Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Oct. 15 - Instructional Strategies

Teachers need to make their classroom as the home field advantage.  When students enter the classroom, they need to feel like they are getting the home field advantage.  Here is where I can create and be the most successful.

Cummins

  • 4 stages of Acquisition
    • preproduction (the silent period) 6 mos to a year
    • Early production - sentences are very simple, not complete
    • Speech emergent - they will get most sentences right
    • Intermediate Fluency
Sheltered English
  • Hand on
  • visual cooperative learning
  • guarded vocabular - protect the number of new vocabulary words that are introduced, and repeat them.
I hear I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.

Learning Pyramid - average  retention rates
Lecture 5%
Reading 10%
Audio Visual 20%
Demonstration 30%
Discussion Group 50%
Practice by doing 75%
Teach Others/Immediate Use of Learning 95%

Cooperative Learning
  • keep groups small
  • needs to be done with careful planning
  • is not easy to jump into
With Cooperative Learning research shows that you will have:
  • higher achievement
  • more time on task
  • improved higher level thinking skills
  • greater retention
  • improved skills for working with others
Great example of solving a problem using cooperative learning and going down the learning pyramid.

Setting up a Coop Lesson - 6 Key Concepts
  1. Teams 
    1. keep them small
    2. developmentally appropriate
    3. heterogeneous, homogeneous, random
    4. assigned by teacher
    5. You need to do bonding activities to get those students to want to help each other out
  2. Will
    1. Students must have the will to cooperate
    2. Team building and class building activities
    3. Team and class recognition systems
  3. Management
    1. Quiet signal
    2. Assigning roles
    3. Team questions
  4. Skills
    1. Listening
    2. Conflict resolution
    3. Tutoring skills
  5. Basic Principals
    1. positive interdependence - a gain for one is a gain for another
    2. individual accountability - individual performance is required
    3. equal participation - equal participation is planned
    4. simultaneous interaction - a greater percentage of students are overtly active at once
  6. Coop Strategies
    1. Structure how students interact with each other
    2. have the 4 basic principals built in
5 reason to do team building
  1. Creates teams in which everyone achieves
  2. promotes real work team work
  3. created the will and the skill to cooperate
  4. builds positive student relations
  5. creates a positive classroom climate
Preparing the students 
  1. explain directions
  2. offer suggestions
  3. help each other without interfering
  4. encourage each other
  5. paraphrase
  6. request a justification 
  7. extend each others utterances
  8. express emotion
  9. resolve conflict
  10. criticize other w/out giving offense
Cooperative learning rules groups
  1. you are responsible for your own behavior
  2. you must be willing to help anyone who asks
  3. you may not ask the teacher for help unless everyone in the group has the same question





Monday, October 1, 2012

Oct. 1, 2012 - Learning Objectives

Class Activity - Matching content objectives and language objectives
Language on left, and Content on the right

Components of English Language Development for ELL's (Linguistics)

  1. Levels of Language Knowledge
  2. Oral Language
  3. Phonology
  4. Orthography
  5. Morphology
  6. Grammar and Syntax
  7. Vocabulary and Semantics
Levels of Language Knowledge
  • Receptive Skills (listening)
    • point to shapes
  • Expressive (speaking)
    • Name shapes
  • Oral 
  • written
Components of Oral Language
  • content
    • any component of language that carries meaning such as vocabulary or discourse
  • Use
    • refers to pragmatic language functions or how language is used as a social tool
  • form
    • component of language that follows a rule system such as syntax and grammar or sequence of sounds within a language
The use of the language is the hardest for this students

Content is difficult for this student
Grammar and Syntax is difficult for this student.

Phonology  - a study of the sound patterns of a language
  • phonemes
  • phonological awareness
  • phonics
English Demons for ELLs
  • Short vowels
  • "sh" sound in shoes, mission, nation, ocean, chef, special and sugar
    • One sound, but 6 different spellings
Language Distance
  • some languages are easier to learn than others, depending on the complexity of their symbol system and their degree of transferability and or transparency
Orthographies - the symbols and the rules for writing them (spelling)
  • transparent - allow a few or just one association between symbols and sounds
  • opague - allows many ways - including combinations of symbols - of associating symbols and sounds.
Morphology
  • study of word origin, formation and structure
  • how words are put together from their smaller parts and the rules of governing the process
  • morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning
  • Cats contains 2 morphemes
    • cat and the plural s