4/8/13

Today, I worked again with Sun Light. I was less concerned this time about working with a student on science homework after my interesting experience helping Sun on his speech project. He told me as we went over to the computer stations that he was still working on his speech from the previous week and he would be delivering it on Friday to the class. 

I looked over what he had accomplished since we met last Monday and his work was significantly more complete than where we had started and finished in our last session together. Sun had filled in all the outline packet, and typed up an initial draft of his speech using the outline provided by his teacher in the giant packet. It also appeared as though someone had reviewed his speech for grammatical errors and areas which needed additional attention or detail. This draft was not as marked up as I might have thought which made me rather happy for Sun. While I know this is not true for everyone, and I certainly cannot speak for other people, I know I am very sensitive to critique. However, peer review is a critical process in second language acquisition and often helps all the parties involved more than it hurts them. I think I would want to incorporate this process into my classroom practice when students are writing lab reports or other papers.

Sun and I moved through his draft making appropriate corrections and adding supporting details. Apparently, he needed to provide additional statistical information about teenage obesity in his draft. We used the internet to research some facts which would fit into his paper and provide support for some of his points. This was a slow process because it involved significant reading. At this point, from working with Sun, I would have put him at intermediate fluency (Hill and Flynn 15). He made few grammatical errors, which was supported by the lack of marks on his draft, but was still below the advanced fluency stage. I concluded that with sustained effort Sun would achieve advanced fluency soon enough.

Although he was at intermediate fluency, Sun struggled slowly through the articles we selected from our search results. The vocabulary was complicated because it was laden with medical terms like “morbidity” and “cardiovascular.” Sun would skim over the page and look for things which “jumped” out at him which might have to do with his topic. He seemed particularly drawn to numbers, which made sense I suppose because he was looking for statistical information to support his speech. I found his tactics for tackling the difficult reading interesting.    He would skim the text, then point out a few words, or ask what something meant, and then he would read some more. Finally he would point to and read the start of the sentence he thought would fit as evidence in his speech for me. This method worked fairly well, but sometimes there would be better information just beyond where he had pointed. It was difficult to tell if he had picked out a point because that was as far as he had skimmed and read, or if something prevented him from understanding the next line which contained the better information.

Either way, we added the new information we had compiled. The next step was to finish the edits and add a citations section. Sun finished his last few edits and I read over the outline one more time for quick errors. Then we moved to complete the citations section, he needed a citation for each article he included in the paper, and his teacher had provided in the large packet the format for each of these citations. As he had been collecting information, Sun had been keeping track of the places where he acquired the facts by copying and pasting all of the necessary information about the author, article title, publisher, and publishing date in a separate Word document. At first I thought maybe his teacher had told him to do this, but it seemed more plausible that in his planning for the speech, and in knowing he needed citations, Sun had compiled these details himself. I felt like this was a very diligent practice, and complimented him on his foresight in anticipating he would need that information in a readily available central place.

As a result of my interactions with Sun, I am more curious about the reading demands for various content classes. We have discussed providing anticipation guides and other methods for comprehensible input through SIOP models, but there seems to be so much more work up front for independent projects like Sun’s speech. Teenage obesity was not a topic the teacher had introduced to the class and then all the students were asked to write a speech. Instead, the students picked their own topics and then had to determine the necessary information for their speech. It was evident that Sun had some prior knowledge about his topic, but when the assignment required him to do research, he became a little bogged down by the vocabulary demands. This leaves me wondering what teachers can do to support the individual work of students on independent projects. And it also begets the question, when Sun gives his speech, which will be laden with content specific words he now understands, will the other ENL students in his class understand them too?

References

Flynn, Kathleen M., and Jane D. Hill. “The Stages of Second Language Acquisition.” Classroom Instruction That Works with English Language Learners. Alexandria: ASCD, 2006. 14-21. Print.

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