Book’s Blog 11

                          Final word

                 
            

As I read the book, I feel that the reason of the book is to purify scholarly research and make it available to practicing teachers. Yvonne and David Freeman review a broad range of research, from Cummins’ work to the research and theories of John Ogbu, David Brown, Halliday, James Gee, Robin Scarcella, Mary Schleppegrell, and many others. They approach the issue from the point of view of ESL research. They tackle how to effectively address the goals of simultaneously developing academic content knowledge and English language proficiency among the nearly five million English language learners (ELLs) in the United States.

I believe that this book is particularly essential for secondary content area teachers of diverse students in a variety of contexts. The Freemans bring in examples of individual students to illustrate the challenges, present summaries of relevant research, and suggest practical applications to teaching throughout the book. Although it is written primarily for secondary content area teachers, the authors’ approach to teaching ELLs as a whole and their inclusion of a wide range of applicable topics, including language acquisition theory, instructional strategies, and scholarship, make this text a worthy read for educators, researchers, linguists, and policy makers alike.

I like how they organize the book. One of the greatest strengths of the book is how they include some application activities in each chapter, encouraging readers to discuss and apply concepts in light of current research. Moreover, as I said above, the authors present classroom examples to illustrate research-based recommendations on supporting academic language development, suggesting methods teachers can employ across the content areas. Teachers at the middle and secondary levels will benefit from applying these strategies, and teacher educators in TESOL and bilingual education may also find the book useful as required or recommended reading in methods courses.

I am pleased to realize that there is plenty to learn from the book. It is worthy to buy because it has a lot of ideas that I will implement for my future lesson plans. I have more ways to scaffold and benefit my students. I think it is important read book for all teachers, particularly new teachers. There are many helpful tips that explain research on second language acquisition and support every statement teachers need. It breaks many misconceptions about English Language Learners, such as the differences between conversational and academic language proficiency and the reason why many students are inappropriately placed in early exit programs or Special Education programs. It is very user friendly and has a lot of examples that are easy to picture.

Overall, I am so glad that I got this book. I recognized why it is available in my country that is not an ESL context because it should be on the desk of every language teacher regardless the context. It guides me to the right direction to make sure that I consider all the different levels of academic language support I must provide in the classroom.


Many thanks to all readers.
Many thanks & regards to all who comments. 

Book’s Blog 10

Chapter 7      Teaching Academic Language and Subject-Area Content                 
The Freemans start this chapter by confirming that many ELLs do not develop academic language proficiency. They review test results in order to consider several factors  that contribute to their poor performance such as:

• Inadequate first-language support and development.
• Inadequate instructional support.

They give an example of ELL high school learner who often spent hours studying and memorizing but none helped him to become more proficient in reading and writing in English. He always blamed himself for his poor grades and his teachers assumed that he had not studied hard enough.

This beginning enables them to provide some suggestions for improving the academic performance of ELLs & struggling readers. They start with major suggestions to synthesize the current research:

1. Success despite despite work.
2. Identity, engagement, and motivation with culturally relevant texts.

Then, they introduce nine effective practices that Short & Fitzsimmons (2007) identified as being critical for school success for ELLs.

1-     Integrate all four language skills into instruction from the beginning.

2-     Teach the components and processes of reading and writing.

3-     Teaching reading comprehension strategies.

4-     Focus on vocabulary development.

5-     Build and activate background knowledge.

6-     Teach language through content and themes.

7-     Use native language strategically.

8-     Pair technology with existing interventions.

9-     Motivate ELLs through choice.  

I like the example the Freemans provide from a teacher, Mary, who have worked successfully with these students. They proof that Mary’s lesson incorporated all these suggestions and practices.  

For teaching both language and content, they start with Barwell’s general definition:

                    “Language and content integration concerns the

                   teaching and learning of both language and

                   subjects area(e.g. science, mathematics, etc.)

                   in the same classroom, at the same time” (2005, p. 143)

To consider in teaching language and content, Barwell outlines a framework of 4 dimensions:

1)     The policy and curriculum dimension.

2)     The institutional dimension.

3)     The classroom interactional dimension.

4)     The theoretical-methodological dimension.

I think teachers working with LTELs, SELs, LFS students, and struggling readers should consider these dimensions when they organize curriculum. If content and language teaching experts collaborate in designing and implementing curriculum, those learners benefit. For example, one such collaboration has been between science teachers & ELL teachers & researchers. The result is a book published by the National Science teachers Association, Science for English LanguageLearners: k-12 Classroom Strategies (Fathman and Crowther 2006).

