3/4/13

For my fourth field experience Ms. McCarthy introduced me to a student named Lee and explained that he had been given an assignment to outline a speech. While English is not my content area, I decided I would try to help as much as I could with the assignment.

Reading over the outline for the speech, I could see that teacher had broken down the parts of a speech including the introduction, body, and conclusion into more detailed parts. The assignment was four pages long and asked the students to fill in the parts of the speech with their brain stormed ideas. The teacher had included an examples page which explained each part and then had an example of an answer which fit a model speech.

As Lee and I began work on the assignment, I quickly became discouraged. I was having a very difficult time communicating and he was having a tough time explaining himself to me. The prompt for the speech was to describe a family vacation or an imaginary vacation where something had gone wrong, and the teacher had provided the students with examples which described a family trip to Disney World. I thought it might be best to set the outline page aside and have an informal conversation, an oral brain storm, about Lee’s ideas for the speech. This was where our communication began to break down.

I do not think I was clear in explaining my intentions of simply talking about his ideas for the speech before working on the outline. Lee was fixated on filling in the parts of the worksheet piece by piece. So we moved to filling in the worksheet instead. I began to recognize that Lee was in the early production stage of language development (Hill and Flynn 15). He could communicate some ideas, but he seemed at loss of vocabulary other times. I admired his dedication to trying to help me understand what he was saying. In a few instances, we used pictures to communicate a few ideas. I had no language tools to help Lee understand my ideas other than miming and drawing, and I was left wondering how else I could help him make the connections between the vocabulary I was using and the words in his native language.

I was having a difficult time connecting to some of the tools we have discussed and read about in class. In this case because I was tutoring, I could not put Lee in a small group, but I wondered if his teacher might have done this. I think it would have been an effective strategy to pair Lee with a stronger student who could help him work through parts of the assignment and make the vocabulary connections. Looking back at the Levine and McCloskey reading I think Lee needed some more specific material supports like a dictionary or pictures to draw ideas and vocabulary about his vacation (Levine and McCloskey 241). Looking back on it, perhaps I should have had him draw some pictures about his vacation ideas.

At the end of the session, I remembered what we discussed in our “Connections” activity during class and I decided to ask Lee a little bit more about himself. He told me that English was his third language, his first two were Karenni and Burmese. Upon being asked if English was the most difficult language he has had to learn, he said that it was because it is so different from the other two. I followed up that question by asking what was the most difficult part if it was reading, speaking, or writing and he said for him the most difficult was speaking and that he felt like he was a strong reader.

This last part of our interaction left me very curious about Lee, I had noticed he was a strong reader because of how well he did following the written instructions the teacher had provided with the assignment. I wondered thought about his comment about not feeling like he was a strong speaker and thought that maybe this was why we had such a communication breakdown. It reminded me of the activity we did in class with photosynthesis. Like many other students, Lee might know the words, but had difficulty accessing his knowledge especially when he was having feelings of anxiety.

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. 230-261. Print.

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