Last Inquiry post for 2018

2018 Inquiry Summary

Successes!

End of Year Data

Having missed the middle 2 terms this year, my successes are straight from the data outcomes from their end of year testing. From 18 in mid year to just 10 students now reading below the age of 9 years old. And from 10 students in mid year who made shifts, to 18 who have now made shifts. YAY!!!

• 7 made accelerated shifts of more than 1 year reading age.
• 22 made shifts up in STAR test

Work ons

Some things I'd like to work-on and make improvements on for 2019 is... To have more check points for students who need 1-1 help with a support staff. Expect more shifts and specific testing for vocab more often. One way to ensure this is done right is to make an effort to record feedback/feedforward for students. Another point would be to visit blogs for the CoL teachers who are covering ESOL principles and see what worked and didn't work for them.

Inquiry Update Term 4 2018

Inquiry Update Term 4 2018

Improving Reading Comprehension through focus of Language Acquisition.

ESOL Principles

1. Know your learners
2. Balance of receptive and productive language

Activities - Speaking frames & information transfer

Term 4 - Getting them ‘test ready’

1. How to tackle multi-choice questions (process of elimination)
2. Looking at pictures and surrounding text for clues to unknown words

Activities - Need to start with teacher @ start of week - hand over to support worker

Need help reading task - breaking down tasks. First do this, tick, then look what next

Tasks - similar to test structure - STAR, vocab, italics, author's view...

Data:

18 students reading under reading age of 9 years old - 10 made shifts in May RR 0.5

Inquiry 2018 - Language Acquisition in Reading

My inquiry this term is around Language Acquisition in Reading.

My question:
How can I strengthen/improve reading comprehension by focusing on language acquisition?

This falls under the Manaiakalani CoL achievement challenge #3:
Lift the achievement in Reading for all students, with a particular focus on boys and Maori students (both genders) years 1-13.

Why?
My assessment tools to measure this will be running records using either PM benchmarks or PROBE. My reasons for choosing reading is because every year, the majority of my students only ever make the expected shifts of 1 year. What I am looking to make is accelerated progress. This is critical as the majority of my literacy class are Well Below from 2017 and are reading at 5.5years - 9years.

How will I go about this?
Looking at my students, I have quite a few who are second language learners of English and would benefit from making links to their mother tongue. One of the ways to do this is through the implementation of the 7 ESOL principles.

The 7 principles are:

1. Know your learners
2. Identify the learning outcomes
3. Maintain the same learning outcomes for all learners
4. Make the abstract concrete
5. Provide multiple opportunities for authentic language use
6. Ensure a balance of receptive and productive language
7. Include opportunities for monitoring and self evaluation

These principles cover tasks which are made and scaffolded specifically for second language learners. Some of the tasks I will be trying out with my students are:

• Speaking frames
• Information transfer
• Interactive cloze activity
• Role play cards
• 3 level reading guides