                   
                                   

The Freemans provide numerous recommendations from the research demonstrating how teachers can build curriculum that teaches both content and language concurrently, using thematic approaches and culturally relevant materials. They mention 4 reasons to teach language and content:

1.  students learn both language and content.

2.  language is kept in the natural context.

3.  students have reasons to use the language.

4.  students learn the academic vocabulary of the content areas.

All in all, the final chapter goes back to the broad, school-wide challenges of supporting ELLs for academic success through the integration of language and content instruction, while also giving a detailed description of a unit developed by a teacher on the novel The Circuit that addressed the students’ need for identity, engagement, and motivation. Although ELLs face double the work of other students, they can succeed when teachers implement effective instructional strategies and teach both language and content. I believe that this chapter has many steps and answers to questions 2, 3, 4 and 7 of farming questions for our course.

     

Book’s Blog 9

Chapter 6      
Developing Academic Vocabulary and Writing Content and Language Objectives

The Freemans focus on the word level in this chapter. I have found them offer specific ways teachers can Help ELLs and struggling readers develop academic vocabulary. I like how they look at the history of the English language to trace how academic words entered the vocabulary and how they distinguish between 2 types of academic words:

a)     Content-specific words.

b)     General academic words.

They summarize 4 procedures of Graves (2006) that teachers should follow to ensure effective vocabulary development:

1-     Provide rich and varied language proficiency.

2-     Teach individual words.

3-     Teach word-learning strategies.

4-     Foster word consciousness.

They argue that researchers have found these 4 keys very essential for developing academic vocabulary. For each of these, they provide examples of academic language and targeted strategies teachers can use as they teach academic vocabulary. They cover different contents such as language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. For example, they talk about developing math vocabulary through daily math journals (130). They also examine subject-specific textbooks, describing the challenges these pose for students and recommending ways to make texts more accessible to ELLs and struggling readers.

For getting an effective approach to teach individual words, they describe Marzano’scomprehensive approach that has 6 steps. They describe these steps and how the approach could be used in any content area and be modified to meet the needs of ELLs. Then, the Freemans offer some strategies for building vocabulary such as:

-        Using context clues.

-        Using word parts.

-        Using dictionaries and related reference tools.

-        Using cognates.

To teach both content and academic language, I have enjoyed their suggestions of how they recommend teachers to plan carefully by using a backward planning design. It is a good model for including both content and language objectives. Backward design includes 3 steps:

1)     Identify desired result.

2)     Decide how you will determine if students have achieved those results.

3)     Plan instruction and learning experiences.

These steps should be involved in teaching language. Teachers should identify aspects of academic language students should learn, decide how to determine if students have achieved those results, and plan instruction and learning experiences to help students achieve those results. They state that content objectives are taken from content-area standards and specify the knowledge and skills students are expected to develop language objectives. In planning for language instruction, teachers must develop language objectives as well as content objectives for their lessons. Language objectives specify the language forms and functions students should develop to comprehend and express the content they are studying. They give some examples of related content and language objectives that are particularly important for ELLs.

One of the interesting quote from this chapter is the following:

"Any effective approach to helping ELLs and
struggling readers develop academic language
proficiency must include teaching academic
language at the text, paragraph, sentence,

and word levels" (p. 143).

For more info, come here.

                   

Book’s Blog 8

Chapter 5        Supporting Academic Writing at the Paragraph and Sentence Levels

    

The Freemans shift their attention to look closely at paragraphs and sentences. I like the following quotation from the first paragraph:

                      “Academic language is complex, but when teachers underst

                        and the different levels of academic language, they can scaffold

                        instruction and help all their students learn to read and write

                        the academic language of school” (p. 104)

Because of such quote, I think the authors analyze academic language at multiple levels: text, paragraph, sentence, and word in last, current, and next chapters. For each of these, they provide examples of academic language and targeted strategies teachers can use as they teach language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. The authors also examine subject-specific textbooks, describing the challenges these pose for students and recommending ways to make texts more accessible to ELLs and struggling readers. They get to the practical issues of how to guide students to read academic textbooks, write for academic purposes, and learn academic vocabulary.

In English, there is an expected structure for paragraphs in academic writing. They give a lot of suggestion on different ways students can construct coherent & cohesive paragraphs and create smooth, focused paragraphs with all sentences linking back to the main topic. They talk about 3 patterns of cohesion in paragraphs: constant, derived, and chained. They also suggest several activities to help students learn how to use the previous 3 patterns to give their paragraphs greater cohesion. Here is a very helpful link for all learners.

