Noteblog Initial Post: Consider the ideas discussed in today’s
readings about different types of classroom talk. What type(s) of talk are you
seeing in your classroom? What scaffolding is needed for response-centered talk
to take place? What types of learning
resources are available that have the potential to promote rich discussions?
Think about specific students in your class who do not participate actively in
classroom talk. What types of scaffolding do they need to participate
successfully in response-centered classroom talk?
Classroom Talk in my classroom:
In my classroom I rarely
see group talk. The students really only get to talk and share their thoughts
if they are working in pairs. Most of the time in my classroom students work by
themselves, and the only time they will be able to voice their opinion usually
is when the teachers asks questions for whatever they are discussing. Scaffolding
is usually only used when she asks the students why they thought their specific
answer was that answer. In my opinion I think it would be more useful for the
students to have more student led conversations in the class so the students
could learn off each other. From what I have seen the ELL students in my
classroom participate less than the non-ELL students.
Tompkins Chapter 4: Working with the Youngest Readers & Writers
·
Literacy is a process that
begins in infancy and continues into adulthood.
·
The implication was that
there’s a point in children’s development when it’s time to teach them to read
and write. For those not ready, a variety of “readiness” activities would
prepare them.
·
This prospective on how
children become literate—that is, how they learn to read and write—is known as
emergent literacy.
·
Literacy development has been
broadened to incorporate the cultural and social aspects of language learning,
and children’s experiences with and understandings about written language—both reading
and writing—are included as part of emergent literacy.
·
Concepts about the Alphabet
o Young children also develop concepts about the alphabet and how
letters are used to represent phonemes. Pinnell and Fountas (1998) identified
those components of letter knowledge:
§ The letter’s name.
§ The formation of the letter in upper- and lowercase manuscript
handwriting.
§ The features of the letter that distinguish it from other letters.
§ The direction the letter must be turned to distinguish it from
other letters.
§ The use of the letter in known words.
§ The sound the letter represents in isolation.
·
How children develop as
readers and writers
o Stage 1: Emergent Reading and Writing
§ Children accomplish the following
·
Develop an interest in
reading and writing
·
Acquire concepts about print
·
Develop book-handling skills
·
Learn to identify the letters
of the alphabet
·
Develop handwriting skills
·
Learn to read and write some
high-frequency words
o Stage 2: Beginning Reading and Writing
§ Children accomplish the following:
·
Learn phonics skills
·
Recognize 20-100 high
frequency words
·
Spell phonetically
·
Reread their writing
·
Use capital letters to begin
sentences
o Stage 3: Fluent Reading and Writing
§ Children accomplish the following:
·
Read fluently and with
expression
·
Recognize most one-syllable
words automatically and can decode other words efficiently
·
Use decoding and
comprehension strategies effectively
·
Write stories, reports,
letters, and other genres
·
Use capital letters and
punctuation marks correctly most of the time
·
Instructional Practices
o Morning message
o Shared reading
o Language Experience Approach
§ Based on children’s language and experiences.
o Interactive Writing
o Manuscript Handwriting
o Writing centers
Gibbons Chapter 2 and 3
·
Classroom Talk: Creating Contexts for Language
Learning
o
Research that has come out of second language acquisition
studies also suggests that interaction is a significant factor in language
development.
o
One clear teaching implication of studies into
second language acquisition is that the degree of facility of second language learning
in a classroom depends largely on how classroom discourse is constructed.
o
There is a common 3-part exchange between
teacher and student.
§
The teacher first asks a question; the student
responds, often with a single word or short answer; and then the teacher
responds by evaluating the answer.
§
Referred to as IRF (Initiation, Response,
Feedback)
o
Group work has a number of advantages for language
learning.
§
Learners hear more language, a greater variety
of language, and have more language directed toward them: group-work situations
increase the input to the learner.
§
Learners interact more with other speakers, and
therefore their output is also increased. They tend to take more turns, and in
the absence of the teacher, have more responsibility for clarifying their own
meanings. In other words, it is the learners themselves who are doing the
language leaning work.
§
What learners hear and what they learn is
contextualized: language is heard and used in an appropriate context and used
meaningfully for a particular purpose.
o
Some suggestions for Group and Pair activities
Across the Curriculum
§
Picture sequencing
§
Hot Seat
§
Questionnaires
§
Problem Solving
§
Paired Problem Solving
o
Both student-student and teacher-student talk
can provide rich contexts for second language development. But just allowing
talk to occur is not enough. Productive talk does not just happen—it needs to
be deliberately and systematically planned, just as we plan for literacy events.
o
It’s quite possible classroom talk determines whether
or not children learn, and their ultimate feelings of self-worth as students.
·
From Speaking to Writing in the Content
Classroom
o
Regular teacher-guided reporting is one way of
providing an authentic and meaningful context for students to develop the more
academic registers of school.
o
We can also see that is not simply the linguistic
features of language itself that affect students’ comprehension, but also the
previous knowledge they bring to the new language they are hearing.
o
As we have seen, however, ESL learners must from
the outset use their second language for curriculum learning, and they need
many contexts in which they can do this.
o
In effect, they moved successfully toward the language
of the curriculum, throughout the unit of work, rather than being expected to
master it prior to their learning of science.
