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.