This presentation was prepared for the Learning Media National Seminar for facilitators (April 2010). It offers guidance in considering what features of a specific text would make texts and tasks easy or difficult for English Language Learners.
(c) Learning Media Ltd., NZ
I’ve planned this workshop on the assumption that everyone is coming in with the same level of knowledge but I know that won’t be the case so please ask questions and if there are things that you want to talk about further let me know and I can try to come back to them later in the week or at another time.
May not get a lot of tie for the third outcome but we will return to it on Thursday if we run out of tie today.
A term that we use a lot but I think it’s quite helpful to establish a shared understanding of it a a group/ 2 minutes to talk to your group and see if you can write a one sentence definition. Share with whole group
Show Gibbons book
A good diagram to explore with teachers.
Use chart to fill in, in groups Refer to p74, 75 of Gibbons
Becasuse cohesion is not a very visible languag system and is one which is intuitively understood by native speakerss, it is easy to overlook the difficulties it may cause for ELLs.
Conjunctions in particular are often overlooked as a potential area of difficulty, and we need to check that these words are understood when they occur in text. Because they have such a large impact on making meaning.
If you look at this text you can see that many of the content words fall into two groups - movement and pysical aspects of the scene. These related words help to hold the text together. The problem for ELLs is understanding them and seeing the relationship between them also depends very much on a reader’s world of knowledge.
This list of aspects of text comes from ELLP. Use one of the texts and consider it in relation to these aspects (in groups). Just do one page if you want to or the whole text. Then go the matrix in ELLP ( either Year 1-4 booklet for Night is a Blanket) or the Year 5-8 booklet for the Journal stories What level would you put this text at? Share with group
Give out handout We may need to be analysing their writing from a slightly different perspective.
Many of these things are the same as native speakers of English - essentially all learners are startingn at the sma point but the pathway they follow and the rate of progress are going to be different. Spelling system of English may be diffciult for them because of pronunciation differences between languages. Remember that punctuation relfects the intonations patterens and pauses of written lagnague. Therefore anunderstanding of puctuation partyl depends on the writer beig able to control the speech patterens of Englslih. Usually a much higher proportion of content words in written word. Ells need a bridge into written langague and talking about a topic may not be enough. They need to see the rpcesses and the products. Style and tone of a business letter in Spanish is very different than one in English.Written language organization reflects the way a particular language is organised to fulfil a specific purpose.
When planning for writing it might be useful to think about some of these criteria. In groups think about the particular vocabulary and sentence structures/ grammar that ELLs would need to write an explanation or a report about water. Choose one text type. How would you do that? Think, Pair, Share Resources you might use, look at etc?
Look in Sellips, ELIP etc, Write Ways, Context, Text and Grammar Show these texts