Why bother?
So let's back up a bit. Remember the main purpose to ELD, at least the focus in term of language domains? The emphasis for ELD instruction is development of the listening and speaking domains. We know from research that students can not write what they can't speak, so ELD prepares students for their ELA time. (Much like the ELD standards provide the scaffold towards the ELA standards).
This means that ELLs should be speaking during the ELD block. Not just 5 minutes. Not just for one activity. They should be practicing (internalizing) newly acquired grammatical forms during 50% of this block! Yes, 50%. Practice makes automatic, and that after all is what we want our English Learners to be with the English Language and its great variety of grammatical forms and syntax.
So how does this happen?
Routines that are structured, predictable and create situations to engage in the language prompts you produce as part of the lesson in order to produce (speak) the grammatical form that will be part of the language response.
Structured means that they are used for a specific purpose (elicit the utterance of a specific grammatical form) and are selected to fit a particular context. For example, you are probably quite familiar with the Pair-Share protocol. In ELD, one student can ask the language prompt: Which animal is ___________ -er than the ________________? (We are assuming that at the start of this week of lessons, the students learned the topical vocabulary to also fill in the language prompt.) The grammatical form of course is the comparative adjectival. The other student can then respond with The giraffe is taller than the chimpanzee. This is an appropriate routineto use during Guided Structured Practice.
Predictable means that students have practiced these protocols to the point that they can use these in any other content area. They have internalized this routine. In fact, savvy ELD teachers will spend the first days of schools having their students simply practicing these language routines, and thus save valuable time when actual ELD instruction begins.
Great! What other routines are there?
Stay tuned...
- W
About Me
- Weezy
- I am an extrovert by nature and an introspect when necessary. I enjoy life and do not take it for granted. My passion is to help educators become more effective at what they do, not only through changing practices, but changing assumptions about the students they teach- particularly, students of color, Standard English Leaners, English Language learners and all others who have been systematically denied access to core curriculum and subjugated to low expectations.
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