Supporting English Language Development

Complete an analysis of the instructional platform or text of your current grade and subject taught. Use the evaluation criteria in Appendix A to guide your question. Be sure to address how the special learning needs of students learning English are addressed in the selected instructional material. Write a 2 page narrative.
Also look for special features, suggestions, and/or ideas given in the teacher’s edition/version that apply directly to students who are learning English as a new language. Write up your findings to include the following:
a. Address the evaluation criteria found on the Appendix A , giving specific examples or nonexamples to support your commentary. Some of the criteria may not apply to the instructional materials you have selected. Organize your information according to the evaluation checklist’s main categories. Look for trends or patterns in the information that you collect.
b. Describe any special strategies, ideas, materials, or tips included in the materials you have reviewed that meet the cultural and linguistic needs of students learning English as a second language
c. What materials, activities, or helpful ways of learning English are missing from the instructional material which should be included?
22 17:32 Visual Thinking Strategies for Improved Comprehension
By
Kristina Robertson
(2006)
On this page
Method
Reading
Writing
Hot links
"Our opinions do not really blossom into fruition until we have expressed them to someone else."
Mark Twain, U.S. humorist, novelist, and short story author (1835 - 1910)
I had a black and white picture of a poor miner's room on the overhead projector. In the picture the walls were covered with cardboard and the room was sparsely furnished. I was doing professional development for teachers and I did not give them any background information about the picture. I asked for some opinions about what they saw, then I asked the teachers, "Do you think a man or a woman lives here?" In unison they responded, "A man!" That was very interesting to me so I asked a follow-up question, "What makes you say that?" Although the response had been unanimous, the reasoning was varied. One teacher said, "You can tell it's a man's room because there aren't any decorations — a woman would put something nice in there even if she were poor." Another teacher said, "That rocking chair doesn't look very feminine." When I asked for more detail she said, "It looks big, and there is no cushion or anything on it." Yet another teacher answered, "I think if it were a woman's room there would be something to remind her of family — either a picture or there would be children's items in the room." The teachers had noticed details that I hadn't and had also drawn on their own beliefs to bring a deeper perspective to the picture.
This is the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method. It is a very simple activity designed to build students' background knowledge and develop thinking skills that use detail to enhance understanding. Many educators have used this method as a precursor to working on a literary PASSage because the thinking skills used to analyze artwork can be transferred to literature as well. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method was created by Abigail Housen, a cognitive psychologist in the Harvard Graduate School of education. VTS is targeted at developing creativity and thinking skills. It also presents a very effective method for tapping into students' background knowledge.
Method
The teacher selects an interesting picture or painting, one that relates to the topic of the story to be read, in this case the picture above.
A copy of this picture is placed on the overhead projector. There are many sources of pictures on the Internet, including museum and library websites. (See the Hot Links section).
The students are asked, "Please look at the picture silently for a minute and think about what you see. What's going on in the picture?"
After a minute the teacher opens up the question to the room, "What do you see in the picture?" The students' responses often start out with the obvious — "There's a man walking a dog and another man riding a bike. The picture looks old. I think it was taken in a city."
When a student offers a qualitative statement, the teacher asks for more information. "You said the picture looks old. What makes you say that?"
The students justify their answers by providing evidence from the picture. They may say, "It's in black and white, and the cars in the back all look like they were made a long time ago."
Next the teacher asks students to share differing opinions and provide justification. One student may say, "The man on the bike is wearing a suit. I think he is going to work on his bike because he doesn't have a car." The teacher then asks, "Does everyone agree? Is that why this man is riding his bike in a suit?" Another student might say, "I don't think so. I think he just likes riding his bike. Maybe they didn't make clothes for riding a bike then."
The discussion goes on until students have shared all they can about the picture.
The teacher summarizes what the students said. "So, after looking at this picture we think that, maybe relatives — who lived a long time ago. We can tell this because of what they are wearing and because the picture is black and white."
For the next activity, the teacher can either have the students write a few sentences about what they discovered, or read a text related to the picture.
Reading
Let's say students are reading about New York in the 1900s. The teacher points out that the same creativity and way of thinking that the students used to look at the picture will be used to understand the reading.
