Expository Text and Middle School Students: Some Lessons Learned Chris Street Voices from the Middle Abstract When students reach their middle school years, they are entering a very important phase where reading is essential to their education. However, this is a time when students are known for avoiding reading. This finding is based on the article “Expository Text and Middle School Students: Some Lessons Learned” written by Chris Street. According to the article, one of the solutions to engaging students with expository text is to treat narrative text and expository text differently. They necessitate dissimilar skills and teaching methods.
The communicative activities are focused on target language fluency through practice. Finding the right balance between communicative and non-communicative activities can affect the motivation of the students. Not all students would want to continuously tackle grammar and vocabulary, whereas some will feel confident dealing with language construction and structures, but will fall apart when it comes to the usage of the language. It is this balance of assisting the students to develop their English language knowledge supplemented with English language practice through raising their motivation levels that can prove to be a conundrum. Yuru
Utilizing the approach of backward design when planning instruction involves the teacher identifying what the student should be able to understand and achieve by the end of the unit and then purposefully working backwards to scaffold instruction allowing for opportunities to deepen the understanding and depth of knowledge achieved (Wiggins & McTighe, 2006, p. 13). How am I, as an instructor, supposed to be able to determine the desired results, what evidence is acceptable and plan the learning experiences within the context of a school year that focuses on so much more than the state benchmarks? How do I create instruction utilizing backward design that takes into account the lack of skills my students come to me with in the beginning of the year? How will I ensure that my students retain the information (Wiggins & McTighe, 2006, p. 19) and perform with understanding, knowledge and skill on their own? Backward design seems to be able to answer those questions while being the pinnacle of good planning and instruction.
The key points are to clearly post, refer to, and review learning objectives and language objectives. Multiple levels of English proficiency are set by standards that the students are monitored by model performance indicators. A student’s native language affects his or her language and academic outcomes by being surrounded by other students who are also ELL with the same English acquisition. Students may utilize their home language more in conversations when speaking to classmates who are from the same home language group (Willoughby, 2009). In speaking to other ELL students whose home language is different, ELL students, use English but due to the students’ limitations in their English proficiency, they expose each other to more broken English I will value the instructional power of a word wall by frequently utilizing, maintaining, and updating it.All too often, secondary educators miss important opportunities to build the literacy skills of all students.
And this too, is far from the truth for some students, but not for others. ESL (ELL) is a term that should either be qualified when used or discarded as a general term. The assessment of ELL/ESL/EFL learners is a significant foundational process for teachers to determine the appropriate teaching and learning programs for their students from kindergarten to the mature adult level. ELL assessment traditionally includes measures of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. There are three basic kinds of assessment instruments.
My English is so poor; I want to improve my English. First time, I avoided classes that involved a lot of writing, as I was still intimidated by past failures. But when poor writing began to affect my grades in other courses, I decided to take a composition class. Now, I use my On Course textbook in my English class, this journal will help me about self-awareness. I began to see how negative scripts could cause problems.
According to Cummins (2012), if a student comprehends the information in a narrative text, but does not understand how to write a response in an expository format, he or she may not be able to adequately reveal textual understanding. When talking about comprehension, we talk about developing a student’s level of understanding with what they are reading. If students are reading different types of text then the comprehension strategies that they are using are going to be different. There are three types of these text that are different in their own rite. Narrative text speaks of a story, expository text provides factual material and poetic text can be an assortment of different writings, but not in the standard writing
It includes students’ ability to deduce the meaning of new vocabularies from the contextual clues. Incidental learning happens more specifically through extensive reading in input-rich environments, although at a rather slow rate (Coady, 2001). As stated by Harmer (2003) and Nation (2001), extensive reading is an enjoyable reading situation where a teacher persuades learners to select what they want to read for themselves from reading materials at a level they can comprehend. Karashen's (2003) comprehension hypothesis emphasized that comprehensible input is an essential and appropriate condition for language improvement and extensive reading programs seek to improve reading fluency, and reading skills generally, while simultaneously amalgamate knowledge of previously encountered grammatical structures and vocabulary. Other searches have stressed advantages such as enhanced motivation to acquire the new language and refresh confidence in reading (e.g., Brown, 2000; Waring & Takaki, 2003).
Preparing Teachers of English Language Learners: Abstract This proposed study will identify a framework for educators to provide high quality education to English language learners. ELLs are those students who are not yet proficient in English and who require instructional support in order to fully access academic content in their classes. Unfortunately many educators are not well prepared to face this challenge. This report will assist in the development f teacher education programs and the professional development specialists of ELL in providing the knowledge and skills that educators need about second language acquisition, development and challenges. The participants in this study will include fifteen principals and thirty teachers from schools that have exemplary served these student’s needs by using effective strategies, thus improving test scores and academic performance.
Teaching students to read and learning to read is an intricate task. Most children enter school with a considerable amount of competence in their spoken language but have little knowledge of how to read and write. There are many diverse approaches used to teach language and literacy skills and a lot of debate has arisen on how to best teach beginning reading. Some educators advocate for a phonics based approach, while others support a whole language approach. This paper will briefly look at these two different approaches, discuss some options on how best to deliver an effective reading program, and review a commercial reading program, in this case, Jolly Phonics, and its usefulness in promoting phonological awareness.