Question 4: Catering for diversity and metacognition Flashcards
What should we consider when trying to support EAL/D students? (Tutorial)
- Cultural conceptualisations and world views
○ recognise that students bring their own cultural knowledge, attitudes and values to the classroom to make sense of their new environment
○ encourage students to maintain their identity and connections within their own communities
○ Understand that cultural background may affect the learning process - Use of home language
○ allow students to speak, read and write in their home language
○ value and encourage maintenance of home language in the classroom and out in the community - Silent period
○ students experience a silent period during which they will observe and acquire new SAE language understandings and behaviours
○ a fear of embarrassment could be a concern for some students - Social vs. academic language
○ students typically develop social proficiency in SAE within two to three years, confidently communicating, socialising and understanding most conversational language
○ it takes between five and seven years to develop academic language and possibly longer for limited schooling students
What are the essential elements for EAL/D teaching? (Tutorial)
○ Feedback (Rubrics and Criterion)
○ Explicit teaching (Purpose of learning, Explains what is required, How to transfer information)
○ Oral Language (Emphasises speaking, help students hear, phonemic awareness)
○ Scaffolding (Make it clear, Achieving success)
○ Register (Informal and Formal language)
○ Visuals (Pictures and Graphics)
○ Building vocabulary (Daily basis)
What specific strategies are needed to scaffold language learning? (Tutorial)
○ Starting with simple language concepts and gradually build complexity - students need a strong foundation before more advanced language skills
○ Practice and reinforcement - providing opportunities for students to practice new language skills in different contexts (formal/informal)
○ Informal conversation in everyday conversations. Then, introduce informal language so they can understand the differences.
○ Authentic learning experiences
○ Promote two-way communication (e.g. role-play, interviews) - students practice speaking, listening and responding.
○ Integration of oral language and written activities - Storytelling, debates, group discussions (reinforce students understanding of both spoken and written texts).
○ Focus on articulation and pronunciation
○ Questioning/instructing/stating
○ Practice language learning in the context of different text types
- Explicit teaching and exposure to the language and structural features of different text types
○ Use purposeful opportunities to develop specific speaking and listening behaviours
○ Explicit teaching of graphophonics
○ Encouraging use of language in the classroom - class and group discussions, real-life applications
Repeated practice of language learning
How can we support English language learners?
Cameron & Dempsey (2016)
1. Shared reading in small group
- Provides opportunities to hear fluent and expressive language
- Learn how books are organised - may be different to first language
- Makes reading process explicit
2. Collaborative discussions
- Opportunity to listen to conversations
- Practice speaking
- Learn new vocabulary
- May need to work in a group of 3 to hear a conversation
3. Intensive vocabulary instruction
- Need explicit instruction and multiple exposures to learn new words
4. Oral presentations and role play
- Building towards presenting to the whole class by presenting to a partner, then small group to increase confidence
- Choral reading helpful
- Informal role play
5. Talking and writing frames
- Sentence starters to build confidence to speak in sentences
- Use correct grammar
- Use academic vocabulary
6. Shared and guided writing
- Oral and written language closely linked
- Often plan writing by talking first
- Share approach - explicitly demonstrates skills such as how to turn ideas into sentences, select vocab and write in sentences
7. Questioning
- Checking for understanding of new concepts and ideas
- Moving to open questions is important to deepen understanding and expose students to a variety of different language structures
- Use elaboration prompts to explain and justify
8. Authentic contexts for learning
- Real experiences than connect students with their class, school, community and the wider world
- Shared experiences provide context for building specific vocab
How do we use the EAL/D program maps (SCSA, 2014)?
○ Identify the phase of learning (year)
○ Determine the SAE language acquisition level (beginning, emerging, developing, consolidating) using the mode overview which is a synopsis of the modes.
○ Refer to the assessment pointers for specific observable learning behaviours in each language modes.
○ Implement program - implement teaching and learning strategies in all learning areas.
