Guest Discussion: Helping Adult English Language Learners Who Have Learning Challenges

Hi group members,

My SME colleague, Miriam Burt and I are happy to announce plans for our upcoming guest discussion as follows:

Title:  Helping Adult English Language Learners Who Have Learning Challenges

Date: March 2 through 5, 2015

Description:  This will be a joint venture between the Adult English Language Learners and the Disabilities in Adult Education groups. The discussion will provide information and conversation on causes for learning challenges in some adult English Language Learners who may or may not have undiagnosed Learning Disabilities and how to help these learners thrive in the classroom.  

This discussion should be of particular interest to teachers of adult ELLs in non-academic ESOL programs who are primarily, but not exclusively, low or very low literate or who have experienced unusual difficulty learning.  The differentiated instructional component is aimed at teachers in ESOL settings that have mixed level classes; issues around learning challenges for ELLs apply to learners in any setting.

Guest Speakers:  

Robin Lovrien,  M.Sp.Ed: LD; Ph. D., consultant in adult ESOL; Dr. Lovrien is a lifelong ESL/ESOL teacher and specialist in learning difficulties in ELLs. Her professional work has focused on the learning difficulties of low literate adult ELLs as well as on ways to manage the adult ESOL classroom to be as inclusive for learners of varying backgrounds and abilities as possible.  Currently, Dr. Lovrien tutors non-English speaking immigrants to Downeast Maine, and continues to provide professional development to teachers in Maine and Massachusetts. 

 

Lauren Osowski is the ESOL Coordinator and an ESOL teacher at the Adult Learning Center in Nashua, NH as well as a member of the New Hampshire Adult Education Disabilities Committee. After receiving a BA in Sociology and Criminal Justice and working in the research field for a number of years, she began her teaching career ten years ago in Eastern Europe. In addition to teaching, Ms. Osowski has presented more than a dozen workshops for ESL teachers on topics related to all levels of English language learners. She has also completed several mini-grant projects for the state of New Hampshire, including her website, Adult Education Technology.

 

Alicia Broggio is currently the Professional Development Facilitator at Literacy Solutions NY. A faculty member since 2004, Alicia has taught all levels of English Language Learners. She has extensive experience with the New York State U.S. Civics For Immigrants (USCFI) curriculum. She has been a teacher trainer for the curriculum since 2006 and has trained dozens of adult educators throughout New York State. Alicia collaborated on the writing of two USCFI modules as well as writing the curriculum used by Literacy Solutions NY in its fee-based hotel and hospital vocational ESOL program  In 2009, as part of the Hudson Valley/Catskill Partnership Regional Adult Education Network (HVCP RAEN) Professional Development Project, she was asked to be a teacher coach. As a coach and mentor, she has evaluated and guided teachers in their classrooms to help them develop more effective instruction.  In the summers of 2007 and 2008, Alicia organized two highly successful family literacy programs at the Yonkers Riverfront Library. Later, she conducted a similar program for parents at several Head Start Centers. She has also been a Best Plus Test Administrator since 2005.  Alicia is pursuing a M.S. TESOL from Mercy College. She will graduate in Spring 2015.

As the date gets closer, we will send out some pre-reading selections to prepare for the guest discussion.

Now, I would like to open up this discussion thread for members to begin asking questions.  The questions will be shared with the guest speakers to help them plan their discussion content,  You can simply add your comment/question onto this message.  All comments and questions will be appreciated.

Thank you.

Rochelle Kenyon, SME - Disabilities in Adult Education

and

Miriam Burt, SME - Adult English Language Learners

 

Comments

Lauren, you have presented and excellent example of how incredibly wrong we teachers can be about a student, despite the months or years we've known them! The list you presented is very similar to what Maria Montano Harmon called Scripts for School (as opposed to Scripts for Work.) We take it for granted that our adult ESL learners even know what to copy, let alone getting it down correctly. These skills need to be explicitly taught and reinforced.

We give binders to our students. For many, this is the first binder they've ever owned and it makes them feel like a real student. But, organizing that binder is another matter. I give all of my students one of those colored sticky tape tabs. Every day at the beginning of class, I demonstrate removing the tab from yesterday's paper and putting it on the next page in the notebook, always putting newer material in the back to reinforce left to right orientation. I have rarely had a student who wasn't automatically doing this by the end of the second week. Most come in, take off their jackets, open the binder, and move that sticky tab before class has even begun!

Kat Bradley-Bennett
Longmont, CO

Hi again Kat,

In your comment above, We take it for granted that our adult ESL learners even know what to copy, let alone getting it down correctly. These skills need to be explicitly taught and reinforced..." would you consider this method Direct Instruction?  If so, this is one of the most effective instructional strategies for students with learning disabilities.

Lastly, would you explain more about "Scripts for School" please?  It sounds like something we would all benefit from.

Thank you~

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

Rochelle,

Direct Instruction is what I mean by explicitly teaching students classroom skills, such as notebook organization and copying from the board. I love the idea of using different colored white board markers and (again, explicitly) teaching students how to determine what should be copied, what could be copied, and what is not necessary to copy. The point I'm trying to make is that we can't assume students have these skills. We do them a huge disfavor if we don't help them develop these skills from the start.

As a Learning Needs Coordinator in adult education, I have yet to encounter a student with learning difficulties who had the first idea of how to take or organize notes. As a teen, I experienced exactly the same problem they reported to me; I'd write down everything and end up not really listening to the lecture or presentation and my comprehension was compromised.  All of these students had learning barriers and/or difficulties which could be accommodated, but not all had a diagnosed learning disability. They benefited greatly from direct instruction from the teacher or tutor how to take and organize notes in a way that facilitated study and review.

Scripts for Schools refers to language we use (and take for granted) that ELLs maybe don't have. It can be as simple as vocabulary, but it also includes understanding instructions (Egs: Open your books to Page 61. Go to the office. Fill out this form. Practice with your partner. Highlight the verbs. etc.). Basically, it's all the language needed to be successful as a student, which extends beyond the classroom content.

Thanks!

Kat

After I posted my description of Scripts for School, I read Robin's entry on ELLs with little to no educational background.  There is this: " It took psychology a while, but the field gradually came to grips with the fact that if you have not been too school and learned how to do "school" things, you would not be able to do well on a test that involved paper and pencil and drawings and words."

Those "school things" she writes about is what is meant by "scripts for school."

Kat

Continuing with the thread I started this afternoon about why adult ELLs fail, I wanted to add four more factors that cause problems:

3.; Continued-- another adult learning need that is too often ignored is that adults need and want highly relevant material and lessons.  This is especially true for our students who come to find an English class because they need English to retain a job, to get a job, to communicate with a doctor or a child's teacher or some other urgent need. The literature on adult learning is exquisitely clear about this-- the more the learning is relevant, the more engaged the learner is and likely to persist.  Yet, again in that audit I referred to earlier-- done just last fall in a large adult ESOL program in New England,  the auditor watched as generic lessons from ESL text books were taught with no effort to then make the lesson personal for the students.  In the study I cited from Minnesota about why students had dropped out of an adult ESOL program, students reported that though the lessons were well designed and lively, the content was not at all of interest to the students.   The manager of a very large ESOL tutoring program in a city in Maine recently reported that one reason her program had great retention of students was that she worked hard with the tutors to make sure each student's lesson was as completely relevant to what the student said he or she needed as possible.  This usually meant using either pieces of a wide variety of commercial materials or figuring out how to create highly personalized lessons.  In my training on using learning activities (what I call centers), this principle is front and center:  the activities are created with individual students from an individual class in mind.  They are decidedly NOT generic.   Just this evening, I was with three young Puerto Rican men who work in the salmon and lobstering industries here.  They came to study English because they need to speak to their colleagues and managers about their jobs.  We worked tonight on me finding out what their specific jobs were (one's job is taking the spines out of the salmon !!).   In the course of this lesson--only our third together, I also discovered that they do not go to the great restaurant across the street from their apartment for breakfast because they are too shy to try to order.   Can you guess what Wednesday and Thursday's lessons are going to focus on for at least half the time and what I will bring in to do that?   Relevance of content can be one of the great keys to success-- and the opposite is also true. 

4.  Another language issue:  First language interference is significant.   It is clearly documented in second/other language acquisition literature that the further a language is from English in terms of phonology (the sound system) grammar, word order, word use and meaning, and of course writing system, other features, the harder it is for a student to suppress the features and interference of his or her first/native language when learning English.  An example would be if a student's language has prepositions or articles, then the student is more likely to use them in English, even if incorrectly, whereas a student whose first language lacks these elements will have a hard time using them in English at all.   Added to this are the challenges that older learners face in hearing new language sounds correctly and getting the brain to translate that to sound gestures (speaking).  Robert De Keyser, in his challenging work on how second language learners acquire grammar, proposed that the older the learner, the more likely he or she was to focus on salient features of language-- the most important parts for conveying the language and the less they pay attention to prepositions and other words that do not carry the main meaning. This can result in what  used to be called derisively : Tarzan English:  speaking in nouns and uninflected verbs:  and mixing up pronouns:  me buy shoes.  Me not like shoes.   (fairly exaggerated, but if you are an ESL teacher, you know what this sounds like...).  Acknowledging the need for unseemly amounts of repetition, De Keyser says that for many adults to learn "correct" grammar and use complex structures more readily, the learners have to be helped to focus on those features with targeted repetition and practice.   A researcher at the University of Washington who studies how babies and adults learn language also says that adult language learners need MASSIVE amounts of repetition in order for the brain to establish an archetype of sound that it can recognize.  Thus if your learners do not appear to profit from correction, do not self correct, complete but do not use the grammar lessons and never notice features you have taught, it can be because of interference from the first language that is preventing them from even hearing or noticing the feature you are trying to get them to learn.  These are the "fossilized" learners-- some of the most frustrating for language teachers.  Since it appears they are not profiting from instruction and often are not making progress in applying lessons that are then tested, they seem to fit the LD profile. 

