Ask the Literacy Teacher
by Leigh Hall
A Special Request
Please submit your questions to: leighhall@teachers.net
Dear Literacy Teacher,
Our district is adopting a new reading series. Would it be possible to get feedback from teachers through your column on the new Scott Foresman, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, and Scholastic? It would be nice to hear from teachers who are actually using these texts.
Dear Readers,
If you have any experience using these materials could you please take a moment to drop me a line and tell me what you think of them? Please let me know if you like them or not and why. Also, please include any benefits and drawbacks to using these materials if at all possible. Responses need not be long. A paragraph or two should work. Responses will be printed in the next issue if possible. You need not include your name to have a response printed.
Thanks
Writing Help for ESL Students
Please submit your questions to: leighhall@teachers.net
Dear Literacy Teacher,
We have a number of ESL children in our school. During writing assignments, these children frequently have trouble with noun-verb agreement. We understand that this is due to the change in language, but we would like to help them express themselves in writing correctly. What is the best way to address this need?
Pat
Dear Pat,
This is a common and valid concern shared by many teachers. We all realize that English language learners (ELL) need to write in standard English. Yet it is a struggle to get them to do so fluently. There are a couple of pieces missing in your letter that make it difficult for me to give you a specific response. It would be helpful to know what grade you are teaching and how long your students have been speaking English. Naturally we have different expectations for ELL students depending on a variety of things such as:
- How long they have been in the country,
- Where they are developmentally in the writing process,
- How fluent they are as speakers of English.
Since your students are probably on different levels, I would recommend you set up different goals for each of them. In the past I have taken writing samples and then analyzed them to see where students were in terms of grammar. I created a spreadsheet that listed the skills I wanted them to learn across the top and then I listed the names going down the side. These skills included such things as writing in complete sentences, subject-verb agreement, comma usage, and capitalization rules. If students had a mastery of the skills I checked it off. If not, I left it blank. Then I would form small groups comprised of students who were having similar difficulties.
This type of plan could be useful in addressing your problem. First, it could allow you to see other areas of writing that students might need to master first. For example, if students do not understand how to write a complete sentence in English then I would tackle that first. It may also allow you to identify students who are not ELL that have this same problem. This would allow both sets of students to work on this together.
No matter what you do though, it is unlikely that all your students will have solved this problem by the end of the school year. Students who are learning English can take up to eight years before they are functioning at the same level as their native English speaking peers. It becomes necessary then to have a great deal of patience and not be frustrated by having to reteach the same concept in multiple ways. They may not pick it up right away. Keep in mind that is your ELL students are at a low level of writing then you may not want to hold them to having to do everything correctly. Pick one or two things you would like to work on. As they master these you can continue to hold them accountable for them while adding new ones. Overall, the best piece of advice I can give is to take each student where they are at, develop individual goals, and work from there. The problems you are seeing should work themselves out in time -- though that time may not come until after they leave your room.
Past Gazette Articles by Leigh Hall
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