While teaching ESL in pull-out and collaborative settings at the high school level, we realized that our students were struggling to incorporate academic language into their own speech and writing. This struggle led to a high incidence of copying and plagiarism. To address the challenge, we turned to strategies we’re often encouraged to use to help students increase their production, especially sentence frames. However, we began to question whether our sentence frames were actually helping students learn and produce academic language independently, or were simply making it easier for our students to complete tasks. We designed an action research project to explore how we could apply the work of researchers like Jeff Zwiers and William and Pérsida Himmele to use sentence frames more creatively and intentionally to guide our students toward greater proficiency. In this presentation, we will share the process we used to establish consistent expectations for student production in speaking and writing at all WIDA levels, and the sentence frames we developed to scaffold students so that they could meet those expectations. We will share examples of student work related to paragraph writing, academic conversations, and responding to text. In addition, we surveyed our students to learn how they feel about using sentence frames, and we will use the results of that survey to frame a discussion among our colleagues about best practices and how we might incorporate more student input into the strategies we use in our classrooms in order to best meet their needs. Presented at MinneTESOL, WITESOL, and MDE Bilingual, Migrant, and ESL Conferences by Laura Byard and Ina Ziegler.

1. SENTENCE FRAMES FROM
TWO PERSPECTIVES
Laura Byard and Ina Ziegler
Minneapolis Public Schools

2. Find our presentation online
http://www.slideshare.net/MsLauraB/sentence-frames-from-
two-perspectives

3. Who are we?
• Laura
• Anne Sullivan
Communication Center
• Grades 6-8
• WIDA Levels 1-5
• Stand alone for levels
1-2
• Co-teach social studies
for levels 1-5
• Ina
• Edison High School
• Grades 9-12
• WIDA Levels 1-5
• Stand alone for level 1
and levels 4-5
• Co-teach ELA 9 for
levels 4-5
• Co-teach chemistry for
levels 1-3

4. Who are you?
• Name
• School
• Grade level
• WIDA levels
• Why did you choose this session?

5. Action Research: What was our context?
•First year at Edison High School
•Grades 9-12
•WIDA Levels 1-5
•Stand alone classes: Level 1 and Level 2
•Co-teaching: ELA 9, ELA 10, Biology

6. Action Research: What was our context?
• Challenges we encountered:
• Students weren’t producing very much language in writing, especially
academic language.
• Students were focused on completing tasks and getting points, but didn’t
have the language to express their own ideas.
• This led to an epidemic of copying and plagiarism, from level 1 to level 5.
• Students also weren’t participating in discussions, especially their
content classes.
What challenges do you see in your context?

7. Action Research: What do we know?
Students learn by producing and experimenting with language.
We see our students as
“speakers/hearers involved in developmental
processes which are realised in interaction.”
(Ohta, 2000)

8. Action Research: What do we know?
• Sentence frames can help students! Student response
without a sentence frame:

9. Action Research: What do we know?
• Sentence frames can help students! Student response
with the sentence frame “I know _____ because ______”:

10. Action Research: Guiding Questions
 How can we help students increase meaningful output in order
to go beyond completing tasks, and learn and grow?
 What is the purpose of using sentence frames? Do students
know this purpose?
 What is the students’ responsibility in using a sentence frame?
What is our responsibility?
 How can we create academic language sentence frames that
are general enough to be used in multiple contexts?
 Do we choose sentence frames and teach them in a way that
allows students to own them and produce them independently
in the future?

11. Sentence
Frames:
Questions
Appendix A
PCG’s Center for Resource
Management (2008)

12. Sentence Frames: Questions

13. Sentence Frames: Questions
How is panhandling
related to living in the
streets?
What would you
recommend to a
panhandler to do to get
back on top and on their
feet?
How would you
improve legal
support for
homeless people to
fight back against
panhandling bans?

14. Student Led Discussion

15. Sentence Frames: Talking Chips
Zwiers
(2008)

16. Sentence Frames: Prediction Cafe
• Sentence frames
• Multiple modalities
• Interaction
• Zwiers (2008).
• Rojas (2009).

18. Sentence
Frames:
Paragraph
Writing
Addressing
students’
individual
needs
through
writing
conferences
http://www.busyteacherscafe.com/literacy/paragraph.html

19. Sentence
Frames:
Paragraph
Writing
Addressing
students’
individual
needs
through
writing
conferences

20. Perspective 1: Teachers
•We noticed . . .
•Increased production in writing
•Increased production in speaking
•Higher quality work
•Increased use of academic language

21. Student Example: Biology
Prompt: Explain how the different parts of a neuron work together to send
messages to cells.

22. Perspective 2: Students
•We wanted to know what they think . . .
•And they wanted to tell us!
•Survey & Survey Results – Appendix E

23. Perspective 2: Students
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
Sentence
frames help me
feel more
comfortable
speaking in
class.
Sentence
frames give me
ideas for things
to say.
Sentence
frames gives me
ideas for things
to write.
Sentence
frames limit how
I express my
ideas.
Sentence
frames help me
to write more.
I use sentence
frames from
English class to
help me in other
classes.
I would like
more
opportunities to
help the teacher
make sentence
frames for the
class.
Strongly Agree
Agree
Disagree
Strongly Disagree

24. What next?
• Increase student ownership and participation
• More opportunities for students to create
sentence frames
• Remove scaffolds over the course of the year
• More opportunities to reflect with students
and evaluate purpose and effectiveness of
learning tools - TOGETHER

25. Sentence Frames: Discussion
 Questions? Comments?
 What is the purpose of using sentence frames? Do students
know this purpose?
 What is the students’ responsibility in using a sentence frame?
What is our responsibility?
 How can we create academic language sentence frames that
are general enough to be used in multiple contexts?
 Do we choose sentence frames and teach them in a way that
allows students to own them and produce them independently
in the future?

26. Thank you!
• Please complete the feedback form in the back of your packet –
tear it off and turn it in.
• We would love to continue the conversation:
• Laura Byard – Laura.Byard@mpls.k12.mn.us
• Ina Ziegler – Ina.Ziegler@mpls.k12.mn.us

27. Works Cited
• Ohta, A. (2000). Rethinking interaction in SLA: Developmentally appropriate
assistance in the zone of proximal development and the acquisition of L2 grammar.
InJ. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp.51-78).
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• PCG Center for Resource Management. <http://www.pcgus.com>
• Rojas, V. (2009). Increasing language proficiency and academic achievement of
English learners.
Retrieved from Workshop Notes online website:<http://api.ning.com/files/7s5iv-
a8*izGoS5gSFNr1p73tIa4wfM7wAl-HEgpikrb-dm3FgkHlosgVm46wGCgr2mLCgMD8j9F-
11JknUms76PgSE4S-gu/Rojas2dayhandout.pdf>.
• Zwiers, J. (2008). Building academic language: Essential practices for content
classrooms, grades 5-12. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.