5. Another significant factor in learning is culture.  This topic could warrant entire books of writing, and needless to say I have dozens of stories about how culture interferes with learning.  My take is that cultural conditioning causes many learners to not be able to profit from instruction because what they are experiencing does not at all match what they expect and want according to their culture.  My most vivid example of this is the student from Africa who finally burst out one day in her GED class in Texas, " You GED teachers are SO STUPID!  You do not even know what you want us to learn!  In my country, the teacher tells us exactly what to learn and then we are tested on that.  You just tell us to study something and then we do not know what will be tested on!"   This is so painful to think about.  This student had no doubt excelled at memorizing passages her teachers gave her in her country and then could write them perfectly.  I taught this method when I was in West Africa, though every fiber of my body objected that this was NOT learning as WE know it in North America!!  Students who come from this tradition are often completely puzzled--as was this student-- by the notion of "study";  they don't know what it means to "study" if it doesn't mean "memorize."  I will never forget the row of older East Africans in one of my community college ESL writing classes.   They had done  poorly on a quiz and I realized that they had thought they could memorize answers but there were no answers to memorize.  I said in class as we were going through the test, "Who thinks they need to memorize the answers to do this test?"  They all raised their hands.  When I said they could NOT memorize because their answers would be personal, they all were stunned!!  Students can be offended when you ask them what they want to learn or ask them to set learning goals.  As one student told his teacher, " That is  YOUR job to tell us what to learn!"  Many students are completely baffled by the way their teachers treat them as peers or are very informal in the classroom.  Others get nervous when the teacher does not go through a text book from page one to the end in exact order.  Students from highly authoritarian cultures expect to be punished or humiliated when they make an error and some are even disappointed that the teacher does not care enough to call out a student for not doing his or her work correctly or for making an error in class.   These are real obstacles and students cannot just put aside their lifetime of cultural training in how school will be to accept what is happening in their classrooms.   It is helpful to have conversations on a regular basis about what is happening, what students expect, why you are doing things, and how what you are doing differs from what they expect-- or want.   Culture can interfere in many different ways, not just in how the classroom is run.   It pays to keep asking yourself and the students what could be different in their experience and their expectations. 

6.  Phonological processing skills are weak-- Phonological skills are the nuts and bolts of listening comprehension and reading and spelling.  In English, a competent reader has a high level of phonemic awareness--- an awareness of and ability to manipulate phonemes in words.  Good readers have a strong sense of onset/rime-- which is chunking words by beginning and ending parts -- c/at;  pl/ay   str/ipe  etc. and as a result, have a very strong sense of rhyme and can hear and produce rhyme readily.   Phonological processing skills develop over a long period of time in English speakers-- they are never fully finished in fact, while in other languages that are much simpler in the degree to which the writing system matches the spoken system, phonological skills are acquired early and fast.   Also, languages differ enormously as to how much phonological awareness is demanded as literacy skills develop.  In languages that are syllabic, not so much attention is needed for phonemes except at the beginning of words, for example.  Phonological skills transfer at the macro level (an awareness that the sound system governs meaning) but often do not transfer at the phoneme level for various reasons, the most common being that the student's first language has less phonological demand than English does ( E.g. Spanish-- in which every letter is pronounced.  Spanish speakers have a high degree of phonemic awareness--but do not have awareness of the feature of English that a word can have only two phonemes but have many letters: Sigh).  Since phonological awareness is critical for good reading in English, if an ESL student does not have it-- or have the awareness that he or she needs to learn the sound system of English because it is different from that of his first language--then reading problems can develop and listening comprehension may stay low.   This this problem can exist as a result of first language influence, or it can be the result of the student not hearing English accurately and therefore constructing words and spellings in his mind that are not correct in English (Was that "cup or cop?"), or it can result from having a low education and the student not having the metacognitive skills to compare what is happening in English to what happens in his or her language.   This is one of the huge differences that can be encountered in adult ESOL with low educated students that is far less likely, in my long experience, to occur with well-educated students in higher ed ESL.   Teaching phonics does not by itself address the problem.  The student needs to learn about LANGUAGE as a thing to be studied--something low educated students have often never addressed-- and learn to compare first language to the new language.   In fact, years ago when many efforts were being made in colleges to help those who could not learn a foreign language,  one prominent university in the Boston area had a class that did just that-- students learned how languages work, what their elements are, how sound creates meaning and how meaning is translated to the written language.  Students who were failing foreign language classes could take this class and were often helped by learning ABOUT languages rather than just attempting--and repeatedly failing -- to learn a language itself. 

7.  Though this is the last, it is one of the most important factors that I discovered-- but was not the first to name-- in causes for ELLs'  learning problems.  This last factor is " pedagogically induced learning problems"-- or problems created by the teacher, the materials, the curriculum, the school system, the educational model the student has encountered etc.   When students with no prior formal education are thrown in with students who are literate and learning comfortably, the non-literate are likely to do badly---and when compared to the literate students, will inevitably SEEM to have a learning disability.   This is an example of a pedagogically induced learning problem:  the needs of the students are ignored for bureaucratic reasons and the students fail to learn and then are blamed for not learning.  When students are tested with a test for English speakers even though the ELLs have not had enough time to become competent readers in English and are then presumed to have reading difficulties, that is a pedagogically induced learning problem.   When students' hearing and vision are not checked, and a student is considered to need special instruction in phonics but does not profit from it because she is, in fact, profoundly deaf, and then is presumed to have LD (see one of my articles in Focus on Basics), that is a pedagogically induced learning problem.  When all of the six other factors are ignored and students do not do well in class, that is a pedagogically induced problem-- one that could be avoided by screening, interviewing, careful teaching .   Dr. Alba Ortiz ,of U Texas-Austin, was the one who gave these problems this name-- I call them PILPS for short.   She noticed this issue in the 1970's as she was horrified at how many ELLs were being referred to special education.   Paying attention to LOTS of things is required to prevent students from being victims in the education setting.  As I have said VERY often, I think teaching adult ESOL is the BEST job in the world-- and the hardest. 

More tomorrow-- be sure to post questions or comments on today's posting -- I will keep answering all postings all week and beyond. 

Robin 

 

Robin,

Several years ago, I attended one of your sessions at the NASLN conference in Denver. You related an incident in which a student was sent to you as having a learning disability when all that was wrong was that she was profoundly deaf in one ear! That story has stuck with me all these years as a reminder that there is always so much going on in our students' lives and if we don't engage with them, instead of pigeon holing them, they'll vote with their feet.

I wanted to offer a resource for vision services, albeit limited. Lens Crafters has a program called Gift of Sight (called One Sight in some areas). They will provide a free eye exam and glasses to a student who a) is low income, b) has not had an eye exam in the past year, and c) has no health insurance that covers vision. It's not a full-blown eye exam, so things like retinal issues or cataracts are not addressed. But, for many students, it might be the first pair of prescription glasses they've ever had! We had to provide proof of our 501.c.3 status and guarantee that we would pre-screen students before arranging for them to get an appointment. Usually, we could refer 1-2 students per month, but that varies from year to year.

What about hearing resources? I've contacted service organizations here in town and the ones that provide any assistance for hearing issues either only serve children or they require proof of residency or citizenship. Does anyone know of any good, reliable resources for adult immigrants who have hearing problems?

Kat Bradley-Bennett
Longmont

Hi Kat,

Teachers have told me how difficult it was for them to get adult students vision and hearing tested as part of a thorough LD screening process.  You have asked a good question.  Finding free or inexpensive resources would be invaluable for the field.  I know that ABLE in Ohio had a statewide project to do just that.  Does anyone have more information on this?

Thanks,

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

Kat-- thank you VERY MUCH for remembering the NAASLN conference and the session on struggling learners.  The story about that learner is in one of the Focus on Basics issues to which Rochelle has provided links.   That case was one of several that confirmed strongly the necessity for a good intake screening and needs assessment, which I will address in a separate post.

I just wanted to add here that Dr. Laura Weisel of Powerpath has excellent, professionally-developed equipment for screening adult learners for basic hearing and visual capabilities.    The equipment is rather expensive, but if you have any adult ed programs near you that use Powerpath and have purchased Laura's equipment, you might be able to make arrangements to use the equipment once a month or to send learners to that program for screening.  The screening takes about 10 minutes TOTAL and is highly accurate. 

I know all too well that one of the reasons adult ELLS often lack glasses is that eye exams are considered expensive and the persons also think they can manage without glasses.  It was great to learn about the eye exams offered by Lens Crafters.  That is a very nice service, though it is unfortunate they do not check for cataracts etc. (I say that because one time when I was teaching at American University and beginning my work on behalf of struggling ESL students, I referred 35 students in one semester for eye exams, and of those one had eye disease, one had an infection and one had incurable damage to one eye.   That was just ONE semester.....   I was fortunate for a number of years in the DC area to be able to refer students to a behavioral optometrist, who does a more thorough exam of eye functions, such as tracking and binocularity (how well the two eyes function together).  Because I referred so many students, the doctors agreed to screen the occasional needy student for free.   Remember also that I mentioned in an earlier post that a large school I worked at in DC fairly recently for adult immigrants agreed to institute routine vision and hearing checks as part of the intake process.  As I have always found, 10% of any incoming group was identified with hearing problems and slightly more with vision problems significant enough to interfere with learning. 

I do want to mention that if an eye exam and prescription can be obtained, it is amazingly inexpensive to get glasses online these days.  A number of sites sell them.   I order all my glasses online and save astonishing amounts of money-- so much so that I can have different pairs of glasses for different occasions!   By inexpensive I mean $34 for a complete pair of glasses with progressive lenses.  The last time I bought those at an optometry center, they cost almost $300.  

One other cheap and easy help for students who don't see well enough to read comfortably are reading glasses available at Family Dollar and most drugstores and other places. These glasses magnify and come in various strengths-- and in various-- and often amusing- styles and colors.    Following the example of one of my teacher trainees, I started keeping a basket of those glasses on the table at my drop-in program.  They were EXTREMELY popular-- one older gentleman simply adopted one pair for himself!    Many of the persons I work with are very shy about going to any doctor because they cannot communicate easily, though the migrant workers are fortunate to have excellent health care through Maine Migrant Health.   This includes some vision care.  

