks so that the students can learn or work towards those content standards but have the language load lessened or burden made easier for them, so that they work more on content while they're learning the language that they will need in order to be successful.

One of the standards for seventh and eighth graders in geography in Minnesota is that students will name and identify on a map, all 50 states and territories in the United States. In the mainstream, they whip through that in about a week and they look at landmarks because they know that most of the students who've been, who were born in this country know the 50 states, at least know how to say them and are familiar generally with where they are.

Yet my, for my students, the names of all of those states are new, brand new content knowledge for them and so just learning the names of the states and where they are on the map, will take a couple weeks for my students. And I need to find ways to help them be able to work toward that content standard, while making and building the language that they need in geography.

So for example with my United States unit, the first thing my students do is learn how to pronounce the names of the states. We do various games to repeat them, students spell them, they say them for each other, they have flash cards, they learn the abbreviations, they learn to match states with the capitals, they draw them on the map, they draw in the map in regions, they draw it on the map blank, they use the abbreviations.

My students do much more playing with the language around the 50 states that would be ridiculous to do in the mainstream and superfluous, the students don't need that much work. But my students because they're coming from a position of no background knowledge, they just need a little bit more work to get to the academic standards of the mainstream students.

Previewing content

It's important to teach students skills for them to be able to check that they're understanding what they're learning. When we have textbooks, it's really easy to fall back on the "answer the questions at the end of the chapter". But our ELL students need much more than that.

I generally, with my students, have them work with a text two or three times before we get to those questions at the end of the book. Those questions are important because they teach kids test-taking skills and general academic skills that they'll need when they're in mainstream content classes.

But I do a lot of other work beforehand. Students use organizers to look at text. Students fill in maps based on information that they find in the text. Students look for specific vocabulary words to try and find context for the words in text. And only after they've done two or three activities with a text, do I expect them to have totally mastered it, to be able to answer those questions at the back of the book. In spot-checking these students, every time they work with the text to make sure that they're understanding.

When students are reading a story, or a fiction book, there are various strategies that you need to teach students for them personally to check if they understand. Some of them are common ones I use is when you get to the end of the page ask yourself, what just happened? If you don't know, you need to go back and re-read or various other means, maybe at the end of a chapter or at the end of a section.

A picture walk is one strategy that I use to teach students how to use a textbook effectively. All textbooks these days have lots of great pictures, graphs, diagrams, tools to help students really understand and to gain more information from the text and it's one of the strategies that I use with my students that hopefully they will use once they leave my classes.

So when we get to a new chapter in the text, the first thing I will do, we'll open to that page in the text and I'll ask the students, "What do you see in this picture?" Students raise their hand, they explain it to me and then sometimes I'll throw the question, "So what does that teach you about whatever topic it is that we're studying?"

For example, we're studying Native Americans in America. And my students looked at a picture in the textbook about Native Americans and it showed a couple Native American men in canoes, one with a net and fish at the bottom of the canoe. So the students say, "I see a boat, I see a man, I see a net, I see water, I see…"

And I said, "Well what does that teach you about Native Americans?" And they thought and I was like, "Well kind of food do they eat?" Right away there they knew that one of the foods that Native Americans got were the fish. It also taught them, someone said, "Well, they use long boats, they use those canoes."

So it helps explain the vocabulary words and it helps activate students' prior knowledge and get them thinking about the topic. And so picture walks can be a very effective tool and something that I always tell my students that they should do before they're reading an academic text.

You can also use picture walks when you're looking at fiction text. A lot of our picture books that we have in this country are beautifully illustrated and tell the stories in and of themselves. So you can open up the book and have students just tell you the picture or tell you the story from looking at the picture.

It's a great way to build background knowledge, have the students name the things they see in the picture, and even if they're not correct with what they come up with for the story, it's got them thinking about the story and when they read it, they'll be able to see what was different from their prediction and it's another tool to teach students that predictions aren't always correct. But it's a great way to give students that background knowledge and get them thinking about what could happen in the story.

Different levels

One of the things that makes the job of an ELL teacher difficult is that in one classroom you will have students with varied level of educational experience, background and skills. One thing that I try to do is group do different groupings for different tasks.

Sometimes I like to have heterogeneous groupings so that the students who have more skills can nurture and support the students who have fewer skills. But sometimes it's important to have homogenous groups, so that I can get all the students started on a project and the students who have the academic skills and the educational background will get right away into the project. They know how to start whatever task it is and then I can right away to go to my students who have had fewer experiences with school and I can work in a smaller group with them.

