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language
what's an aspect of my teaching related to language development that leads to an inquiry question and assumptions about language? an broad area of ideas to dig in, but today my question about my teaching is:
What parts of my art curriculum, specifically combinations of texts and images, foster and encourage language learning with effectiveness? My assumption is that *some* parts do, and some better than others. On the speaking and listening levels, students work with english and discuss the projects and interact regularly (in fact sometimes it's difficult to get their attention mid-class) Occasionally I will hear Spanish between students for clarification or humor, but even among the Spanish-speaking subgroups in class, their primary language for interacting in class is English.
We have done some art projects in the past that have incorporated writing in the work, specifically the class created illustrated books with sequences of image and narrative text. I've also been including fairly bite-sized written assessments in the form of mid-project and final statements. Students' abilities with completing those seem to be more related to interest and engagement than language ability.
I'm convinced they're related, the process of learning academic uses of language, and academic uses of visual communication, but I've yet to see research or findings that say something like "learning perspective assists with the learning of language structures" or any specific correlation like that. I think reasonable connections can be made for art activities which explicitly include text, and corollary tasks like artists' statements, but I'd be curious to hear of research where *art* study improves *language* acquisition. |
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The student language learner I'm examining for my inquiry is a young ethically Chinese 7th grader named Julio was born in Brazil, and lived there until age 9 before coming to the states. His native language is Chinese, what he learned in the house from his family as a baby, with Portuguese learned concurrently from outside the home. He described past fluency in Portuguese, but now does not remember much of it in a useful way.
He has an older sister, one year older, who's been able to retain her Portuguese, but struggles with Chinese and English, and a younger brother, four years younger, who can't remember learning Portuguese but has the best English of the three kids but struggles with Chinese.
His student life outside of school seems pretty positive to hear him tell it, he likes to cook (spam and eggs is a favorite), play video games, and other activities which are usual for a student his age. He and his siblings live with his grandmother, since his parents both still live and work in Brazil, alternating lengthy visits to the family in the states. Julio also goes back to Brazil to visit family every other year or so. He speaks English mostly at school, but Chinese with a few friends who share that language.
His past and present schooling has been pretty consistent. He attended a public school in Brazil which he said prepared him only somewhat for coming to the states, but his interest in academics, and his family's high value of success in school, enabled him to push through language difficulties so that he know takes entirely mainstream courses and achieves high marks. He currently studies Chinese grammar, conversation, and writing with a tutor a few times a week, enabling him to make desired progress in learning chinese characters.
He's very quiet without being shy, and reported to me a trend that seems to be related to the fact that he's well behaved and quiet. It seems, despite being a redesignated language learner, that the Brownian Motion of seat rearranging in every class has put him in the back. While his language ability is very sophsticated, he pointed out the most common issue he had with academic language in class is not being able to hear the teacher or other students due to being in the back. Despite that, he gets good grades and feels like he understands well his academic subjects.
He keeps up in my class, and asks some of the more sophisticated question in the class (and produces some of the best work too). He has a slight accent that is consistent with the dominance of his native Chinese. When talking to him, I notice him visibly grasping for a word infrequently but consistently, but those terms tend to be oddball words that aren't subject matter academic language terms but words that are part of discourse outside of class.
My structured evaluations included a lengthy interview during lunch where I could observe his language carefully, plus check-ins after each up-front teacher activity to confirm and assess understanding, along with ongoing informal check-ins and assessments. Rarely did he miss or mistake ideas, but once or twice he missed terms important to the lesson, though how much was due to inability to hear versus unfamiliarity with the words was unclear.
In in-class writing activities (there's only a few in my class) he's able to respond accurately and clearly with no indication of anything but native English fluency. I was not able to observe him in the process of writing longer essays, but says that he usually is able to a review of his essays for typos and grammar. He says he has to fix a few mistakes each time, but not many....
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Much of what I see in the classroom parallels the story of Manolo from Valdes' book. more words to explain soon.. |
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For these examples regarding scaffolding, I'm using the lesson we're teaching this week about storybooks. Our 7th grade class is creating "a storybook", based on the model of picture books for younger (age 4-6) readers.
While not every student has had trouble with generating ideas, some do get stuck with the blank page. So we use a version of Text Re-presentation, by having the student consider existing stories, movies, myths as inspiration. That more general directive catches only some of the kids, a few need very explicit routes to exercise their creativity. For these kids, a more formal approach to adapting an existing text is the key.
We have children's books in the class that we've been using as texts for discussing in simple terms story structures (beginning, middle,end) and messages in the story (morals, etc), so some kids are revising the story they can see to make it their own, so instead of "one fish two fish" a student is doing "one frog two frog", and he still has creative room to write his own rhyme and invent new illustrations and situations..... an alternative that one of the other art folks suggested this week was to get the students to describe a real story that happened to them, "what happened this weekend?" type thing. That would make this project a type of Bridging then.
The other type of scaffolding that this project demonstrates is Schema-building, in that we're explicitly talking about and naming parts of a story. Not only are we having the students consider character and setting, but we're talking in simple terms about beginning, middle and end, or setup, conflict, and resolution. We're obviously not doing what we'd do if this were a scriptwriting workshop, but we are identifying these parts of a story structure, and the students are asking and answering questions about these ideas as we work.
Not only are we talking about this, but with this project we're doing the thumbnail/planning process, and we're looking at the production schema of idea -> character sketch -> story brainstorm -> thumbnails & planning sketches -> final work, which applies to real world creative efforts just as much as in class. By making these planning documents, the students can literally see the structure of what we're doing, and we can point to parts of these diagrams/thumbnails as we discuss the work with a student, so that gaps in academic language pertaining to this type of planning don't hold us up at all. I have one special needs student who's verbal communication and attention is poor, yet this type of map is clear enough for him to successfully participate in the project.
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Within the context of my current art class placement, assessing language is a little challenging. The listening and speaking component of the ELD standards can be applied without too much difficulty, since we do talk in class ;) The reading and writing components would be difficult to ascertain given the context of the projects and work so far. Fortunately, the design of my particular teaching event looks like it will include some measure of reading and writing, since we'll be digging into the concept of illustrated stories. While I doubt we'll be making the students write passages of great length, we will be testing the student's language ability to some degree.
Tomas keeps mentioning that language issues will come up and need to be addressed with students who *aren't* designated as ELD students, and that appears to hold true for my population of students. The few kids who're marked as ELD at various levels don't seem to be too far out of sync with the non-ELD counterparts, so language development will be addressed per the needs of the whole class, not just the marked kids. I suspect some of my ELD students have a better command of language, in the ways the standards consider it, than some of the non-ELDs, and that areas like "Vocabulary and Concept Development" in Reading will need to be worked on with everybody....
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