From their description, I think that students can learn that there is more than one way to achieve the goal of a focused paper with proper scaffolding to start experimenting. I like how they give an example of doing an activity to analyze paragraph structure from an integrated physics and chemistry book.

After that, they move their talk to the language at the sentence level by showing the learners how the writers of academic texts connect their sentences and guiding them to better writing. They offer different ways of clauses are linked in English and describe different types of clauses such as embedded, paratactic, and hypotactic clauses.

They show how the teachers can help students to understand the complex writing of academic texts through sentence combining that is an effective strategy for improving students writing. This step will lead them to produce more complex writing and, then, they need to develop a repertoire of words and phrases. 

Finally, The Freemans describe 2 strategies to help struggle learners to read & write academic texts:

a)     Sentence transformation. 

b)     Paraphrase.

Regarding the framing questions of this course, I have found that This chapter helps to answer the questions which focuses on the how to write and writing to learn as I explained above

Book’s Blog 7

Chapter  4        Coping with Academic Texts & Textbooks

As I pointed that chapter 3 goes into a detailed description of academic registers and cultural influences on discourse. This chapter and the next three chapters get to the practical issues of how to guide students to read academic textbooks, write for academic purposes, and learn academic vocabulary. This chapter addresses the variations in the language used in various content areas. I enjoyed reading how they examine the characteristics of content-area texts & some problems with the textbooks. They follow Fang’s identification of the expository language found in the texts. Fang (2008) categorizes 4 unique features of the language:

a)     Expository texts contain many technical terms.

b)     The language is abstract.

c)     Academic texts are dense.

d)     They are more authoritative than oral or written narrative texts.

From these features, no texts can be completely objective, and the presented information is not accurate in most cases.

It is interesting discussing about contradictories in textbook language. The Freemans states that “the style of writing varies considerably, even within one textbook” (p. 74) and this variation in style is common in school textbooks for many reasons. One of them is that readers have to adjust their reading to match the language styles.  Another reason is that these textbooks do not provide clear models of how students should write.  They list several problems with textbooks, for each content area, such as:

-        Textbooks are superficial, even though they are very long.

-        They are hard to read, they are essentially reference books.

-         They are badly designed.

-        They are authoritarian.

Within these problems, they talk about the dryness of these textbooks, no stories, many facts, no updates, errors, the process of choosing them, the cost … etc depending on Daniels & Zemelan (2004).   

To cope with textbooks, the author suggest to introduce informational texts in the lower grades.  Furthermore, secondary teachers should supplement textbooks with informational texts that students can read, and they should teach them strategies for reading expository & academic texts. They need to scaffold instruction that supports them in reading texts in different subject areas as Dr. Pence suggested to do in the history content. There are 5 causes for including more informational reading:

1-     Informational text is the key to success in schools.

2-     Most reading done outside school is informational.

3-     Many students prefer nonfiction.

4-     These texts often relate to students’ interests.  

5-     They help students to build important background they need for different contents.

The Freemans argue that engagement in reading is a key to academic success. They offer the “Engagement Model of Instruction” by Guthrie & Davis (2003) who identify 6 practices that build motivation and promote reading engagement:

1. Knowledge goals.
2. Real-world interactions.
3. Many interesting texts.
4. Support for student choice.
5. Direct strategy instruction (includes 10 strategies).
6. Collaborative activities.

There are several challenges involved in finding ways to engagement learners in reading content-area materials. The Freemans offer 2 strategies for helping ELLs & SELs, who struggle with reading, to engage with texts that represent different academic genres:

A)   Read & retell.

http://www.myread.org/monitoring_read.htm

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+power+of+read+and+retell.-a0228435388

B)    Text analysis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_analytics

Both are tools for understanding academic genres. Both scaffold academic language & enable students to build academic language proficiency.      

_________________________

Fang’s paper @

Guthrie & Davis’ article @

Book’s Blog 6

Chapter 3        Making Sense of the Academic Register of Schooling

Jose is another example of a struggling reader & writer and still lacked academic English although he could communicate socially in English. The Freemans use him as both a typical example of long-term English learner (chapter 1) and a classic example of a student Cummins identified as having conversational fluency but lacking academic language proficiency (chapter 2).  They explore in more details:

1. What is meant by the academic registers of schooling
2. How teachers can plan instruction to help students develop these registers.
3. How to distinguish between oral & written registers of academic language.
4. To consider some complexities of both grammatical & communicative competence.
5. To discuss how students acquire linguistic competence through membership in social groups.