○ Assessment - refer to assessment point to determine student placement
○ Student achievement - to achieve a level in a mode students need to demonstrate achievement across a range of tasks & determine an EAL/D level for each of the modes
○ Reporting to parents - use the EAL/D progress report as an alternative to the mainstream English report. Translated letters are available to parents too
○ Mainstream assessment - Students require ongoing monitoring of SAE acquisition, using the EAL/D progress map.
What are the four levels of SAE language acquisition and how are they generally categorised?
Categorised into beginning, emerging, developing and consolidating. From there it is subcategorised into 8 levels.
Describe the 4 levels of speaking in the SAE language acquisition according to the EAL/D program maps (SCSA, 2014)
- Beginning (Speaking): Still relying on contextual environments to provide vocabulary and slowly building small banks of vocabulary and simple sentences.
- Emerging (Speaking): Attempts more communication on the basis of building relationships in social settings. Code switching at a simple level.
- Developing (Speaking): Developing academic language in SAE with minimal support, have an awareness of how spoken texts differ across cultures, extends language understandings to produce complex and comprehensible speech and can plan and rehearse formal speech.
- Consolidating (Speaking): Demonstrates and has greater control over their language, structure, and monitoring/reflection
Describe the 4 levels of listening in the SAE language acquisition according to the EAL/D program maps (SCSA, 2014)
- Beginning (Listening): Recognising standard speech in contextual environments. Becoming familiar with common SAE and sounds.
- Emerging (Listening): Moves from recognising to comprehending and understanding speech. Increase in awareness of text purpose and social situations.
- Developing (Listening): Comprehends and organises information from broad range of speakers, listens and communicates with confidence, listens for relevant detail and comprehends spoken SAE and expands on content vocabulary.
- Consolidating (Listening): Comprehends at a greater level with more confidence. Listening varies between specific purposes, informal and formal situations. Wider vocabulary that can be used to respond to questions and texts.
What is metacognition?
Thinking about thinking and learning how to learn
How can metacognition be used to help cater for diversity?
First steps
Metacognition
- Reflecting on strategies or content
- Representing learning
- Reporting learning to others
- Strategies for reflecting and representing learning
○ ‘Five minute reflections’
○ Goal setting
○ Self questioning
○ Think pair share
○ Reflective questionnaire
○ Cumulative charts
○ Learning charts
○ Concept maps
○ Venn diagrams
○ Learning logs
○ Look what I can do
○ T-charts
○ Y-charts
○ KWHL framework
Describe some links between EAL/D progress maps and metacognition
- Dialogic teaching
- Differentiation strategies
- Use various representations (written, spoken, visuals) and allow students to choose the most appropriate for them
- Small group work to encourage reporting to clarify and extend learning -> supports EAL/D students by providing opportunity to discuss and link to others, develop fluency and support vocab use
- Questioning - focus on process not product -> Learning through interaction, close to open questions -> expose students to different language structures
- Represent thinking in concrete forms -? Key words, drawing a picture, graphic organisers etc.
- Supporting students to plan, monitor, and evaluate their work/learning
- Creating an overall environment where students take risks and have a growth mindset
How will you embed metacognition into your classroom when differentiating for linguistic/cultural diversity?
Knowledge of ways of catering for diversity - progress maps, overview and advice from SCSA, links to metacognitive strategies
E.g. 3 different ways to use metacognition in my classroom
- Goal setting
- Reflective questionnaires
- Y-charts
- KWL charts (Nailer, 2023)
Describe some of the strategies from Winch et al. (2016) when teaching people from diverse backgrounds who already speak another language
- Look to grow their confidence in what they do know
- Use stories to find common ground
- Look for translations in books
- Vast range of cultures within books
- Similarities between stories - character, setting, theme etc.
- Help children to celebrate the power of language: Word magic
- Highlight importance of new words and words in general
- Words are the tools of advocacy and protest
- Literature can alert readers to social problems and injustices
- The literature of protest
- Speeches - advertising and political need to be read critically
- An open-hearted literacy
- Encourage the telling of personal stories
