After reading the syllabus, I feel that I am very eager to learn more about teaching math and literacy in TE 402 and techniques to making it more enjoyable for children (especially math, because that is not my best subject!) Overall through this course I hope to gain more confidence to teaching literacy, as well as tactics to make it as enjoyable and promising for my future students.
As far as the readings go, it was nice to read the introductory chapter to Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning as well as the articles in the coursepack because they mainly talked about ESL (I guess it's properly called ELL now). ESL is something that I feel very strongly about because I have been working with an ELL student in my field placement and observing the school's ESL teacher during my first grader's lunch break. When we were given the "literacy concept map" assignment, ELL students were one of the first things that came to mind while attempting to define the word. As this just shows how literacy and language can help connect people, cultures, languages and customs all around the world!
Some of the information in Chapter #1 was very interesting to me, such as Gibbons comments regarding the inclusion of ESL students in English-speaking schools. She noted that English-speaking children build off of their already acquired at-home native tounge in a classroom setting with a teacher and other students. The language is reinforced in the schools, where ELL students are experiencing something more challenging as two different languages are spoken at home and in the classroom. This reminded me of the ELL student that I am working with (who I will call May). May often replaces the word 'and' with 'y' which is the Spanish form of the word. She often mixes her sentences up in a "Spanglish" sort of form as she tries to communicate with me and the rest of her classmates. Although at times I feel bad for my CT because May sometimes holds she and the rest of the class back during instruction, the inclusion of her being engulfed in the language is what is best for her to pick up the slang and embrace the language, which was mentioned by Gibbons as well. However, I was wondering exactly how school's ESL program best supports these students? How do you even begin to communicate with someone that doesn't speak your native language? I have previously learned (and came across in the readings as well) that mockery is the best way to begin with ELL students, but it still seems like such a challenging objective that could be slightly embarrassing for the ELL student to be around their peers when they cannot properly communicate with them. All in all, ESL is something that I am very interested in studying and learning more about, so I will keep you all posted on what I learn! ;)
As I stated earlier in my post, I believe that literacy is a wonderful tool to connect all cultures and races through its many forms of reading, writing, communicating, identifying, interpreting and understanding the spoken language.
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I completely agree with you about literacy and how we interact with it. It is completely important for our culture and we could not communicate or involve ourselves with others if literacy was not there. That is really cool about how you work with an ESL student at your school, that is a great experience! It is funny to watch students such as yours evolve and learn new things everyday.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with you when you said that mimicking is a valuable learning technique. It is a huge part of teaching as well. Teachers are always modeling for their students. They might model the behavior that they want to see in the classroom or the correct way to do a homework problem. It can even be something as simple as modeling the correct formatting for a paper. Teachers are always modeling and this technique shoudl cross over into the teaching of ELL's. My mother has always said that the best way to learn a new language is to be immersed in it (that is why she studied in Spain and Mexico to learn Spanish). I think that the immersion and inclusion models are always the best. Students learn by observing the correct method. If students hear English all day they will be more apt to understand the gestures, and subtleties of the language (such as sarcasm). I do not beleive that students shouldn't be given special attention, I believe the only way they will succeed is by getting individualized attention. However, I believe that removing them from their English speaking peers for the majority of the day does not allow them the access to the English language that will really help them learn.
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