It is March. Your class is settled and you are either gearing up for (or in the midst of) State Testing. You have been working with your multilingual students all year, and they are ready. Just as you breathe a sigh of relief and find your footing, the announcements come: a new student from out of the country is waiting in the office for you. Then another, and another. Now the question becomes, how do we integrate these newcomers into the class and curriculum when they are so far behind the language levels of their peers (who have been here all year)? The answer is so simple and intuitive it almost feels too easy: allow beginning language learners to express themselves through pictorial representation, then leverage co-created text to engage them in all four language domains. In our middle school newcomer class, we followed the on-level language arts curriculum, with a lot of scaffolding for language level. The essential question for a unit in the sixth and eighth grade curriculum was, “What is a challenge that you have overcome?” We reworded this question to: “What has been hard?” And, “What ‘wins’ have you had?” One little girl from Korea (Jenna) wanted to tell the story of her new puppy. I wasn’t sure how a new puppy was a challenge, but Jenna insisted on her chosen topic (via Google Translate), so I let her write about it. She did, after all, know the word “puppy.” Other students had a different task. If multilingual students had been with us all year, they would have responded to the grade-level prompt in a narrative essay format. We asked newcomer students (like Jenna) to put the events of their story into panels, like a graphic novel, and then add dialogue bubbles. They knew exactly what we were talking about because Manga was a favorite genre during our silent, sustained reading time. Students’ first attempts at pictorial expression were rough drafts. They tried their best on the dialogue bubbles, and some included a few words from their heritage language if they did not know the word in English. We took the draft through the writing process, using peer editing on the dialogue bubbles to help it make sense. After students published their graphic novels (in color with the edited dialogue bubbles), I conferenced with them individually while other students continued work on their narrative essays. I pointed to the pictures and asked students to use circumlocution (talking around the unknown word they wanted to describe) to try and explain what was happening in the panel. I used a whiteboard to write down my words so they could see them, and if we really got stuck, Google Translate (in a word-to-word fashion) was the last resort. For Jenna, I pointed to Panel 9 and asked, “What is happening here?”
“Puppy…bite.” Jenna responded after a long pause, pointing to herself “Good job finding the words!” On the whiteboard, I wrote: “The puppy bit me,” and explained to Jenna that we were going to put the verb “bite” in the past tense because the puppy was not biting her at that moment. I did not explain why “bite” became “bit” (this would come later). I just wanted to give her as many reps as possible speaking, reading, and writing the language. Jenna copied these words onto an index card and practiced re-reading these words fluently. We developed three to four sentences this way so that Jenna could speak enough to describe her graphic novel to a partner. Having enough English to do so felt like a necessity in this newcomer class, in which English was the only common language. Jenna made fast progress in her English through engagement with all four language domains: listening (with comprehensible input), speaking with circumlocution, and reading and rewriting co-created texts. Pictorial representation is also very effective with science labs, history document-based questions, and explanations of math processes. How can you use this activity in your own classroom? See my padlet for more examples: https://bit.ly/DCRpadlet Comments are closed.
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AuthorElise White Diaz is an Educational Consultant with Seidlitz Education, specializing in trauma-informed multilingual education. CategoriesArchives
November 2024
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