When students share about their reading, the teacher asks the same kind of VTS questions about the text. "What is happening? How do you know that?" The teacher makes a point of showing the students how sharing their ideas about the story are the same as when they discussed the picture earlier.
Writing
A variation of VTS was offered as a Bright Idea from Gemma De Vita, a teacher from Fulton County Schools in Atlanta, Georgia. In her Picture Description activity, she makes copies of an interesting picture and has the students glue it to a page in their notebook. The students write three to six sentences or questions about the picture and then share them. This allows the students to have a picture book with their own notes to remind them of what they are learning and thinking. Gemma says she likes to use the Picture Description activity in her classroom because, "Once I thought maybe I would try another strategy to introduce a selection, and my students asked where the picture was. They said they love doing Picture Preview and would I please do it more. They said, 'It's fun!' It also helps with all Language Arts domains: Speaking, Listening, Writing, and Reading. Students can also work at their own levels and challenge themselves as they hear higher level questions that they can use as models after their next reading selection. It also helps them compose questions, which they often need practice with."
The Visual Thinking Strategies method offers an easy, interactive and non-threatening way to get students thinking. There are no right or wrong answers, and anything that students believe can be justified by details in the picture. This opens up students' minds to the fact that, even in reading, people come away with different impressions and thoughts. These should be shared and discussed to further develop understanding for everyone. To me — this is the richest lesson of all!
Language Objectives: The Key to Effective Content Area Instruction for English Learners
By
Jennifer Himmel
(2012)
This article provides an overview of how to use language objectives in content-area instruction for English learners and offers classroom-based examples from different grade and subject levels.
On this page
Language Objectives: An Overview
Writing Language Objectives
Aligning Language Objectives and Standards
Getting Started
Next Steps
Final Thoughts
Resources
Video Clip: Language Objectives
In this article written for Colorín Colorado, Jennifer Himmel of the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) provides an overview of how to use language objectives in content-area instruction for English learners. Her overview includes:
what a language objective is
steps that teachers can take to create language objectives
how to implement language objectives in a general education classroom
how to align objectives to content and language standards
ideas and resources on how to support teachers as they become familiar with this practice.
Language Objectives: An Overview
Mrs. Shell has been teaching eighth grade math for twelve years. She has deep content area knowledge and wants to provide all of her students with authentic activities and tasks to relate the significance of the mathematical concepts that she teaches to their lives. Mrs. Shell has always felt successful at teaching her classes but this year has been different. Her sections include students with more diverse backgrounds than previous years, particularly more English learners.
As Mrs. Shell was beginning to feel frustrated with her inability to reach all her students because of their needs, she learned about one way to make her content more comprehensible to all her students — creating and posting objectives that tell the students not just what content concepts they will learn in each lesson, but also the academic language they will need to learn and use to meet the state's math standards. With this knowledge, Mrs. Shell is now confident that she not only knows what to teach, but also how to teach it so that all her students can be successful.
Academic English
Generally speaking, academic English is the language of schooling and the language that helps students acquire and use the content area knowledge taught in schools (Anstrom, DiCerbo, Butler, Katz, Millet, & Rivera, 2010).
Teaching content to ELs: The challenge
In my work supporting general education and ESL/bilingual teachers who provide sheltered instruction for English learners (ELs), I have met many teachers like Mrs. Shell. While these teachers want to provide effective instruction for their ELs, often they don't see themselves as language teachers and so they aren't sure where to begin with their students.
These teachers aren't alone, however, and they are facing a challenge shared by teachers across the country. We know that for school-age students, academic language is crucial for school success (Francis, Rivera, Lesaux, Kieffer, & Rivera, 2006). In addition, research allows us to state with a fair degree of confidence that English learners best acquire English when language forms are explicitly taught and when they have many opportunities to use the language in meaningful contexts (Goldenberg, 2008).
Yet while the explicit instructional support that ESL and bilingual teachers provide is essential to English learners' academic language development, English learners receive a majority of their instruction from general education and content area teachers who may not have experience teaching academic language development.
The question becomes then: What do general education classroom teachers need to do in order to support the academic English development of language learners, especially when English learners are one of many types of students they serve?