I also vary the expectations. For example, every year I have my students do a podcast about a different state, it's kind of a report. And my, I have, my students who have more school experiences each choose their own state to research and create their podcast. But I take my students with fewer experiences and we all do our state, Minnesota, together. And we do the research together, we all look at the same book. We look together to find out the research information that they need. And we all write the same podcast.

They, we write it together, we do shared writing, but then each one of them is actually reading the same podcast into the tape to be put on the website. So in that way I'm able to differentiate what I'm doing. They all have the same task, but I'm scaffolding it for the students who have less experience so that they can be successful, just with different expectations.

Language groups

It's important when you're teaching anyone, but especially when you're teaching English language learners, to think really strategically about the way that you group students. When I want students to do something that builds their background knowledge or to do something where they need to come up with a concept or they need to do something that requires them to do some thinking about previous experiences or things that they maybe learned in another area, I group them by language. When they have a chance to talk about it in their native language first, it activates their schema, it gets it right at the top of their brain so that they're ready to then discuss it English.

But at the same time, there are times when I don't want them to be speaking any language other then English. And then I do the best that I can to ensure that I have students who don't speak the same language sitting next to each other so that the common language that they have is English. And I use that for more language-oriented tasks.

Social vs. academic

As an ELL teacher, I've noticed that for most of my students, they learn the social language much before they learn the academic language. I'll have teachers that even will say to me in the hall, "Why is she in ELL? I hear her talking in the hallway and her language is so fluid."

But then when you start to get towards the academic tasks, speaking in a discussion, listening and understanding to what's going on, taking notes, reading, writing, the students flounder. That's very common with English language learners. And I feel that it's my job to help my students have the strategies and skills that they're going to need to be able to build on what they know and to be able to work towards understanding things.

Social language is really important though, the majority of their life is not going to be spent in a school. They need to have the social skills, the social language and we need to build that in teach our students how to create good relationships and use proper words that way. But in my classes, the focus is usually more on the academic language because we have such a short time with them before they are mainstreamed and they need all the skills and all the language and vocabulary support that they can get.

Collaboration

Collaboration is essential when you're working with English language learners and there are varying degrees of collaboration. At times in this building and in other buildings I've worked in, I have been working every day with a mainstream classroom teacher in a science room or in a history room and we have a common planning time and we plan our lessons together.

There's a mixture of mainstream students and English language learners in the classroom and we are working every day to ensure that the ELL students get the content knowledge and the language knowledge and helping ensure that all students are successful. That's kind of heavy-duty collaboration.

But collaboration can work on various levels. It's important as a teacher of newcomer English language learners for me to know what the grade level standards and the grade level resources are for students in my history class and in my geography class. I try to touch base with the mainstream history teachers and with the geography teachers once a unit, I'd say.

So right now I'm studying Native Americans in history or my students are studying Native Americans in history and so I had a quick chat with one of the history teachers just to see, "What resources do you have? What do you use?" I know what the standards are but in their history meetings, they choose the power standards, the most essential standards to teach.

And so it's important for me to know what's happening in the mainstream because in the end, that's what my students are going to be responsible for and that's what I'm responsible for teaching.

It's also important within your ELL team, to work together. I see my students for history, but they see another ELL teacher for reading and another ELL teacher for science. If we can coordinate our efforts to maybe have common assessments or common routines or rituals or homework policies, that helps make it smoother for students all across the board.

For example, in our ELL team, we have the same rubric for paragraphs and for essays. And so students know that when they write a paragraph in my class, they're going to be graded the same way as they write a paragraph in reading and the same way as they write a paragraph in science. They have common, those common assessments help students really clearly know their expectations and then they also make it easier for us as a team to look at student work and to see what students are struggling, how can we help them and it helps us as teachers be more successful with our students.

We can chat about, as ELL teachers we meet once a week at lunch and it's a quick meeting, it's only 20 minutes, but we're able to talk about what kids are doing fabulously, what kids are really struggling, maybe I find out that a student is struggling in my class but is getting A's in all the others. I need to find out why she's struggling specifically in my class.

Or it could be the opposite, we have a student who's struggling in all of the classes and maybe she's misplaced and we need to move her lower, down a level or up a level, get her some extra help. And so it's really important for us to help individualize our instruction through collaboration with our ELL teachers. But also to make sure that we're getting the grade-level content standards by talking with the content teachers in the mainstream.

Collaboration is another way to give an ELL teacher access to content and materials and resources that are already created. Our grade, our content specialists get together every couple of months to create curriculum and to create materials. And I've been able to get a lot from meeting with them after they've had those materials.