I have often suggested that adult ESOL programs might try to create a relationship with a community clinic of some kind or some other health facility to arrange to have students' basic hearing checked.  It obviously would not be a flood of people and could mean a world of difference for a few.  Also, there are reasonably inexpensive hearing boosting devices available that could be used by students while at school. 

My attitude is that if a program and teachers are committed to this extremely important aspect of adult ESOL, they can find a way to make the screenings and prescriptions and devices happen.  

Robin 

Hi Glenda,

Those glasses can be lifesavers, can't they~  

In a training on instructional strategies that a colleague and I delivered, we demonstrated how our  "emergency kits" could address many of the problems that plagued our students.  One lucky attendee was able to keep the demo.  Along with inexpensive pairs of the glasses you mentioned, we included post it notes, stress relievers (squeeze balls) and other tactile enhancers, highlighters, overhead transparencies, pencil/pen holders, lined and unlined note cards, ear plugs, modeling clay, a clip-on light, E-Z Reader Strips, a small calculator, and an assortment of other handy, useful tools.  Lists were provided to all the attendees of the contents of the kit and where they could be purchased.

Have any of our group members used these tools with students?

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

Most of these items were added to my classroom over the years in response to student needs.  I use Play-Doh instead of stress balls.  It works just as well and can also be used for other purposes.  I often offer a ball of Play-Doh to students who are taking their oral proficiency tests.  I haven't done an official statistical analysis, but anecdotally, they always do better when they have something to do with their hands. 

Students are also "colored flag" happy!  The test for me as an instructor there is helping them to determine what to flag (or highlight, for that matter) so that the visual cues are actually useful.

The kit idea is very interesting - something I could pass along to teachers in PD workshops.  Can you attach the list of items?  I'd appreciate it!

Happy Monday!

Glenda

A big ongoing challenge for many EL educators, certainly including me, is accommodating the special learning challenges which some of our World English speakers face. WE speakers come from countries where English is the official language of government, commerce, and education, but speakers may use so-called "Pidgin" English or Creole and/or communicate in a different language in the home. Many West African students, for example, are considered WE speakers. Many WE speakers have much stronger oral skills than literacy skills; therefore, they may not truly fit into a traditional ESOL class.  While WE students may have relatively stronger oral communication abilities, their literacy skills often lag far behind. I usually do word study activities with all my beginner students, and for many WE students, "hearing," understanding, and applying sound/symbol correspondence seems to be a big challenge -- even though these students speak English. Many of these students have had limited education in their home countries due to civil war, poverty, lack of school facilities, etc., which obviously is a big factor in their success in adult ed. In addition, research on WE students from Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Liberia (de Kleine, 2006) shows that these students produce systematic grammatical errors which can be traced to their use of "Pidgin" or Creole in their home countries (note that my use of the word "errors" is based on expectations of Standard American English usage). In a busy classroom setting, the teacher often does not have the time or opportunity to help WE learners one-on-one. Are there any tips for helping these students succeed?

 

Sheila-- the student who speaks a variation on our English is certainly a challenging kind of student to have in class- in my experience they are not too happy about being in an ESL class when they consider themselves English speakers.  As you point out, their pronunciation and grammatical constructions vary significantly from what US ears or even British ears are accustomed to hearing.  

I am firmly in the camp of linguists who insist that the language people speak among themselves is itself adequate and "correct" -- World Englishes, in my mind, cannot and should not be compared to US English in terms of "correctness" and I can imagine that the speakers are much distressed by having their speaking patterns called incorrect.  Here in Downeast Maine, the purest Downeasters use a variation of grammar that is non-standard-- the only past tense form of IS   is WERE-- She were, he were, I were,  etc.    as in " She were wicked windy out there today."   or " He were fishing all last week and didn't get hardly a thing."   This is not incorrect English-- it is the dialect these people speak among themselves.   

The truth of the matter is that what these speakers of dialects and World Englishes need to know is that to compete and be successful in academic and some other situations, they will need to learn US standard English for writing-- and I have encountered a Jamaican who had severe reading problems.  As she was learning to read her reading comprehension was pretty significantly impacted by the fact that what she was reading did not match how she spoke.   She had to learn the 'alternative' version of grammar and word choice to understand her stories.  

The sound symbol issue is common where English is not pronounced as standard English is pronounced and taught.  I often wonder how children in New England write  the words where the   R has been subsumed-- as in Pahk ya cah in Hahvad yahd.  That is no joke.   And there are many such strong accents around the US. ( Here in Maine we use it as a joke-- lobster chowder is often written as "Lobstah chowdah" on signs....) 

When I have encountered this issue, I have told the speaker what I said above-- in school and for reading and writing purposes-- except creative writing-- they will get along better if they learn and use standard spellings and textbook grammar, but it is NOT asking them to REPLACE their language with more conventional versions--rather, just as a foreign language learner does, they are learning an additional language-- and they will learn to code switch when it is appropriate.  

It is extremely important, in my view, NOT to stigmatize these students as having "learning problems"-- as I noted, the learning problem they are most likely struggling with is why they are being asked to learn English. 

Robin 

 

 

At my school, students' placements are dictated more by their oral skills than by their written.  Thus, we end up with students in a higher level where they can follow the verbal lesson easily, but have trouble keeping up with the writing and reading.  I currently have two of these students in one of my classes.  Here are a few things that have been successful with them and helped advance their literacy skills:

  • They are so eager to learn that they try to copy everything I write on the board.  Of course, this makes them fall behind because they can't write quickly.  I devised a color system with them.  When I write on the board in black, they know that they should copy it.  When I write in blue, it is optional.  I will leave it on the board and they can copy it if they have time, and they know it won't get erased.  When I write in red, they know that it is not essential for them to write it down.  For the other students in the class who can differentiate the information on their own, they make their own choices about what to copy and don't know the "secret color code", which also allows the ladies to save face.  No one else know that they are getting that extra guidance.
  • I believe that in any class, no student should feel bored nor rushed.  I make sure to have English distractions at each table, small activities that students can work on during down time.  This way, when the higher students finish the exercise, they can grab an activity (matching, spelling, reading, etc.) while the lower students have time to finish.  No one is missing new information, and everyone is getting all the practice time they need.  If the lower students want to do the activities as well, depending on what it is, they can use it before class or take it home with them.
  • My class loves dictation!  However, it is very challenging for a couple students.  If we do a pair dictation, I put the low students together.  They will actually dictate each letter of each word to each other and have a blast helping each other get it right.  In the beginning of the year, I give them fewer sentences to work on together (but give them all the sentences to take home).  As the year progresses, they notice that they get faster and faster and are able to handle more sentences.  If we do the dictation as a class, I will casually put a copy of the sentences I am reading on the table next to them.  I will point to what I am saying as I go, and they can listen and see it then copy the sentences onto their paper.  Also, the class usually remains unaware of the fact that they are looking at the sentences (they are too busy writing their own!), which again allows the ladies to save face.

Hope some of these ideas are useful for your WE students!

Hi Sheila,

Thanks for joining in on this discussion with your fascinating message.  Can you tell us something about where you work and about the class you teach now or have taught in the past.  World English is a new term for me and I want to make sure our Disabilities group members understand it as well.

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

Hello all,

We had the most wonderful start to our guest discussion yesterday.  So much valuable information was imparted by our three guest speakers.  They covered topics from their outline and more including:

Struggling Learners: Why do you think they should be diagnosed?

Talking About Disability with Students from Different Cultures

Disability Terminology

Why We Think They Have LD

What Really Has to Happen When Learners Don't Learn

The Impact of Students' Educational Background on Their Progress in Class   

The Culture of School

World English and Learning Challenges

The Challenge of Educational Materials Used in the Classroom

Good Oral Skills and Low Literacy Skills

What Causes Adult ELLs to Struggle in Learning:

        1.  Vision problems and physical health

        2,  Level of education

        3.  Adult language learning issues

        4.  The need for highly relevant material and lessons

        5,   First language interference

        6.  Their culture 

        7.   Weak phonological processing skills

        8,   Pedagogically induced learning problems 

 

 

Were you able to access and read the selected pre-reading materials?  Do you have any take-aways from what you have read?  

 

Lastly, please don't forget Dr. Lovrien's question to you:

Why would you as a teacher want a student to be diagnosed with a learning difficulty?  What do you think would happen and how would that happen?

You can post your responses at any time.

So, welcome to Day 2 of this interesting discussion!   Rochelle Kenyon, SME        

Hello all-- I was delighted that Alicia and Lauren chimed in yesterday not only with examples of how non-literate learners are completely new to the culture of the classroom but also of how to help the slower and lower-skilled ones function in a multi-level setting. 

I term this group of learners the ones with "REAL special needs."  Here is where we really have to look at ourselves and our beliefs about learning to see how the notion of LD does NOT apply to these learners.   Since LD is intended to explain why a learner is not making normal progress in school, it is irrelevant to try to explain a non-literate person's struggles with the culture of school as LD-- they have never dealt with the written word before, nor struggled with what to us are simple routines of opening a book and finding a line to write on. 

As I began to examine teachers' claims that their students must have LD because they weren't learning, I saw that many of the students in question had little or no prior formal education before they appeared in the ESOL classroom in which they then struggled.    I began to examine this population much more closely.  I went to research of neuroscience and the brain and to research by psychologists who were attempting to determine if non-literate persons in places such as Mexico or Brazil had normal intelligence.  It took psychology a while, but the field gradually came to grips with the fact that if you have not been too school and learned how to do "school" things, you would not be able to do well on a test that involved paper and pencil and drawings and words.   As this realization dawned, researchers began to look far more closely at what was going on. 