Teaching content to ELs: The solution
One principle that teachers of English learners can begin to apply immediately is creating and posting language objectives for their lessons. Many teachers are familiar with using content objectives to identify what students will learn and be able to do in the lesson. However, they are less likely to include language objectives that support the linguistic development of their students.
Implementing language objectives can be a powerful first step in ensuring that English learners have equal access to the curriculum even though they may not be fully proficient in the language. This is because the second language acquisition process requires opportunities for the language learner to be exposed to, practice with, and then be assessed on their language skills (Echevarria, Short, & Vogt, 2008).
To this end, language objectives:
articulate for learners the academic language functions and skills that they need to master to fully participate in the lesson and meet the grade-level content standards (Echevarria, Short, & Vogt, 2008).
are beneficial not only for language learners but for all students in a class, as everyone can benefit from the clarity that comes with a teacher outlining the requisite academic language to be learned and mastered in each lesson.
Now let's take a closer look at some examples and how to write language objectives.
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Writing Language Objectives
What is a language objective?
Language objectives are lesson objectives that specifically outline the type of language that students will need to learn and use in order to accomplish the goals of the lesson. Quality language objectives complement the content knowledge and skills identified in content area standards and address the aspects of academic language that will be developed or reinforced during the teaching of grade-level content concepts (Echevarria & Short, 2010).
These objectives involve the four language skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing), but they can also include:
the language functions related to the topic of the lesson (e.g., justify, hypothesize)
vocabulary essential to a student being able to fully participate in the lesson (e.g., axis, locate, graph)
language learning strategies to aid in comprehension (e.g, questioning, making predictions).
Below are examples of language objectives for different content areas and grade levels. They come from the Common Core State Standards for Math and English Language Arts (2012) and state standards in New York and California.
3rd grade Science, States of Matter
Content Area Standard Content Objective Language Objective
California: Students know that matter has three forms: solid, liquid, and gas. Students will be able to distinguish between liquids, solids, and gases and provide an example of each. Students will be able to orally describe characteristics of liquids, solids, and gases to a partner.
4th grade Math, Two-Dimensional Figures
Content Area Standard Content Objective Language Objective
Common Core: Draw and identify lines and angles, and classify shapes by properties of their lines and angles. Students will be able to classify triangles based on their angles. Students will be able to read descriptions of triangles and their angles.
7th Social Studies, Colonial Communities
Content Area Standard Content Objective Language Objective
New York: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of the geography of the interdependent world in which we live. Students will be able show how geographic features have affected colonial life by creating a map. Students will be able to summarize in writing how geography impacted colonial life.
9th grade English Language Arts, Informative/Explanatory Texts
Content Area Standard Content Objective Language Objective
Common Core: Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence. Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented. Students will be able to draft a conclusion paragraph for their expository essay. Students will be able to use transitional phrases (e.g., as a result) in writing.
Sources:
Common Core State Standards for Math and English Language Arts, 2012
Learning Standards for Core Curriculum, New York State Department of education, 1996
Science Content Standards for California Public Schools, K-12, reprinted 2003
How do I create effective language objectives?
Video Bonus!
Dr. Cindy Lundgren discusses the process of writing language objectives in this excerpt from her Meet the Expert interview.
Language objectives are directly correlated to content objectives. Once a teacher determines the lesson topic from the appropriate content standards, the teacher will want to begin thinking about the academic language necessary for English learners to complete the tasks that support the content objectives. This identification of the academic language embedded in the lesson's content will become the basis for the lesson's language objectives.
You can use the following guidelines to start thinking about appropriate language objectives for the lesson:
Decide what key vocabulary, concept words, and other academic words students will need to know in order to talk, read, and write about the topic of the lesson. Those words might be taught as a language objective. They should include technical terms, such as ecosystem, and terms like distribution that have different meanings across content areas. Other terms to highlight are those that language learners may know in one context, such as family (as in parents, siblings, etc.), but that have a different use in science (e.g., family of elements in the periodic table).
Consider the language functions related to the topic of the lesson (e.g, will the students describe, explain, compare, or chart information). See the WIDA English Language Proficiency (ELP) standards for examples of these functions for English language arts, math, science, and social studies for all English proficiency levels and grade-level clusters.
