Crissy Harris-Strategy Share

                                                          Strategy Share

I recently attended a conference called Supporting English Learners in the Reading Workshop. The speaker was Lindsey Moses who has written and collaborated on many different books about best practices for ELLs.  The course started off discussing the different language proficiency levels and the differences between BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills, conversation) and CALPS (Academic Language Proficiency.)  As we know, students gain conversational language much more quickly than academic language. This is why we see so many of our students holding full conversations on the playground but not contributing to discussions in the classroom.  This training introduced several ideas that I want to take by to my classroom that I feel would be useful for all classrooms.

The first few strategies involve how to encourage students to participate in group discussions and get them to practice their speaking skills.  The best way to improve a student’s speaking ability is to allow them to talk frequently in the classroom.  Here are some ideas I thought were very useful.  These ideas give students more “wait time” so they are able to form their ideas before they have to share them to the class.

Think, Whisper, Let it Go:  The teacher poses a question to students. Then, she gives them time to think.  Once they have an answer they whisper it in their hands.  Once students have had time to whisper they “let it go.” This means they either shout out their answer or raise their hand to tell their answer to the class.  This gives students lots of wait time so they don’t feel pressured to come up with an answer on the spot.

Talking Chips:  The teacher gives a problem, question, or topic to a group.  Then, she gives each child in the group 1-3 chips.  Each child will have their own color.  Then, when a child wants to say something in the group they put a chip in the center.  When a child has used all of their chips they can’t contribute to the discussion anymore until the next topic.  The teacher can then quickly see which students are using their chips and which ones aren’t contributing to the conversation.

Stand Up, Hand Up, Pair Up:  The teacher poses a question to the class.  Then all students stand up and put their hand in the air to signal they are looking for a partner.  They high five each other when they find a partner and put their hands down to “pair share.”  Once they finish sharing they then put their hands back up and look for a new partner.

I also really liked some of the reading ideas she gave us.  One in particular that stood out was how to teach students about character portrayal in books.  She used the three texts, Piggy Book, Giving Tree, and Paper Bag Princess to demonstrate this.  Students read the book and then think about how the character is being portrayed in the book. What is their role?  What are their characteristics? They then have to provide evidence for their answers.  They put all of this in a chart.  Some books also had the students focus on how the portrayal of the character changes in the story.  This helped bring a large and sometimes difficult concept down to the level of the students.  It also had them analyzing the books they were reading to see how different genders are portrayed in texts and to look for bias. 

She shared many great ideas that I wrote down but these were my favorites that I felt I could take back to the classroom and start using quickly. I look forward to checking out some of her books to try more of these strategies in the ESOL classroom.

Sources:  https://lindseymoses.weebly.com/