For one thing, as LD expert and researcher Feggy Ostroski-Solis stated after many studies,  "School is a culture like other cultures."  We know the brain is shaped by the culture in which one grows up, and in the same way, school shapes the brain and the acquisition of knowledge and skills in it.  Therefore, concluded Ostroski-Solis, if a person hasn't been to school, he or she will do poorly on tasks that require school training-- as Alicia said-- even holding a pencil or figuring out what "the top" means on a piece of blank paper.   In our culture, children are exposed to school-type skills and literacy from the earliest ages.  They already know how to turn pages when they are small babies, and when children enter school they understand about finding things in books, putting your name at the top of the paper, etc. 

Persons who have NEVER been to school do not have that training and understanding of school procedures.   In an earlier post I mentioned a very unfortunate attempt in the mid-west to test some adult ELLs who were suspected of having learning problems.  I mentioned that most of them were previously non-literate and had struggled to make progress in their programs.  One of the behaviors reported by the testers was that the students being tested had no idea in which direction the test items were to be answered.  The same problem happened with the Sudanese young man I wrote about earlier-- when he was tested to find out if he had LD,  the tester reported that the student attempted to answer by working vertically instead of horizontally.  Again, this young man had had no real formal school before he got to high school and two years in high school had not yet convinced him of the primacy of horizontal questions.  

So lack of knowledge of school cultures and procedures and vocabulary and behaviors can be a HUGE reason why non-literate students may not do well in typical ESOL classes.  

Another closely related reason is culture-- a teacher in Wisconsin working with groups of pre-literate students finally conceded to the reality that these students preferred to work in groups and not alone.  The concept working alone and "doing your best"  did not exist for them. They wanted to help each other learn and make sense of the lessons.   Students who are confined to a desk by him or herself and not allowed to interact with others from the same culture may feel totally alienated and frightened by the classroom.   Similarly, a volunteer group in Denver conceded to non-literate Somali women's desire to sit on the floor to have class.  They had never sat in chairs to do anything formal and were highly intimidated and uncomfortable doing so for class.   This group of women, by the way, had been deemed " unteachable" by several social service agencies and volunteer education groups.   The volunteers who went to the women's homes, sat on the floor with them, encouraged them to discuss new words and ideas in their own language together, and above all, focused on what the women wanted to learn-- how to say the names of the pieces of clothing their children were wearing, which differed significantly from what the women were wearing- had enormous success with them and found them highly teachable, albeit at a pretty slow pace.

And this brings me to another factor that disenfanchises these students:  They are usually compared on tests and in book learning to literate students.  Of course they are going to look "disabled"!!  If a literate student can manage to answer a whole page of questions and talk about pictures, and a pre-literate student cannot because she has no idea what she is looking at, the outcome is understandable.   So I urge teachers NOT to use the same measurements of learning for the literate and the pre-literate or non-literate ( By the way--these terms were developed at the Center for Applied Linguistics-- preliterate referring to cultures with no tradition of literacy, such as the Karen or the Somali Bantu,  non-literate referring to people from literate cultures who never went to school.  the term illiterate, which is highly negative, can refer to a person who did not acquire literacy sufficiently or "on time"; ).  

Another factor influencing non/preliterate learners learning is their phonemic awareness.  I discussed this issue a bit in the long post on factors that cause ELLs to struggle in learning. Phonemic awareness refers to knowledge of sounds in words and is the foundation of reading and writing and listening comprehension.   Studies on preliterate or non-literate adults show that they typically have phonemic awareness similar to that of the 3-year old in our culture.  Furthermore, having never learned the concept of "language"--something that can be studies and dissected, as it were, the non-literate do not think of the phonological properties of words; rather they think about the meaning of words. So a famous experiment in Holland, where a great deal of research is being done on the non-literate, showed that when nonliterate students were asked --orally-- which word was longer-- car or bicycle-- they answered car-- because a car is longer than a bicycle.   So the idea of "phonics" -- letters that are supposed to represent something and then the letters having sounds as well-- is very difficult for many to grasp.  Teaching phonics before learners understand the concept of "language" is, in my view, the best example in our day of putting the cart before the horse.....  Children in our culture are extremely verbal before they really tackle the concept of phonics, yet non-literate learners are often faced with letters and phonics in their first week in the classroom, despite the fact that they hardly speak the language whose phonics they are trying to grapple with.

The concept of language as a thing, and harder still the concept that letters and words convey meaning, is conveyed well in the title of the study from Minneapolis entitled, "Teacher, the letters speak!"---  it is exactly that breakthrough that must happen for REAL literacy to begin to develop.  Our children know from infancy that the words on the page are a story and that the pictures and words in books go together. Again, the non-literate have never had the opportunity to learn that basic lesson.    One teacher I heard once explaining how she taught non-literate students "to read"  asserted that if you just had them repeat the words often enough, they would know them.   This is true for parrots, too, is it not??

The final obstacle that is huge for the non-literate is perceiving two-dimensional information on the page.  I need to leave now to go to some meetings.  I will complete that part of the discussion later in the day.

Perhaps Alicia and Lauren have more things to say about working with the non-literate and how much has to happen before they begin to function as other students do.

Robin 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you, Robin, Alicia, and Lauren, for sharing your expertise and experience so generously.

I would like to pick up a bit and expand on what Robin talks about when she talks about the teacher in Wisconsin. That teacher/researcher was Dr. Helaine Marshall, who, supported by a grant from the National Institute for Literacy (NIFL), looked at how adult Hmong learners in Wisconsin experienced success in learning English and how they didn’t. From this project, Helaine developed the Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm (MALP), a framework for marrying the learners’ preferred ways of learning with the expectations and requirements of western education. On the website that discusses MALP and the services and resources Helaine and her colleague, Dr. Andrea DeCapua, describe the framework:

"This new framework was then be implemented using three strategies: (1) Hmong students’ conditions for learning, namely, a relationship and immediate relevance, are accepted and maintained; (2) traditional Hmong learning processes, including cooperation and oral transmission, are gradually combined with formal educational processes, individual achievement and the use of the written word; and (3) activities for learning are initially confined to practice, slowly yielding to analysis of familiar material and finally, analysis of unfamiliar material http://malpeducation.com/resources/articles/#earlyDev"

I wonder if some teachers who use the MALP framework in their instruction would be willing to weigh in here on their experiences with MALP?

Thanks.

Miriam Burt

SME, Adult ELL Cop

YAY Miriam for posting this information about MALP and Helaine Marshall and Andrea DeCapua!!    I  was really digging around in my memory for who it was had done that ( and my my   This could NOT be more timely and helpful.   I do hope someone has had experience with it.  It always seemed to me to be one of the more reality-based useful approaches to the Hmong of any that I have seen.     It is wonderful to have the link, too.   Robin 

After being trained by Dr. Helaine Marshall at Long Island University while working on my master's in TESOL, I implemented MALP as an action research project at a local community center where the learners were mostly low-literacy Guatemalan day laborers.  Having worked with this population at another community center, I knew that I needed to change my instruction delivery to be successful. What I learned from MALP (and there's a teacher's checklist on the website (and in the books) that makes it easy to identify if you're being consistent with the model), is (1) how to help learners overcome cultural dissonance by establishing interconnectedness (with me and each other) and creating immediate relevance (in the curriculum), (2) combining shared responsibility and oral transmission as students' familiar learning processes, and (3) engaging learners with projects that formed the foundation for acquiring academic tasks. In my context, I used scrolls---big pieces of Kraft paper taped to a blackboard---and made charts that were filled with the subject matter relevant to learners, that they transmitted to me orally and I wrote and they copied and I took home and typed up and brought back instead of using textbooks they couldn't relate to. We started with Name, Job, Languages, Home Country, Family. Eventually, we got to questions and answers about work and engaged in critical thinking (because we know about the funds of knowledge adults bring to the table) and in the end theme booklets and typed up pages with the text the learners had created became treasured and useful possessions. Men who had never raised their hands in a classroom before learned to do that and began to have fun! Instead of being the sage on the stage I began to be the guide on the side as these adults worked to make their own "scrolls" in pairs or small groups. Creating a fertile space within which they could ask questions and talk about controversial subjects, we became deeply connected. I have also used this method to a lesser extent with struggling Saudis in college IEPs and international students in writing classes. MALP can be used with most any curriculum, in content-based classes (colleagues reported on these), and in public schools or adult ed.  As you can tell, I'm a convert. 

Nan Frydland

 

Hi Nan,

I enjoyed your post.  There is nothing better than hearing from a "convert" who is willing to pass learning on to newbies.  

I haven't heard the term "sage on a stage" in a long time, but it is so relevant in this discussion.  Whether one is teaching students with cognitive or neurological impairments or those who are not native English language learners, simply lecturing them could never be the right approach.  All the speakers we have already heard from as well as those group members that posted confirmed that a hands-on, direct approach is best.  

Thanks for your contributions to this discussion.

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

Hello Dr. Robin,

What resonated most with me about your informative message is the mental picture you create for each student you highlight.  

Your comment about parrots rings true.  For my African Grey parrot, she learned most words spoken in the house.  She never needed anyone to speak directly in front of her.  The fascinating thing is she learned the words using the voice of the speaker.  For common words that I said, her voice was distinctly female like mine, whereas she had a more identifiable masculine voice for words associated with my husband's lower and deeper voice. Visitors would look around our house for unseen people who might have been talking rather than believe me that my bird was speaking!

Rochelle Kenyon

 

Hi group members,

Below is the content outline for Day 2 of our guest discussion.  The speakers will return later on in the day.  Please use this time to post questions, comments, or responses to Dr. Robin Lovrien's question from yesterday.