Think about the language skills necessary for students to accomplish the lesson's activities. Will the students be reading a textbook PASSage to identify the stages of mitosis? Are they able to read a text PASSage to find specific information? Will they be reporting what they observe during a scientific demonstration to a peer? Do they know how to report observations orally? Acquiring the skills needed to carry out these tasks might be the focus of a language objective.
Identify grammar or language structures common to the content area. For example, many science textbooks use the PASSive voice to describe processes. Additionally, students may have to use comparative language to analyze two related concepts. Writing with the PASSive voice or using comparative phrases might be a language objective.
Consider the tasks that the students will complete and the language that will be embedded in those assignments. If students are working on a scientific investigation together, will they need to explain the steps of the procedure to one another? The language objective might focus on how to explain procedures aloud.
Explore language learning strategies that lend themselves to the topic of the lesson. For example, if students are starting a new chapter in the textbook, the strategy of previewing the text might be an appropriate language objective.
(Adapted from Short, Himmel, Gutierrez, & Hudec, 2012. Used with permission.)
Aligning Language Objectives and Standards
English Language Proficiency (ELP) standards
Developing appropriate language objectives for lessons involves becoming familiar with a state's content area and ELP standards. Whereas the content standards will provide the topic of the lesson and what exactly the students should be doing with that topic (e.g., solving problems, creating models, ranking ideas), the English language proficiency or development standards help to identify language skills and functions that students should be working on to achieve academic language fluency. These ELP standards can help to identify:
communicative tasks (e.g., retelling, asking clarification questions)
language structures (e.g., sequential language, past-conditional tense)
types of texts students need to understand (e.g., informational text versus literature).
English Language Arts (ELA) standards
Other resources in addition to the ELP standards are a state's English Language Arts standards or the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History, Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects (CCSS). The English Language Arts and Literacy CCSS might be especially useful to teachers of English learners due to its attention to literacy across the content areas.
Additional resources to consult, especially if a state is a member of the WIDA consortium, are the Model Proficiency Indicators (MPIs) outlined in their ELP standards. The MPIs outline what an English learner at a specific level of English language proficiency can do in a language domain (e.g., listening) by addressing the language functions embedded in an example topic for that content area with appropriate scaffolds or support (Gottlieb, Cranley, & Cammileri, 2007). Classroom texts and other materials (e.g., science investigations, primary source documents) are other good sources to consult when preparing a lesson.
Classroom example #1: The cell cycle
To demonstrate how teachers can begin to explore identifying academic language in a lesson, let's look at how one teacher, Mr. Zhang, approaches this task.
Mr. Zhang's 7th grade science students have been working on the cell cycle. The content standards for 7th grade science indicate that students must be able to investigate and understand that all living things are composed of cells, with a key concept being cell division. The content objective for this lesson asks the students to compare and contrast the cycle of a normal cell with a cancer cell.
Because the students have already focused on the new vocabulary and grammar structures in this unit, Mr. Zhang and Mr. Lewis, the ELL teacher, decide that addressing the language functions required to complete tasks should be their next linguistic goal for the students. From there, Mr. Zhang and Mr. Lewis brainstorm some scientific language related to the cell cycle that might need to be directly taught in order for the students to master the content and ELP standards:
The language of comparison — in order to have students explain what they learned about the normal and cancer cell cycle (e.g., more than…less than)
Sequencing — in order to have students clearly outline the steps in the cycle for each type of cell (e.g., first, second, finally)
Recording ideas in a graphic organizer — for students to be able to identify main ideas and organize them (e.g., Venn diagram),
Summarizing — either orally or in writing, in order to have students demonstrate mastery of the topic.
Once Mr. Zhang and Mr. Lewis have identified the language objectives they want to focus on, they must look at the state's grades 6-8 ELP standards. When they look at the standards, they see that the students at low-intermediate to advanced language proficiency must be able to record information from oral input and explain, with detail, the similarities and differences between ideas/concepts/things. Given these ELP standards and the content objective, they decide that the best use of class time is to highlight oral language development and thus create the following the language objective:
Students will be able to orally explain the differences and similarities between normal and cancer cell cycles.
