Inquiry Blog Post - On Directions

I have not taught except for one day in the last 2 weeks because we were on a field trip, students have had testing for 4 days, and I have been sick for several days. So I haven’t been able to test my inquiry hypothesis. But nevertheless, here is the hypothesis and the system to test it that I designed.

My inquiry hypothesis is that complicated oral instructions are very difficult for ELLs, particularly those in my class to follow. This leads to them getting behind, getting confused and moving one step further down to the belief that school is not for them, or even worse that they are incapable in a school environment.

Putting the hypothesis in a testable form, it is: Students comprehend directions better when they are given oral and written (and if possible visual) instructions as opposed to just oral or just written instructions.

To test this I would give two assignments that share some similarities in terms of the overall difficulty. Perhaps I would ask students to put themselves in the shoes of a person in a historical setting, and write a letter describing a historical event. In the first letter I’d ask them to address a set of questions based on one historical class of person, say priests in India, and in the second one I’d ask them a different set of questions based on, say, the untouchable caste.

The testable difference between the two tasks is that the directions in the first case would be given orally and in a written form. In the second case they would be only given orally that is to say with minimal written instructions (though the prompts themselves would likely be included).

And after students received the directions, they would be asked to turn over their papers, and briefly write what they believe they are to do in the assignment.

From my personal experience, unless my ELL students are either:
1. Given ultra clear instructions and asked to repeat them back
2. Given instructions in a written and verbal form OR
3. Allowed to work at their table groups to help each other out
Then… students don’t know what to do, and they don’t usually produce work that is correct or they may not produce work at all.

I have seen this pattern take place several times. Most recently with a game which I was explaining in class, verbally, (and also showing them how to move their hands). I think the number of instructions made it really hard for my ELLs to understand the game until they saw it played.

An interview of my Case Study student

I interviewed Eduardo today. One thing that I learned was, despite Eduardo’s interest and excitement about some of the history work that we do. He felt a little uncomfortable being interviewed by me.

I had chosen him because he was one of the students who seemed to be the most academically motivated, yet still had a lot of challenges with English. He was someone who always worked hard and seemed excited about the work we do. But in a one on one setting he was sort of nervous, showing that perhaps he was not the best choice.

Nonetheless I learned some things about him. I learned that he gets As and Bs at school, that he finds Math and Art the easiest classes, and that he’s on the soccer team at school. He says he likes UFS because he likes his friends and teachers. He doesn’t like the food, however.

He was born close to Toluca, and came to the US when he was 8 and said he was excited to come to the United STates. He had finished through the 3rd grade in Mexico. His parents were educated through secundaria. He lives with his mother and father.

He lives in the outer fruitvale neighborhood, his mother stays home while his dad is a baker. He said he thinks he wants to go to college but he didn’t seem to sound sure. He attends one of the after school programs every day, which means he’s at school from 8am – 6pm every day – long day!

In probing his learning styles - he said he likes graphic (pictures), written, and listening modes for learning all equally. But I wonder if he really feels that they are all equally easy for him.

There is still much to learn about him.

"Eduardo" a Case Study in English Language Learners

When thinking about who I wanted to do my case study on their were two possibilities. One student who is quieter and works hard, and another student who is often in trouble, talks back, and is sort of a class clown. As it would happen, they are both very good friends and often together

When I mentioned these two students to my CT, she said that the loud kid, E., probably has an undiagnosed learning disability, which might make it more challenging to understand the language needs as opposed to the special needs of this student. So I chose the other student, a quiet student who I’ll call Eduardo.

Eduardo’s behavior in class is very low key. He rarely draws attention to himself, or volunteers to answer a question. He nonetheless generally stays engaged when the material is accessible. Usually, his work shows good effort and attention to detail. He excels in the drawing. His portfolio of work is full of colorful and life-like pictures - of Animals, Egyptian gods, etc. He is also enrolled in an architectural drawing class after school. His writing is, however, far below proficient. He regularly spells words phonetically and incorrectly, “Polar Beard” instead of “polar bear.” Or “por” instead of “poor.” Verb tenses are often incorrect. Nonetheless, his work shows improvement over the year.

Eduardo’s family is from the municipality of Toluca. He loves soccer, and wants to be a professional soccer player or a doctor.

Eduardo is academically motivated – he appears to want to do well. He wants to ake up work that he doesn’t do for example. In the letter he wrote my CT in the beginning of the year, he wrote that he wants to be a doctor. He also included his graduation day (from 5th grade), in his list of his life’s most important events, and he wrote that he was very proud. Thus I think he wants to do well. Nonetheless, he lags behind by most indicators.

He has below basic test scores on the CST in Math, Science, and English Language Arts.

His overall CELDT score is 3, with scores on the different sections of mostly 3, with the exception of a 1 in his writing.

ELL Resources - few to none

The school where I teach is not a charter school, but is a "small" school. It operates pretty similar to a charter though.

