2/11/13

This was my first experience in North Central, and although I am from Indianapolis and had many track meets at the school, I had never actually been inside the building before. But despite my initial trepidation, I was very excited for my first field experience and to meet the students I would hopefully be working with throughout the semester.

I arrived very early, so after meeting Mrs. McCarthy, she guided me down the hall where I had the opportunity to observe one of the Bridge classes. The students were finishing up the day working on a lab report-perfect for a pre-service science teacher to observe!

After meeting the instructor, I asked two the students if I could sit down with them and observe their work. They cordially allowed me to, and I watched as they filled in the details of their lab report. Mostly observing, I asked a few questions and the young ladies responded explaining what the experiment was about, why it was important, and the results they saw. Using oral language the students (9th graders) were very competent, they were very articulate, and could explain the difference between control and dependent variables. I watched as they wrote their hypothesis for the experiment and observed that these two had very strong language skills. When they were first speaking to me, I was curious about how the strength of their spoken language would translate to writing because as we have discussed in class, academic language is very different from social language (Levine and McCloskey 14, Hill and Flynn 18). But I think in this case, these students demonstrated strong academic language, they were probably in the intermediate stage of second language acquisition (Hill and Flynn 2).

When the school day finished, I went to the learning center in the library and Mrs. McCarthy introduced me to two students who needed assistance with biology. So, for the rest of the afternoon, I worked with Bo and Henoke on writing their lab reports (they were students in the Bridge class too). Mostly, I just observed the students and checked in with them as they developed their lab reports. Their teacher had provided them a template to use with each section of the paper and a small description. I noticed that Henok seemed to be able to read these instructions and follow them more adeptly than Bo, therefore, I thought Henok was probably in the later part of the speech emergence stage, while Bo may have been in the late part of early production, or the early part of speech emergence (Hill and Flynn 2). Bo asked me more often as he was reading what words meant or what he needed to do and this got me thinking about the variety of levels I will have in my class, and how I can provide support for each student without having to create a million copies of something like an outline. Or maybe more explicitly put: how can I use scaffolding to target where some students are and bring them up to where they need to be, without limiting members of the class that are further ahead?

Henok soon finished with his report and moved on to a vocabulary sheet. This was a matching worksheet where he had to match the science term to its definition. He struggled with this a little bit more because some of the definitions were just as difficult as the terms themselves. We went through the terms he was struggling with (only about 4 or 5 of the 15 on the page) and I helped by explaining the parts of the definitions he did not understand. I broke the longer words down in to root words or gave him visual examples of the processes the terms were in reference to. At the end, I had him pick out the two most difficult terms for him and we talked about those a little more in-depth. This was a good practice because the two words he picked out were density dependent factors and density independent factors affecting population growth, both very confusing ideas. When we finished, He was able to explain to me what those two terms meant in oral language.

The most difficult thing for me during the hour I worked with Henoke and Bo was to not completely take over for them. I could see that the two of them had significant understanding of what they needed to do but couldn’t necessarily put that in oral language-something we have modeled in our classroom activities and discussed in reference to the articles by Levine and McCloskey. In my future sessions I would like to work on asking more questions and guiding the students to answers instead of just spoon feeding them. I am excited for the rest of my sessions at North Central. I am intrigued by the model they used to assist the ELL/ESL students at the school-something that to me seemed to meet the developmental needs for socialization, positive interaction with adults and peers, as well as competency and achievement. And, in addition, I am curious to learn more about other supports teachers are using to help these students which I might be able to take to my classroom.

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.

Levine, Linda N., and Mary L. McCloskey. “Language Acquisition and Language Learning in the Classroom.” Teaching Learners of English in Mainstream Classrooms (K-8): One Class, Many Paths. New York: Pearson, 2008. 1-25. Print.

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