English Language Learners--highlight Gibbons
Published on Feb 17, 2017
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He saw and treated the choir members as the people they could become, not as homeless people or as people with problems. (Gibbons, p. 3).
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"The integration of language and content should relate language learning, content learning, and the development of thinking, and should aim to find systematic connections among them.
--Bernard Mohan, "LEP" Students and the integration of Language and Content"
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Three ways of securing academic achievement
1. Students from all backgrounds are more engaged when classroom work is cognitively challenging than when it consists solely of conventional low-level work.
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2. All students, regardless of social or ethnic background, achieve at higher levels when they participate in an intellectually challenging curriculum.
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3. Equity gaps diminish as a result of engagement in such curricula. (Newman et al, 1996).
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"I can say what I want, but not for school work and strangers." p. 1
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What does it mean to scaffold language?
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Look at Scaffolding Questioning for ELL readers
Language as a cultural tool
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Language as a meaning making tool.
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What helps learners to learn language?
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Learners need to understand what is said to them and what they read.
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What makes texts difficult to understand
Here are the main sources of language difficulty for ESL students:
Illegibility
A first, obvious difficulty relates to the legibility of a text. ESL students may have problems that are caused solely by the fact that what they are trying to understand has been poorly printed or copied, is badly set-out or is in a very small type-face.
You are requested to desist from masticating gum in this establishment.
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Unfamiliar Words
A written message may be difficult to understand because it contains many words that are unknown to the student. In the following text, for example, the instruction is simple but the language in which it is expressed is not:
You are requested to desist from masticating gum in this establishment.
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Lack of Background Knowledge
Another difficulty arises in cases where the necessary background knowledge is missing. Unless the student has a basic understanding of statistics, for example, there is little point him/her looking up the unknown words in the following passage since the definitions are unlikely to further comprehension.
To minimize two unknowns we differentiate with respect to each variable in turn treating the other variable as a constant. The process is called partial differentiation and the notation used is standard.
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Difficult Concepts
The next difficulty can be seen in texts such as the following:
The appeal of the view that a work of art expresses nothing unless what it expresses can be put into words can be reduced by setting beside it another view, no less popular in the theory of art, that a work of art has no value if what it expresses can be put into words.
The words in themselves are not unduly difficult and no special background knowledge is required, but the concept expressed in the passage is complex.
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Complex Syntax
The above text about art is also difficult because of its syntactic complexity. In general, long sentences containing subordinate or embedded clauses tend to be less immediately intelligible than shorter, simpler ones. For example, the second instruction below is probably more readily understood than the first, which contains an embedded participial clause.
Explain clearly using at least three different reasons or drawing three diagrams why McClelland lost the battle.
Explain clearly why McClelland lost the battle. Give at least three reasons or draw three diagrams.
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Nominalization
Nominalization, which is the use of a noun in combination with an "empty" verb, is a feature of academic text that causes problems to ESL students. The following fragments give the same instruction. The second, containing a nominalization, is likely to be the more difficult:
In your answer you should consider the effect of heat loss ..
Consideration should be given in your answer to the effect of heat loss ...
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Polysemy
Polysemous words are words with multiple meanings. These can cause difficulty if the student has learned one meaning of the word, but the word has a different meaning in the context of the sentence the student is reading. An example is the word solution which can mean either the answer to a problem or a mixture of two substances. Mathematics is full of words that ESL students are likely to have learned first with their everyday meaning: table, mean, power, even, volume, root, etc.
Jokes and puns are frequently based on the polysemous nature of the words they contain, which is why they are usually so difficult for ESL students.
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Poor Writing
The final source of difficulty is associated with the many different manifestations of poor writing. For example, a text may be difficult because the ideas are not organized logically, or because punctuation is lacking, faulty or ambiguous, or because cohesion is slipshod. The following extract, taken from a recent IB Computing Studies exam, has an example of poor cohesion.
A bar code is often found on produce sold in supermarkets and, by means of a bar code reader, a computer can directly identify that item.
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source: http://esl.fis.
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