Getting Started
How can I get started?
Planning template
The Content and Language Objectives planning template used in SIOP Model workshops offered by CAL helps teachers begin to practice writing their own objectives.
Careful lesson planning
In creating measureable and student-friendly language objectives that support the content objectives, it is important that learner tasks in the lesson are aligned with the objectives. It is not enough to have well-written objectives that promote language acquisition if the lesson is lacking in tasks that support the objectives. If the language objective for a middle school social studies lesson is for the students to orally retell the key characteristics in a historical event using sequential language, it is important that the teacher previews sequential language with the students, such as providing sentence stems or frames, and builds into the lesson some structured pair work so the students have an opportunity to retell the event to a peer. Therefore, careful lesson planning is another essential step in preparing effective language objectives.
Collaboration
It is also useful for content area and ESL/bilingual teachers to plan lessons together, as we saw with the 7th grade science lesson scenario involving Mr. Zhang and Mr. Lewis. In this co-planning scenario, each teacher used his expertise to better integrate content and language instruction for the language learners. This type of collaboration can help a teacher like Mr. Zhang learn more about the second language acquisition process of his students and can help a teacher like Mr. Lewis become more familiar with the grade-level content expectations that his English learners encounter in content area classes.
How do I know which language objectives are best for my students?
The language objective that the teacher selects will depend on what the English learners in the class need most at that point in the year and what language is most important to understanding the content concepts. If the students have already spent a good deal of time working with new vocabulary, then the teacher might consider having students use that vocabulary to develop their writing skill by writing a summary of the process they followed.
Conversely, the teacher might want to help students become more proficient with a particular type of graphic organizer in order to develop more strategic language learning. As all teachers know, teaching is a dynamic and complex process that requires a multitude of decisions to be made. However, the advance planning required in creating language objectives allows teachers to better anticipate the academic English needs of all students thus increasing the comprehensibility of the lessons.
It is important for teachers to realize that even though their lesson may include all four language skills (it is good if they do, since the language skills reinforce one another), they do not need to post a language objective for every language-related item addressed in the lesson. Teachers address many instructional needs in a 50- or 60-minute class period. Rather than highlighting all language uses in a particular lesson, it is important for the teacher to think about what is non-negotiable in that lesson.
In other words, the teacher should keep the perspective of the English learner in mind and ask, "Of all of the skills and functions addressed in my lesson, which is most important for helping students meet the grade-level standard and develop their language proficiency?" These objectives then must be measureable (i.e., can you see or assess the student's mastery of that objective?) and written in language that accounts for the linguistic and cognitive development of the students.
Language objectives: More examples
A second grade English Language Arts class language objective might be something like this:
"I can write describing words about Charlotte and Wilbur."
A language objectives for a high school English Language Arts class might look something like this:
Students will be able to orally justify their character's actions during a discussion group.
How can I make language objectives "student-friendly"?
Both of the above objectives are measurable, but both also take into account appropriate developmental stages of the students. Teachers of young students (e.g., PK or K) may even want to consider further adapting the objectives. For example, we have seen kindergarten teachers use symbols such as a pencil to symbolize "write" and a mouth to symbolize "talk" when they post their objectives for the children to see. We have also seen teachers of young learners rely on pictures to show the key terms they want the students to use or to convey the topic of the lesson (e.g., a picture of a ruler and of hands to discuss standard and non-standard measurement).
One way that teachers can ensure that their language objectives are measureable and student-friendly is by using appropriate verbs. Because language objectives should provide students with practice in the four language skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, verbs related to those skills might include, but are not limited to, the following:
List
Retell
Summarize in writing
Record
Read
It is also important to not equate low language proficiency with limited cognitive ability. Therefore, teachers will want to make sure that the language objectives they create also reflect tasks that fall on the higher end of Bloom's Taxonomy and use verbs (e.g., orally justify) accordingly.
As noted above in the guidelines to creating language objectives, language functions are also a potential source for language objectives. Verbs related to language functions might include:
Describe
Orally explain
Report findings in writing
Classroom example #2: Solving math inequalities
This example offers some ideas for creating language objectives using the Common Core