They talk about 2 types of context:

a)     Context of culture that includes ways of doing things and cultural norms for most daily activities.

b)     Context of situation that occurs within a particular culture and is described by 3 elements; field, tenor, and mode.

These three elements constitute a language register, which is the way language is used in particular context of situation within a particular culture. Register can be applied in different ways such as math register & social studies register.  All of this is what Gee calls them Discourses. The Freemans describe how to use the classroom Discourses to build academic registers. There are some specific methods discussed on how to extend the use of academic language in classroom discourse. The author mentions that only repeating an academic concept, or perhaps rephrasing what the student said, does not "extend student talk" and no new learning actually take place. They offers some ways to extend students talk and to help the students to bridge conversational & academic language registers. 

As I said above, they talk about the 5 points in details and move into sociolinguistic competence that guides them to discuss Gee’s primary and secondary Discourses as we studies in this course. Gee argues that language can be understood only within a particular Discourse. His notion of Discourse is similar to the functional linguists’ concept of a register, the language used in a context of situation that exists within a context of culture. However, as a sociolinguistic, Gee focuses on both the social aspects of context and on the linguistic aspects. The Freemans agree with Gee that school constitutes a secondary Discourse for everyone. It is “a place where students negotiate identities” as Cummins (2001) argued bilingual students often develop their identities based on primarily on their lack of academic English proficiency rather than on the many positive attributes they may possess (p. 65).

From this chapter, the Freemans start analyzing academic language at multiple levels such as text, paragraph, sentence, and word. For each of these, they provide examples of academic language and targeted strategies teachers can use as they teach language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. The authors also examine subject-specific textbooks, describing the challenges these pose for students and recommending ways to make texts more accessible to ELLs and struggling readers.

Book’s Blog 5

Chapter 2        Distinguishing Between Academic and Conversational Language

Chapter 2 starts with an example of ESL struggling learner. Dolores was 14 when she came from El Salvador to the USA with a limited formal education. The authors present an essay from Dolores’ writings to differentiate between academic & conversational language. They analyze this essay and they use it later in different places of this book. Then, they review Cummins’ work and framework that shows the differences between academic and conversational language. I believe that every classroom teacher must understand the difference between conversational language and academic language and their acquisition as well.

I add a simple description of BICS and CALP as theorized by Jim Cummins.

Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) are language skills needed in social situations. It is the day-to-day language needed to interact socially with other people. English language learners (ELLs) employ BICS when they are on the playground, in the lunch room, on the school bus, at parties, playing sports and talking on the telephone. Social interactions are usually context embedded. They occur in a meaningful social context. They are not very demanding cognitively. The language required is not specialized. These language skills usually develop within six months to two years after arrival in the U.S. Problems arise when teachers and administrators think that a child is proficient in a language when they demonstrate good social English.

Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) refers to formal academic learning. This includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing about subject area content material. This level of language learning is essential for students to succeed in school. Students need time and support to become proficient in academic areas. This usually takes from five to seven years. Recent research has shown that if a child has no prior schooling or has no support in native language development, it may take seven to ten years for ELLs to catch up to their peers. Academic language acquisition isn't just the understanding of content area vocabulary. It includes skills such as comparing, classifying, synthesizing, evaluating, and inferring. Academic language tasks are context reduced. Information is read from a textbook or presented by the teacher. As a student gets older the context of academic tasks becomes more and more reduced. The language also becomes more cognitively demanding. New ideas, concepts and language are presented to the students at the same time.

Cummins also advances the theory that there is a common underlying proficiency (CUP) between two languages. Skills, ideas and concepts students learn in their first language will be transferred to the second language. He hypothesizes that there are 2 components of language proficiency:

a)     one that reflected the ability to carry on conversations on everyday topics, and

b)     another that was needed to comprehended, talk, read, and write about school subjects (p. 28).

I like his definition of academic language as “the extent to which an individual has command of the oral & written academic register of schooling” because it reminds my with Gee’s Discourses. To help educators conceptualize the distinction between BICS & CALP, he used quadrants formed by 2 intersecting continua shown below to illustrate that conversational language is context embedded and cognitively undemanding while academic language is context reduced and cognitively demanding.

                            
               

or as the following figure that shows how to determine if a task or exercise falls within the BICS or CALP continua. By using a matrix with two axes (Context-Embedded language and Context-reduced language) we can see how certain task may be more or less demanding.

For more details, press here.