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

I.   They ARE different—what these learners lack

       a.     Brain differences due to no literacy

       b.     Fundamental understanding of what text is and what it is for

       c.     Experience in the classroom

       d.     Experience as a learner—don’t really know HOW they learn

       e.     Cannot learn from books initially

 

II    All:  How they are the SAME as other learners

      a.      Adults

      b.      Need dignity protected

      c.      Need tremendous amounts of repetition to master material

      d.      Need to relate to material very strongly

      e.      Need evidence of learning

 

Hi all-- I have had an unexpectedly busy day and have not gotten to all the items on the outline yet.  I promise I will do so later this evening!   I hope Alicia and Lauren can speak to some of the items in the second part of the outline.    Lauren has already spoken to some of them.    Robin 

As I read through all the wonderful information posted by Dr. Robin, here are just a few things that came to mind.  I wanted to add these thoughts to the discussion of teaching non-literate English learners:

  • There is a new student at our school from Congo.  She has no literacy skills and has never been to school in her life (she is about 50 years old).  Although she had no schooling, it is very clear that she was a woman of status in her country.  She carries herself in such a way, proudly walking down the hall to class, that she instantly commands respect.  As she has begun class, it is abundantly clear that she does not like (and is not used to) being at the bottom of the totem pole.  She gets frustrated easily and does not like interacting with the teachers who are trying to help her.  While it is important to remember that all our adult students deserve our respect, she is a reminder that learning cannot occur until she feels comfortable with the interaction between teacher and student.  While trying to teach her to write her name, I was cautious with how I approached her.  I sat next to her rather than standing, to make our physical space even.  Before offering my assistance or beginning any task with her, like holding her hand as she wrote to show her the movements, I asked for permission ("OK?") and waited for her approval.  Because she has control over her learning and I am merely playing a supportive role, she has responded extremely well.
  • When working with non-literate students, it is important to break things down into the smallest pieces possible.  Why do we rush to teach a student the alphabet?  Start with just the letters in their first name.  Once they have mastered those, move on to the last name.  Take small bites out of learning.  Figure out what the "need to know" information is and start with the most urgent.  Also, when students need to know the information and it is of high interest to them, they will use it and remember it.
  • When approaching the alphabet, incorporate all possible senses.  Have you ever tried to use your finger to write a letter on a friend's back?  Do they guess the correct letter?  This is because the shape of the letter is ingrained in your mind.  You can actually feel the letter.  Have students practice in a similar way.  Not all alphabet practice has to include a pencil and paper.  Students can practice using their fingers on a variety of surfaces and textures, using magnetic letters or scrabble tiles, or using craft materials such as clay or a pipe cleaner to make the shape of the letter.
  • Because non-literate students do not recognize the importance of printed material, it is important to use real life materials to teach.  Students need to be taught to use pictures as symbols for vocabulary.  When using real life objects to teach vocabulary, students can easily see and touch the object.  When the use of real life objects is not possible, color photographs should be used.  Black and white drawings should NOT be used.  For students who are just learning to read and write and recognize letters, there is no significance to a black and white drawing.  I keep a binder of large pictures torn out of magazines.  It is the most useful resource in my classroom!  It can be used for so many things, and especially when I need to show a word to a non-literate student.
  • With non-literate students, I like to use "I spy" type books and games to train their eyes to search for visual clues.  I may have them search for a small picture among many pictures, a single object in a large photograph, an object in our classroom, or a letter among a group of letters (either on a printed page or a pile of magnetic letters).  By having them use their eyes scan and locate, they improve their ability to process the information, which improves their reading skills.

Good morning listers! 

I promised to finish yesterday's outline--but it was late-- and snowing again-- when I got home and the end of a long day.  Here I am catching up. 

How fortunate that Lauren posted her wonderful, concrete message last evening!  My comments here will enlarge a couple of topics she mentioned:

First-- Lauren notes that it is important to use colored photographs AND real items as students learn vocabulary.  There is real scientific evidence for this practice.  The earliest writings about non-literate ELLs--dating from the late 1970's when there was a massive effort to help the Hmong as they were having to flee their homelands, report that the use of drawings and pictures with these students was problematic in the extreme.  The non-literate really could NOT understand these materials and the teachers cautioned against trying to use pictures and drawings as primary teaching resources.  

An anthropologist in the late 1990's studying non-literate peoples also noted that pictures were not perceived by the people she was working with in the way literate people perceived them.  She asserted that non-literate persons did not accept pictures as substitutes for real things or real situations.  This point was strongly confirmed for me when I began to ask programs that worked with the non-literate whether they had noticed unusual situations or reactions to pictures.  One adult ESOL program here in Maine told me a painful story about trying to educate parents from East Africa about how to dress their children in winter weather (it's COLD here in Maine from November through March).   The teachers tried the usual-- fliers sent home with information about how to dress for the weather.  Still the children would arrive at school inadequately dressed--and the social workers were beginning to make loud noises about child neglect and removing students from their homes.  The ESOL teachers then tried pictures in their classes.  The adult students could name items in the pictures but did not relate the pictures to what they were supposed to do with their children.  Finally, at the last minute (vis-a-vis the social service agency) the teachers asked permission to bring down a child from upstairs in the elementary school to the adult school.  Then they demonstrated-- from underwear on out--how to dress for cold weather and explained that the government was not happy that their children were cold.   The next day all the children were properly dressed. 

Another program in Texas working with non-literate refugees was giving lessons in healthy eating in America.  The volunteer teacher had beautiful pictures of fruit and other things to show the students.   They listened politely, but as with the adults in Maine, did not change their behaviors.  Only when the teacher brought in REAL fruit did the students become animated and say, " Teacher!  THESE (pointing to the bunch of bananas) are bananas!  Why you show us this? "( indicating the picture).  When the teacher switched to using only real objects and food in her lessons, students responded eagerly.

And another study coming out of South Africa also showed that non-literate persons do not pay attention to the same things in pictures that literate persons do.  In this case, those doing the study were attempting to design medicine labels that non-literate persons could understand.  The most important factor in the drawings--such as the sun, used to indicate the need to take the medicine in the daytime-- was no more important to the non-literate adults looking at the labels than anything else that was in the picture.  Where a literate person would notice the most salient feature--a drawing indicating a wound to the head, for example-- the adults being studied commented on the hair of the person in the drawing and other features that were not important in terms of understanding the label.

Yet another example:  Two years ago I was working with non-literate older Haitians who were here in Maine as migrant workers.   As in all ESOL groups, this one varied enormously in education levels and previous exposure to English.  We had only a few short lessons, so I focused on oral skills and one night we worked on naming parts of the face.   Of course, after we named the parts of the face orally, pointing to ourselves and others, I got paper for everyone, drew ovals on them and told them to draw in the feature as I named it.  To my embarrassment (for not having found this out ahead of time), those I learned were non-literate were completely unable to put even a nose and eyes and mouth on the "face" on the paper!!!  They apparently had NO visual image in their minds of what a face looked like-- even when looking at each other.    The literate students had no problems whatsoever in doing this task (which I quickly abandoned for something else....) .

Research by international teams on non-literate populations found strong evidence of this issue.  According to various investigations ( all this research, by the way, is cited in the paper on non-literate adult ELLs I coauthored with Martha Bigelow), non-literate adults do not scan visual fields in a systematic way--a skill or habit that is the result of acquiring literacy.  The brain is significantly altered by acquiring knowledge of and looking at a writing system.  Once that system is mastered, ALL information coming into the brain --visual AND auditory--and even tactile--is processed in a systematic way.  If the brain has not learned an organizing system, information is randomly processed.  It was these researchers who found that there is a hierarchy of ease in how visual images are processed, with colored photographs of real objects being the easiest for non-literate adults and stylized black and white drawings being the most difficult to understand (think all the symbols used in our culture--such as symbols for handicapped access, smoking, use of cell phones, etc. ). And as we saw above, even understanding what is in the picture does not guarantee the learner will, as the anthropologist concluded, substitute the picture for reality.  

This is why Lauren suggests having both the real objects and the pictures present as the students begin to learn vocabulary, to help them transfer the concept.  ( This always makes me think of baby books in our culture--which now have big, bright colored pictures with either the first letter/sound or the word for the object written in big, plain letters-- our babies are trained in visual information from earliest infancy.  The adults in question here have never had that exposure to pictures and print). 

So many of our teaching materials rely on pictures and drawings-- in fact, it is impossible to imagine teaching ESOL WITHOUT pictures, isn't it??  Yet this information tells us this is a path to frustration and confusion for the learners with no formal education.   Moreover, the difficulties with visual information do not go away after the learner has acquired some literacy.   I worked with an East African woman who could manage most basic reading on her job and was remarkably gifted at figuring out words that she needed to know  in her environment cleaning in a hotel   She wanted to learn phonics to be more competent in reading. She had been in the school where I was working for several years, and had managed to move up to a  low intermediate level class. When I gave her a pretty standard phonics book, with black and white drawings of pictures having the vowel sounds she was working on, she was completely confused about how to use the book.  The page involved sorting words with one pattern ( e.g. all words ending in -an) into a circle which was labeled with -an.   This is a task any preschooler in our culture would pretty much know how to do.  The student placed all the words in ONE circle.  On another page, she did as the Sudanese student whom I wrote about when discussing the pitfalls of testing for LD: she worked vertically, despite the examples and despite my showing her that she needed to work horizontally.    Since she had worked in workbooks quite a bit in her classes, I was surprised at the lingering difficulties with visual fields. 

Another student I worked with just a few months ago was unable to understand the line drawings of the continents in her citizenship preparation workbook.  This lady is  not non-literate, but has a very low education level.  When I was learning about reading difficulties at the Lab School, I learned that this is a "figure-ground" issue-- figuring out what the foreground and background of a visual image is. 

Bottom line??   As Lauren urges,

  • Keep things concrete for a LONG time;
  • Use colored photographs ( materials for language therapists often have excellent photographs of virtually anything a student needs to know-- far more extensive collections than ESL materials have); 
  • Do not depend on written or visual material to convey important information; 
  • Create matching activities where students place pictures on real objects, 
  • Then have a set of pictures in front of them in rows ( this is what I call "Instant bingo" ) and hold up an item and have students pick up-- and eventually, cover with something-- the corresponding picture
  • Then give a student a picture and have him or her retrieve the corresponding real item from a pile or box holding many items
  • Make more games and activities of this sort--matching real items to pictures and vice-versa-- helping students begin to process and use pictures as substitutes--or equivalents-- for the real thing. 

In the next post, I am going to discuss more ways to have success with the non-literate.  

