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:
- Know your learners
- Identify the learning outcomes
- Maintain the same learning outcomes for all learners
- Make the abstract concrete
- Provide multiple opportunities for authentic language use
- Ensure a balance of receptive and productive language
- 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
