Beating Rachael

I think the whole purpose of this blog is to beat Rachael. To be perfectly honest Psychology stole a lot of my energy and now Rachael and I are making it a competition! We do actually enjoy learning but sometimes after school after the million meetings, emails and phone calls all you want is a sleep. However, posting late this week made me really angry! I’m a nerd but I don’t like making life hard for myself or letting myself down! So … We’re back!

So I began straight after the session by reading Understanding Writing Contexts for English Language Learners by McCarthey, S. J., Garcia, G. E., López-Velásquez, A., Lin, S., & Guo, Y. (2004). Understanding writing contexts for English Language Learners. Research in the Teaching of English, 38, 351-394.

It was a good one to start with as the ideas were really interesting and I found it ‘easy’ to read, but I also found it really confronting. Teaching ESL student, or students with low-literacy skills we can become inclined to think that they’re not smart or able to think. The authors make a really valid point at the start of the paper students from diverse language backgrounds are tending to lag behind on indices of literary achievement. The authors continue on to say that many of these students receive watered-down instruction emphasizing drill and practice, and offering few opportunities to be involved in their own learning, speak their native language, read challenging texts, or write about their personal experiences (page 351). It is important to acknowledge that all students (including ESL students) need to be challenged academically. I believe that we can’t just teach writing out of context, we need to be giving our students strong material to work with and from this we can help them improve their writing.

Rachael, Rita, Christian, Jess, Anne and myself were all recently involved in writing a learning element for a presentation we were giving at a Conference. Rita has since worked more on the learning element and it is the one that she will be working with Capstone What scares you the most? This learning element focussed on writing a narrative, by analyzing a short story. The element really focuses on ‘good’ writing, without any skill or drill. At Lanyon we really focus on trying to improve writing, using the Learning by Design framework, first steps and learning intentions (assessment for learning). This involves teaching writing in context, teaching writing explicitly, teaching writing through reading, making achievable goals, and working individually with students to improve their writing. It also makes teaching enjoyable, I don’t think I could do this job if I was doing drill and skill type work, I’d only end up trying to deal with the behavioural problems from my bored students!

While teaching narrative is important, I also think it is important to teach different text types. There is so much focus on narrative and yet we’re never asked to write a narrative in our real lives! I understand that having a knowledge about creative writing can help improve your writing in other areas, but do my students? I think we need to be explicit about what we’re teaching and why! I think it is important to read and write different text types. My students recently wrote an information text, they created their own A3 page that was modelled to look like a text book. The students had to really think about what went into it, where to place it and how they should write. They’ve also written a speech, a story, poetry,  a play, text transformations, paragraphs, a letter and they’re going to write an information text. As well as journal writing (cooperative reading) and reflections. I make it really explicit that we need to transfer the skills to each task, and also what skills they don’t need in this task.

I think the one thing that I really picked up in the reading is that it is really important not to pigeon hole students, whether they are ESL or students who have low literacy, it does not mean they are dumb nor should they be treated this way.