Robin

 

I continue to be amazed by the wealth of information, strategies, and activities being provded by Robin, Lauren, and Alicia. The first thought that comes to my head, every time I read one of these rich posts, is how much effort the teacher has to put into instruction for students who struggle to learn. It truly is the master teacher who can be successful with these learners.

But, in fact, the amount of work to put into teaching pre-lit, non-lit, semi-lit, and struggling English learners can be daunting, it seems. And dedicated as we are, there may be a limit to how much preparation time the possibly part-time teacher can put in as she prepares to meet the needs of all her students. Lauren, Alicia, Robin, and everyone who successfully is helping struggling learners acquire English skills, can you tell us if you find the preparation and set up to work with these learners exceeds that of working with with learners who who are learning more easily? Does it get easier for the teacher over time as you do this? Are there "short cuts" to use so that you aren't always starting from the same spot when creating materials and activities?.For example, and this may sound like moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, but I find when I make teaching or training materials and laminate them I am less likely to lose them and they are less likely to walk away from the classroom or training area and hence I am more likely to use them again with another group.

In a similar vein, the learning stations that Robin spoke about earlier in the discussion seem to be a great idea. Do you find you have to create new matierals for these learning stations for each student in each class or is there some carryover from one to another?

Teachers working successfully with struggling learners are true heroes, I think.

Miriam

SME, Adult ELL CoP

Miriam-- the short answer to your GREAT question is NO.   I am awfully glad you took the initiative to ask that because as the two other ladies know, the amount of prep the learning centers and similar activities take DOES seem daunting to many, and in many groups I train, though the idea is well received, later follow up indicates that teachers cave to the imagined preparation.

First, let me say that the way I advocate managing classrooms makes planning for struggling students moot.  The whole idea is to make the activities accessible on several levels with varied content and to group students and offer variety in such a way that the so -called struggling learners ARE NOT treated differently or planned for separately from the group as a whole.  Second, as my research into learning centers indicated and my expert teachers in NY state and elsewhere have found out, once a classroom is organized around centers, there is FAR MORE time for the teacher to work with individual or groups of learners because the rest of the class is always productively engaged and working independently ( good learning center planning and management means that ALL activities are self- checking-- students do not need to wait for a teacher to tell them if they have done an activity correctly).

Though Lauren does not necessarily organize her classrooms entirely with learning centers, you can discern from her comments that she uses the basic principles-- students always have choices of activities to go to no matter what their level.  This means the faster, quicker students can find something useful to do at all times and do not need to wait for the teacher to finish with the slower ones-- one of the deadliest of problems in any classroom.  This problem was specifically cited in the study from Minnesota that I cite (about why ELLs left their program).   Furthermore, Lauren has set up rather simple procedures to assure that students who are lower literate or working slowly can be doing work that is similar to but not identical to what the faster students are doing, but that fact is not advertised.  The students can self regulate if they are going to copy or not or read the cue cards or not, etc. 

What teacher find to be the second most challenging aspect of the learning center approach is varying the content so there is an easy version and more challenging version of an activity and then varying the kind of activities so that a content item or skill or language point can be practiced in a variety of ways.   If students always encounter Go Fish and Bingo, useful as they are,  they will give up and find reasons not to engage with these.  It is why generic games from publishers really do not work for very long-- students learn them too fast and get too used to them.  Boredom is human after all.  And teachers complain about being bored themselves at repeating the same things over and over.  

Being a special ed teacher, I tried for my first two years in adult ESOL to imitate the approach I used in my classrooms at the Lab School and create a separate learning plan and materials for each student.  I nearly died of exhaustion, even though the approach was very successful.   Gradually I accepted the fact that ESOL students have a LOT in common in terms of learning needs-- basic question asking form for example-- and do not ALL have to have individual learning plans for everything.   This made the use of activities in groups much easier.  Furthermore, we say we are trying to cultivate independent learners, yet the teacher tends to do EVERYTHING for the students.  In the best run classes of teachers I trained, the students got the activities out and set up and put them away, participated heavily in creating new ones, were given a LOT of freedom to adapt the activities to their own needs and to use them in the way that was useful to them (for example, in the classes where I did my study, and in my program here in Maine it was very common for students to play the bingo-type games until ALL players cards or boards were covered.  They did not want to stop when someone got "bingo".  Did I care??? of COURSE NOT-- they were practicing English in far more depth than even I had in mind!!)  In short, the teacher and students were true partners in the learning process.    Alicia has run classrooms this way for a long time-- she and her colleague at Yonkers Library are absolute whizzes at launching center-based classrooms at all levels of instruction.  I hope she will chime in with more about how she does it. 

Robin 

 

 

 

 

 

What I learned in my research and saw in

It does take time to set up and plan activities for class of non-literate or low-literacy students, with or without learning centers.  However, I have found that although the initial investment was higher, the materials last and can be used for a long time, which actually cuts down on prep time over time.  Also, it is always great to get students involved in creating materials and activities for the class.  I have used higher students in my class who come early, stay after, or work while lower students are completing classroom exercises to create matching games and other activities.  We also worked in conjunction with a higher level class and had those students (who were working in a similar subject area) make games for the low level students.  As a perfectionist, I have to let go of my desire to have everything "look pretty" and "match".  As long as things are clear and easy to read, they work for the students.  I have found that cardstock is my new best friend - I can type a set of flashcards (cut up after printing) and print multiple copies on different colors so when they all get mixed together, I know that one color is one set.

I set up learning centers that correspond to the curriculum in our book (I will go into more detail about the centers later and add some pictures, but for now, just to respond to the question of time).  I have plastic shoe boxes set up by unit with different matching, spelling, dictation, sentence making, and board game activities.  The first year that I used the centers in class, I definitely spent more time than I had in past years getting all the things ready for the centers.  It was not an obscene amount of time, but it was definitely more.  However, in the two years since that first year, preparation has been a breeze!  When we get to new material, I swap the activities - the old ones go back in the box and the new ones come out.  Sometimes things come up that require the creation of a new activity/center, but the "bones" of all the centers are ready and waiting for me when I need them.  The initial investment was completely worth it!  Also, the year I created the centers, I was the only teacher who was teaching my level.  Now, there are two of us.  The other teacher now uses all of my materials, and I imagine that if she had been here a couple years ago, we could have easily split the workload.  As Robin mentioned, using commercially created materials is usually not a good option (although I have stolen the letters out of more Scrabble games than I can count!) but sharing materials amongst teachers benefits everyone!

Thanks, Lauren, and Robin, for your complete response to my question about the elephant in the room - does it take more time than the teacher has to give to make the prep to make the class work for everyone. I like the concept that the learning centers, like the learning, is for all the students so no one is singled out.

Speaking of learning being for everyone. I wonder if one of your three experts could speak a bit about the role of needs assessment in planning instruction for your struggling learners.  What kinds of assessments do you do throughout the course? I am speaking, of course, about ongoing needs assessment to find out what the students need and want to learn and how they feel about what they are learning.

Thanks, again, for the concrete examples you are weaving in with your discussion of your philosphy and the research on working with struggling learners!

Miriam Burt

SME Adult ELL CoP

 

 

To answer your question, Miriam, about assessing the students' needs and finding out what they want to learn, I do so in a very informal way.  First of all, when students register for our classes, they complete a brief registration form that includes information about his/her education level, work history, current employment, and native country and language.  I use this information to gauge what might be important to them before they enter the classroom.  Once they are in class, I try to observe what they seem to be enjoying most and introduce more activities that are similar in content or style.  I also walk around and ask the students if they like the activities (which can be as simple as pointing to the activity and saying, "Good?"). 

At my school, we are bound by a textbook that we are expected to get through in a school year, so many times the activities are an enhancement of what they have learned in the book.  If I notice that there are things outside the textbook that are of interest/need, we step away and use some centers specifically designed for the situation.  As an example, here is New Hampshire, it has been a particularly difficult winter.  I introduced some "winter learning centers", similar to what Dr. Robin mentioned.  One box had clothing and shoes in it for winter and summer and the students had to sort it (we have had some Congolese students coming to school wearing flip flops and socks because they had arrived last summer and had yet to be given proper winter gear).  Once the clothing was sorted, they asked, "Do you have...?" questions (which gave me a chance to identify those students who needed winter gear and connect them with a local organization that provides such things).  We also did a learning center to practice making a phone call and leaving a message to tell the teacher they would not be in school because of the snow and cold and stressed that it was OK to miss class because of this as long as they let the teacher know.  (Our city has done a poor job of keeping sidewalks clear, and since most of our students walk to school, it gets extremely dangerous.)

In summary, I don't use any large, formal assessment.  I tend to rely on my own observations and the bits of information I can get from the students in class.

I so appreciate Lauren's wise posting about informal needs assessment.     Not meaning to self-congratulate more than I already have, I have a hard time even relating to this as a formal idea because I do it constantly for all learners in every lesson.   Two really important things I like to find out very early on is some idea of how much schooling there has been and what the learner's work or daily occupation is.   It pains me no end to visit a classroom and quickly determine that the teacher has NO IDEA what his or her students actually DO outside of the classroom.   I often find this out by focusing on what the student says he or she needs English for, or where and to whom the person needs to speak English.  Right now I am the sole tutor in a small tutoring program that is sponsored by the little non-profit that serves the Spanish speaking population in our area.  We recently changed the process by which students access tutoring and now a pair of persons at the non-profit screens people before they are referred to me.  By doing this in Spanish, the interviewing pair is able to find out from the prospective student just what I mentioned--why they need English and what learning English will do for them.  The vast majority want it to communicate better on their jobs, so I need to know what their jobs are.   Then I tailor activities to that job-- what some call contextualizing.   It doesn't mean that every minute of every lesson is only about their jobs or lives, but we always end up there.   So for example, I work with three Puerto Rican men, two of whom who work in a lobster processing plant and one in a salmon processing plant.  They need to be able to communicate much better on their jobs, so we have spent a lot of time on numbers, since they are paid by the pound or piece.  While the activities I use-- Go Fish with numbers that Spanish speakers often confuse ( sixteen/sixty), bingo with amounts of money ( $34.95) etc.--are not strictly about the work in the lobster or salmon plant, the numbers are critical for their tallies, etc. and conversation gets back to that as the practice goes along.    I often create sets of words on cards to make into sentences that are specifically about learners' exact jobs:  "The spring on my clamp is broken."  "Don't throw away the little pickles!" (this last command is about working with sea cucumbers-- the plant manager asked me to be sure the workers understood it because they tended to throw away the little cucumbers, which have their own use!).  

