Teaching Language
- Our beliefs and ideas about language learning, developed through wide reading, careful thought and experience.
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Benefits of joint construction
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General Principles
- • each culture has its own ideas, beliefs and traditions about the use of language. It is important for the teacher to investigate these differences as they will impact the way a student responds to the new surroundings. For example, some cultures encourgae silence, others encourgae simultaneus speaking.
- • use materials which students find interesting and relevent. This can be the start of many talking, listening, reading and writing points. Critically analyse resources such as books, instructional aids: are they relevant, interesting, engaging, biased?
- • design learning experiences that require collaboration, student-student, student/s-teacher and even students-parents/family. Collaboration provides a supportive environment for a student to learn his or her second language.
- • consider how the environment and learning experiences are supporting and challenging the learner. The element of challenge is crucial for a student's language and intellectual development. make connections between prior knowledge and 'non-school' knowledge to 'school' knowldege
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Oral Language
- Principles of oral language development:
- • students need a supportive and relevant environment where mistakes are OK
- • oral language needs to be modelled, both through teacher-student and student-student interaction. The students also need time to practice their oral language.
- • the development of oral language needs to include both BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) and CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency) and classroom practices need to cater for both areas of oral language development.
- Planning to meet oral language development needs:
- • what am I planning to achieve?
- • are the students proficient in one or more languages?
- • are learning experiences concrete, meaningful and purposeful?
- • who will be asking the questions?
- • who controls the topic development - is the curriculum relevant?
- • are there opportunities for the students to talk, interact and think?
- • are there opportunities for students to practice their oral language?
- • what level of linguistic demand is required?
- • is the environment of oral language development context embedded or context reduced?
- Assessing oral language development:
- • what are the linguistic and cognitive demands of this task? Are they appropriate?
- • is the linguistic demand required in this activity in relation to linguistic ability of the students?
- • what is the level of oral interaction in group discussions?
- - who is talking?
- - what are they taking about?
- - how are they talking? (eg. formally or informally)
- • importance of using a variety of assessment strategies for oral language development
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Reading
- Principles for teaching reading:
- • students are engaged in their learning when it has meaning and purpose for them. Using genuine texts which have relevance will engage the bilingual student
- • reading is a complex process, particularly for the second language learner. The teaching of reading needs to encompass all cuing systems; graphophonic, semantic and syntactic
- • students need to be scaffolded in their learning.Therefore, teaching of reading needs to involve modelling and a supportive environment. Using staged lesson plans that lead to the reading of a text is one way if doing this and can be adjusted for different needs and abilities (see Weather unit for an example of a staged lesson plan).
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Writing
- Issues for assessment in writing:
- • if there is error then it is important that the source be located (refer to student's miscue analysis)
- • the question of 'how to assess' arises. Assessment needs to be done carried out via meaningful and purposeful tasks where needs and weaknesses can be more easily identified. Formal testing does not always give an accurate assessment.
- • the structure of writing in some languages differs from English. This will affect the way a bilingual student writes. Writing skill will also depend on the students' proficiency in other languages.
- • assessment strategies need to be varied to gain a wide view of the students' development
- • the writing task needs to analysed according to linguistic and cognitive demand
- • the familiarity of the task to the learner.
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Benefits of joint construction
- • language is modelled orally and written
- • words and phrases are usually repeated which helps the bilingual speaker to become familiar with words and text
- • students have the opportunity to contribute
- • students are actively involved in the task and their thinking is engaged
- • knowledge of content, grammar and structure of text is consolidated
- • students are able to learn through their mistakes
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This page was created by Johanna Lloyd and Miriam Shipard
October 1998