I've just learned some more info about my school's ELL approach. Only the students with super basic levels or who have just arrived (in country) get any extra resources during the day. They are segregated into a newomer or an eld class. I’m still learning what the difference is between newcomner and eld classes at the school and what kind of support they get. It appears that they just have a sheltered course.

What’s important to know is that students with CELDT scores of as low as 3 are mainstreamed with no additional resources or support (according to my CT). We have 10 ELL students in my class. Some of them do fine, but many struggle and I think need extra support. Sometimes when they are confused start to check out. They are getting used to doing this, and it is a very dangerous path they are going down (or being pushed down). The worry I have is that as these 11 year olds startjavascript:void(0) to really develop their own identities that, due to lack of success and accessibility of the curriculum, that they will choose to identify as someone who doesn't value school.

The resource teacher only helps students with IEPs, but many of the ELLs seem to need help as much or more than many of these students.

Scaffolding Techniques In My Classroom

I recently introduced a game called “Murder Mystery” in my class during transitions and to get kids out of their seats. The way you play is you have one person secretly chosen as a murderer. Then all students walk around and shake hands, only the murderer, when he or she shakes someone’s hands secretly scratches their palm, which means that they are poisoned and after waiting 5 seconds, they have to stage a dramatic death. To illustrate what I meant, I had another student shake my hand and then after five seconds, I “died.” This gave students a sense of how to play the game and illustrated it.

My CT is great at using modeling to show examples of good student work. In the middle of independent work, she’ll hold up one or more students’ work and either read it or show it if it’s art work to show what makes it great. I think this raises expectations in a way, and also provides one model of how to accomplish a goal. It also gives positive feedback which is nice.

My CT also encourages metacognition by having students grade themselves on various tasks that they’ve completed. She also has them think more generally about how they can improve, and she has them set goals as well. One example of her use of these strategies is after having students run “Literature Circles” at each table group. Literature Circles are a rather challenging form of student led discussions about text. In this case they discuss a novel they are reading. Each student has a different role, and each student at some point leads a discussion on an aspect of the text. This activity required a lot of teamwork, patience and hard work to learn these new roles. After trying these literature circles, Carlee (my CT), had them give themselves a grade, and she had them reflect on what worked and what didn’t work, and asked them what they could do differently next time. She had students share out their ideas so potential problems and solutions surfaced for the whole class to benefit from. I can’t remember the specific remarks that students made, but I was impressed by the honesty and clarity that the students had about themselves and their groups’ work.

Sentence Stems in Class

This past week I have been helping students to write biographies while I observe my CT teach english. They are doing something called a "hero" project where students can look at individuals who have done positive things in the face of difficult situations. I think about a third of my class is ELL students, and my teacher chooses to use sentence starters to scaffold the use of "academic" language. For example, in a worksheet in the conclusions, students choose a sentence starters like this one: "In conclusion, _______ (put your hero here)" has given us a ("gift" or "legacy") that lasts today in the form of_____________ (finish the sentence). The teacher briefly modeled each sentence using only one example. The students wrote about half of these sentences incorrectly in some way. Many of them filled in the blanks, then went on to write a whole sentence in the final blank that stood alone.

The challenge here is how to teach students academic language. I think that these phrases are very important, but that enough scaffolding was not given. The end result was that I went arround briefly trying to ask students to correct their own mistakes, and then usually ending up correcting incorrect entries and showing them why it was correct. It is an open question as to whether this works. I would like to see if students can use these sentence stems in the future without help or not.

Learning a Second Language is Hard

I once thought that if you live in a place for 2 or three months you'd just acquire the language. When I was 19 during a break in college, I decided to travel to Nicaragua and stay there fore a number of months to learn the language and to understand their political history. I figured, hey, I have two months, I should be able to become perfectly fluent in that time, right?

So I have basic fluency now. But as for speaking in complex sentences, or understanding a movie in Spanish, it's not happening. I realize now that it is much harder to learn a language, and my goal of speaking like a native speaker in 2 months was a little, um optimistic.

Nonetheless the experience was really wonderful and I did soak up language. I think it really helped to have individual tutors for 2 weeks, 5 days a week. Living with a family that had experience hosting foreigners also made learning a lot easier. THey knew how to teach me and foster me somewhat.

So what makes learning a language easier is having patient people to teach you and education. Living with a family is advantageous because you feel comfortable enough to ask questions and try things out. For whatever reason, I was rarely shy about speaking imperfect spanish. I was never ostracized or anything. In fact many people inserted me into their social structure and treated me as they treated wealthy people in their society. Some individuals wanted to confide with me in their distrust of poor lazy people, others assumed that I was super rich back home. At any rate I generally feel I had social capital to burn. Perhaps that is why I rarely felt stigmatized for not speaking spanish. Boy it's really different here though.

Not speaking the language, no matter how rich you are, is stigmatized. Which I imagine makes it really hard to actually learn the language.

I have found that even when you do start to learn a language, the cultural barrier is still there. Speaking spanish to a young person i relate to is much easier than an older adult with really different life experiences.