And that last part indicates another way of doing needs assessment--I often visit the locales where my students work and find out for myself what English they actually need, and what the names are of the pieces of equipment they use or clothing they wear, parts of the process they perform.    This impresses the students no end, and has also created quite good relations with the plant managers, etc.  

Right now I work with quite a few women who are not working because it is not lobster season.  I go to their homes, which provides me a golden opportunity to work on conversation about their children ( who are often right there in mama's lap), their house, their daily activities etc.  Today I did that favorite language learning activity of having the student write labels on little stickies and post them on about 25 things in her kitchen. She actually ASKED to do that, which made me laugh a lot.  Such an OLD tried and true practice!!   And she is racing through this vocabulary because she WANTS to learn it.

As I said, I do informal assessment virtually all the time.  If I see that an activity is too hard, not really exciting a learner, too easy, too unfamiliar, I immediately adjust it or abandon it for something else.    If some special need arises, I readily put aside lesson plans and go with what is needed.  Two weeks ago one student ,who is a Japanese mother of two young children, told me she and her husband wanted to take the children to Boston to the Science Museum during school winter break.   So we stopped everything I had planned and spent most of two lessons looking up T routes ( the subway in Boston), parking, motel locations, hours of the museum, etc. and she repeatedly strategized with me how she would guide her husband while he was driving, what she would do if the younger child got too tired or the older one got very interested in something, etc.  Can you imagine a more relevant and vocabulary-rich topic??? 

Sometimes it happens that I proceed with whatever the learner said he or she wanted-- or didn't want-- and then a few lessons in , the learner changes his or her wants significantly.     A man who was working in lawn maintenance switched to working on lobster boats while he was coming to our drop-in program.  So my assistant teacher and I shifted gears quickly and created a bunch of activities for him to practice saying-- and understanding --the words for tasks and items on the lobster boat.  When we could not understand him , we turned to --guess what?? youtube!! and found wonderful videos of how to fish for lobster!! He could show us the equipment or actions he was trying to talk about.    In the middle of that set of activities, it became painfully clear that he could not pronounce nor hear  the V/B consonants as different.  So my assistant created a whole set of activities for him to practice that. 

I know this seems an impossible procedure with a large group of students, but the principles of this approach should always be operable-- paying attention to what students do and are interested in or NEED to be able to use English for,  to connect learning directly to them and their jobs in some way, to respond to changes and significant needs at some point.  

Someone posed a question early on about keeping students in the classroom.  Among many ways to do that is to make sure the student feels that the class is addressing his or her OWN needs.   I remember so vividly a quote from an Asian student in a wonderful qualitative study of adult ELLS done in the 1990s.   The researcher was finding out what helped students engage, and this woman said ( I don't have the exact quote available, but here is the gist), that she knew she should go to class but she could never find herself in what was going on in the classroom.  The teacher never actually "saw" her and acknowledged her as a person who had a life quite different from those of most of the other persons in the class (because she was a worker in a store, while the others were somewhat different).    Or I think of the students in that study from Minnesota (Schalge & Soga, 2008) who reported that they just were not interested in the lesson on using the airport-- which had NOTHING to do with their lives,  or the lesson in cooking, because they didn't cook that way anyway.  We so OFTEN make assumptions about what students SHOULD learn, must want to learn,  probably need, etc. without actually listening to them, or asking them.  We cannot be surprised or dismayed if they vote with their feet because the class is not addressing what they came to it to get.  Even advanced students like to know why a text was chosen for them, or how they can learn a particular body of vocabulary, etc.  

When a program  requires classes and teachers to use a specific book, as Lauren's does,  then the teacher's job means relating that book and curriculum to the student's lives, and helping them understand what it is they are benefiting from in the lesson.   Students who are a bit more fluent can be asked to make that connection-- "How do you think you can use these questions on your job?" "Tell me about your day at home with the children using this grammar point we just did. "   It IS hard if the topics in the book are completely out of the experience or interest of the students, but most can be related to in some way.   However, I remember the Salvadoran student who, when asked why he missed class pretty often, replied,  "Teacher, I can understand when it is something I know about, but I don't know anything about volcanoes in Hawaii, so I don't come."   He found topics he did not know about a waste of time and effort in learning English.   So yes, ongoing needs assessment is critical to success, retention, engagement, learner progress.

But I promised this morning not to do these endless posts..... I lied.  So sorry!!  I have really enjoyed this "conversation" -- I will add a few more posts about learning centers tomorrow even though our discussion is officially over.  If you need to contact me outside the list, I think you can ask Rochelle to forward your message to me. 

Thank you for your kind comments, great questions, and interest in my work and in helping the more challenged learners!   Robin 

 

 

 

Hi to Robin, Alicia, and Lauren,

I can't express how much I am enjoying and learning from your discussion.  I hope that our group members feel the same way.

After reading Robin's last message, I realized why I have been so attuned to what you all have to say.  Having been an LD teacher, all of Robin's activities, approaches, and methods harken back to the "tried and true" special education methodology.  The commonalities are so easy to see.  Our philosophies about working harder and spending extra time individualizing instruction to all students mirror what you do with your low literate ELLs.

I invite members of the Disabilities group to join in and add to this discussion.  What similarities do you see?

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

Rochelle-- I am glad you see the strong overlap in what I advocate and what happens in special education.  I absolutely would NOT be the teacher I am had I not had the enormous amount of time not only being trained as but working as a special education teacher.   As I have said several times,  the biggest lesson was that all students can learn, and many need to learn in very idiosyncratic ways- but you, the teacher need to help the student find the best way to learn.   And the equally important lesson I learned is that learning literacy skills and content does not have to happen the traditional, book-and-paper way.  The Lab School, where I taught for many years, was founded so students could learn through the arts and other non-traditional learning methods.  Students learn reading and math through wood-working, cooking, film-making, painting and sculpture, dance, theater and anything else creative the teachers can come up with.  It was a powerful message--though I didn't fully transfer it to ESL until I had to find ways for teachers to really engage and accommodate ALL learners.  

In ESOL, individualizing comes as much from making sure the student's personal need for English or interests are being directly addressed as from creating individual learning plans.  That may need to happen more for the student who is more educated and learns faster than for the one that is lagging behind. 

One of the many things I advocate for in adult ESOL is to give the more highly educated students FAR more responsibility for their own learning, just as students are responsible for learning in college foreign language classes.   Knowing a student is sitting there bored and unchallenged is, to me, more stressful that figuring out what to do with the lower educated or lagging ones!!

Robin 

 

First, thanks to all of the guest discussion leaders for offering your various points of view.  I have learned a lot.

Initially, I wondered, as Miriam had, about the difference in extra teacher preparation time teaching ELLS could possibly take.   But I was enlightened by Dr. Robin's response.  It is true that making the materials accessible to all students, despite their level of English proficiency, is what is ultimately important. An instructor viewing them as a separate sub-group within their class, can prove detrimental long term. Kudos on the concept of "learning centers. '  This approach seems to encourage student accountability which also can lead to self-advocacy.

Pamela, your comment about self advocacy and accountability hits the nail right on the head!  I use the learning centers in my classroom at the beginning of class.  The centers are each kept in boxes on a shelf in the back of the room.  Students can choose a box when they come into the classroom.  If they arrive early, they can take a box as soon as they arrive, but they know that by the official start time of class, they all need to be working with a learning center of their choice.  Without fail, when I enter the room, they are all working diligently.  Seeing a group of students, many of whom have very little prior education, take control of their learning and make choices in the classroom is inspiring.  As students have moved on from my class into upper levels, I hear from other teachers about how independent and motivated they are.  I believe it is because they have been given the power of choice and seen that their choices lead to more learning and understanding.

Thank you Pamela and Lauren for these comments of aspects of learning that are crucial to students being able to proceed in education AFTER adult ed.

I want to underscore Lauren's comments about how inspiring it is to see low-literate students take control of their learning.  This was one of the early lessons from learning centers-- and I wish I were a talented enough writer to REALLY express the awe and inspiration I feel when I walk into a well-managed center-based classroom and see ALL students working productively on activities THEY have chosen.   It is a rare sight in adult ESOL to see ALL students engaged at this level-- AND there is NO prohibition about moving around the classroom or talking to other students, since center activities require that.   (This, by the way, was a BIG obstacle for students in my study.  They just couldn't get used to being allowed to do that-- this makes me grind my teeth, because they ARE adults after all and are too often treated as children in the classrooms I visit).   It takes a while with working with centers for students to really get the hang of making choices, but they do catch on . Similarly, they are often uncomfortable at being in charge of checking their own work, but once they do, off they go.  I use wall pockets a lot-- students place cards with words on them in correct sentence order.  The cards are highly coded so only one group is used in a sentence, and there is an answer sheet to check with.  I remember a wonderful scene in one of my study classrooms of two women-- one from Peru who was a highly educated special education teacher--but a professed lover of traditional foreign language learning ( memorizing verb forms) and the other from Mexico, well educated but not college. The two were working on a set of sentences at the wall pocket, and they argued and talked and tried out all different things, and then would look at the answer sheet and discuss the reason for their errors.   It was delightful to watch.  They worked really hard at it and by that time had accepted that they didn't need ME to tell them whether the sentences were correct or not.   

Many great comments today-- I will respond more this evening-- must go tutor for a couple of hours.  Robin 

 

 

Hello Pamela,

Thank you for participating in this discussion and sharing your thoughts.

To repeat something that Dr. Robin and I have shared, the learning center concept is also an integral one in teaching students with disabilities.  The objectives are the similar for both groups of students.

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

Hello group members,

Welcome back to the guest speakers for the 3rd day of our guest discussion.

The content outline for today will be as follows:
 

            I    Finishing discussion about non-literate                      a.     Visual perception of 2-D info is different
                     b.     Hold off on focus on literacy for low/non literate until oral skills are much stronger
           

           II   Helping students who learn differently-
                     a.     Attitude of teacher—presumption of success
                     b.     Finding out what is holding things up
                     c.     Figuring out what is relevant and important to learner
                     d.     Imagining a differentiated classroom

                         III    Following up on questions or comments    Thanks, in advance to those members who post and read the messages.   Rochelle Kenyon, SME    

Hello all,

Welcome to Day 4 of our guest discussion.  Here is the guest speakers' outline for today.

 

     I   Learning Centers

            a.     Robin—definition and some examples, purpose for using

            b.     Lauren—how you have adapted them, used in your classrooms

            c.     Alicia—how your practice changed—How LC’s worked with defined curriculum ( EL Civics)   

 

As always, your questions and comments are always welcomed.

 

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

I have two classes in which I use learning centers, and I use them in very different ways.  The first class is a literacy class for relatively new refugees (they have all arrived within the past 9 months).  The second class is what we call a level 1 class.  The level number comes from the textbook series we use, the Future series from Pearson.  In the literacy class, I have a lot of flexibility with the material we are covering in class because it is a pure survival class.  They are just beginning with English and with reading and writing, so I can get creative with the learning centers.  In the level 1 class, students are expected to (at some point) progress through the class and on to the next level, so I do have to follow the curriculum set forth in the book.  I use the learning centers to enhance this material and add other important information.  Because I was unable to paste pictures into this post, click here for a link to a mini-grant I did about learning centers for the state of New Hampshire.  It includes pictures of many of the activities I mention.

First, I will talk about the learning centers in the literacy class.  As Dr. Robin has mentioned before, the most important elements of learning centers are choice and self correction.  While the self-correction piece can be challenging in a literacy class, it can be as simple as a spelling activity where there students have a card with a word spelled out and have to find the correct letters to spell the word.  This is one of my students' favorite activities!  When I start with the literacy class, I give them a card with the word (in all caps because my letters are in caps) and the letters in mixed order so they can rearrange it in the right order.  As they get more comfortable, I leave the pile of letters in the middle of the table and let two students work together to spell.  This is a great activity because as higher students are incorporated in the class, they can speak the words to each other rather than look at the cards. 

Another popular learning center for the literacy class is the food matching.  We have a set of fake food that was donated.  I found photographs of the same food, printed color drawings, black and white drawings, and words that matched the food.  We start with the food and photographs to match the real thing (well...the food is fake, but very life-like...one student almost took a bite out of the apple once!) to the photographs.  I also teach them the words orally and we practice those.  Once the students are comfortable with the photographs, I introduce the drawings and eventually words to get students to recognize the different representations of the food. 

Other centers for the literacy class include many sets of flashcards: days of the week, months of the year, numbers, alphabet, etc.  Once students have started learning the words and writing a bit, the flashcards are left on the table and students can choose the ones they want to work with.  They can use the flashcards by arranging them in order or showing them to a partner and having them say or spell the word aloud.  I started slowly with the class and only introduced a couple learning centers at a time.  I also used my wonderful teacher's aide to demonstrate the learning centers to the students.  We tend to use centers off and on throughout the class because the students have a hard time focusing and sitting through me teaching a lesson (after all, they are just learning to be students!).  So, by alternating between teaching, learning centers, and small group or independent activities, they get time to relax and learn in a low stress environment.

For my level 1 class, I have a very diverse group made up of students who were formerly non-literate all the way up to students who are extremely well educated.  The students range in age from 21 to 80 and come from 10 different countries.  Some students are in level 1 for the first time while others are repeating the class for the second or third time.  Adding learning centers to the class has been an invaluable asset.  I use the centers, or "practice activities" as we call them in class, every day at the beginning of class because students tend to trickle in.  When they come in, they select a box that contains one activity and begin.  As other students come in, they can join one of the activities in progress or grab a new one.  If a group of students finishes one activity, they can bring the box back and trade it for a new one.  All of the activities are self correcting, and I float around the room to answer questions and help as needed.

Because the learning centers are made to accompany the textbook and enhance the practice, the basic learning center structures are the sames, but the content changes depending on the material in the current unit.  There are five constant centers and one rotating box that contains a different type of activity depending on the unit or a point of interest from the students.  Here are descriptions of the learning centers (for pictures, you can click on the link in the first paragraph):

  1. Board game - I used a blank game board (from Bare Books) and created sets of cards for each unit of our textbook.  There are four different color cards: blue, orange, yellow, and green.  Although the content changes with each unit, the type of question on each card is always the same.  Yellow cards have a picture of a vocab word that the student needs to name.  Blue cards have a question that the student must answer.  Green cards have a fill in the blank sentence.  Orange cards have a mixed up sentence that the student must rearrange.  The cards are printed on card stock and cut up.  All of the answers are written on the back of the cards.  As students move around the game board, they land on spaces that tell them which color card to pick.  There is always a lot of teamwork.  Although the game has a start and finish space, many students choose to go around the board multiple times for more practice.
  2. Matching/Go Fish - There is a set of cards with pictures and words.  For lower level students, this becomes a simple matching game.  For higher level students, there are instructions for Go Fish and they can practice "Do you have?" questions and short answers along with the vocabulary.  There is a key showing all the pictures correctly labeled.
  3. Spelling - I mentioned the spelling activity before.  Students have a set of cards with vocab words from the unit and a bunch of magnetic letters.  They can choose to use the card to help spell the word, or they can work with a partner to say and spell the words.  Some students like to use the magnets on the white board and others prefer to sit at a table and lay out the letters.  Again, it is their choice.
  4. Making sentences - Individual words are written on cards that students put together to make sentences.  I have color coded the cards for extra help.  All pronouns and subjects are on blue cards.  All verbs are on red cards.  All prepositions and articles are on white cards.  All adjectives are on green cards.  And all objects are on yellow cards.  This helps students see the pattern in the sentences.  Also, they know that if there is no blue card or no red card, it is not a complete sentence.  I have a list of sample sentences that can be created from the cards.  Some students use the table to lay out their sentences while others prefer to get up and use the hanging wall pockets.  It is their choice. 
  5. Pair dictation - Each student takes a card that has 5 sentences on it.  One student reads his sentences while his partner writes what he says.  Then, they trade, and the other student reads different sentences while he writes.  It is always interesting to see the different way students approach this.  Some students will alternate sentences (one reads a sentence, then the other, and back and forth).  Other students will read their complete set then write their partner's complete set.  Amazingly, the formerly non-literate students frequently choose this activity.  My two lovely ladies will sit together and dictate each letter to each other then practice saying the sentences together.  It takes them a long time, and they work so hard at it, but you can see them both beaming with pride!
  6. Rotating material - Some examples of rotating materials I have used are: winter apparel, a large floor map (formerly a Twister game) for students to walk around on as they give directions, US citizenship question cards, city bus schedule with questions, a classroom scavenger hunt/labeling activity, and various technology learning centers (Pronunciation Power, the CR-Rom that accompanies our book, grammar activities, story writing).

My students love working together on the activities and tend to rotate the activities fairly between them.  Also, because we keep the same learning centers for a couple weeks (the class meets 2-3 times a week), the groups find different ways to approach the same activities as they become more proficient in the material.  I have seen tremendous growth in their confidence and command of the target language.  And in such a multi-level class with students from all different backgrounds, the activities give students a chance to work at their own level and progress at their own paces.

Hi Lauren,

Your message above is worth its weight in gold to teachers/tutors who have been reading this guest discussion to learn ideas.  Your descriptions of the learning centers you use would be easy to replicate in other programs.

Thanks so much for the link to your mini‐grant project, Using Learning Centers in an ESL Classroom.  What a great resource that is for the field!!

It is easy for me to see why Dr. Robin recommended you so highly to join in on this guest discussion.  You love what you do, and in turn, your students probably enjoy learning from you.

Thank you for your contributions to this discussion.

Rochelle Kenyon, SME

 

 

The most profound change in my teaching happened when I suddenly saw my role in the classroom in a totally different light. Previously, I had seen myself in the role of "teacher"; ie, I had information that I thought they needed and wanted to teach to them. Later, I began to see myself as a "facilitator". These were adults who already knew very specifically what it was that they needed to learn. This changed my whole mindset on adult ELLs.

In multi-level classes learning centers may used to introduce new material but when working with a defined curriculum learning centers are used to enhance the material within curriculum. For example, the USCFI curriculum includes a module on housing. It includes a dialog for calling the landlord to make an appoint to fix a problem in the apartment.  their is so much material to mine here for learning centers! Days of the week, telling time, parts of a house etc. One of our teachers, working with a beginning level class, created a Go Fish game with four different ways of telling time. (4:45, quarter to 5, 15 minutes to 5 o clock, a picture of an analog clock). She also used the same materials in a Memory game. She incorporated part of the housing module's dialog into a board game.

I like the phrase Lauren used "practice activities". It is especially appropriate when working with a curriculum. The learning centers present opportunities for students to decide which element of the curriculum they was to "practice". 

Good morning group members,

After four very full days of vibrant discussion, our guest event, Helping Adult English Language Learners Who Have Learning Challenges, has come to an official close.  Earlier, Dr. Robin said that she would continue to answer questions.  Based on her work load and the amount and depth of content she and her team have already posted, she would have to make that decision.   If we were holding this event face-to-face, there would be the obligatory evaluation form to complete.  Since we don't have a process for evaluation, I would like to ask you for your "Reflections" on the value of this guest discussion to your practice.  Please take a few moments to answer the following question by replying directly under this message.            What is the one most important lesson that you will take away from this discussion?   Thanks very much.   Rochelle Kenyon, SME