Languages and Children: Chapter 10

This chapter is written for people like me! I am a qualitatively minded person, always trying to draw connections between the little nuggets of knowledge I know and encounter. Throughout the time in this class, I have brainstormed some content areas that would be best used for certain activities for effective SLA instruction. I want to make sure to create a respectful culture in my classroom that acknowledges the cultures of all students (and teachers) in the room, while providing an effective forum for teaching language and this chapter shows the need for that. Mathematics and science, of course, are listed among those content areas that most need language-related instruction. It was interesting to dive into the Connections Standards that stated that there are some aspects that students can only fully understand through the foreign language and its cultures.

Languages and Children: Chapter 5

Here in the first page, one of my questions that I asked in class during the KWL is answered determinedly. In the past, introducing the written word to second language learners was seen as a bad practice and a way to confuse the young mind. Now, methods scholars suggest that we should introduce the written word as soon as possible. Like teaching literacy to anyone, there are a few necessities: fostering help with missing schemas, introducing reading and writing as tools for communication (not just filling out a worksheet), building a word wall, teaching the basics of directionality and the physical processes of reading a book, surrounding the students with meaningful written words, and peer teaching (or shared reading). This chapter provides a few great starter activities for the early language learning child.

Languages and Children: Chapter 4

The entire field of education heralds the positive impact that collaborative/cooperative learning can have on the success of many students. As this chapter discusses, peer interaction learning can help students make an emotional connection to the content, can help students discover the objective on their own, and it can help them develop social and language skills. This is especially important for students learning English because they have a lot of meaningful input experience and are prompted to producing meaning-making output (two essential parts of the SLA equation). One of my favorite activity examples was the "Finding differences: one picture" activity because it was a simple way to have students practice comparing two things. This is a skill they will need for the rest of their academic careers, on a deeper level.

Languages and Children: Chapter 6

Effective lesson planning has been one of the most challenging and empowering teacher knowledge I have acquired this year. As I read this chapter, C&D kept confirming what I've learned in these last few months: good instruction planning advice is found with the ESL and Exceptional Learning professionals. ESL and Exceptional Learning teachers and researchers have spent the last several decades learning so much about the brain and how it works best (this chapter, obviously, focuses on the advantages of planning units/weeks/days around a central theme or big picture) using the most up-to-date technology and research practices. While other factions of the education world have done a great job of completing their research and have come to the same conclusions (no more lines of desks in a classroom, no more memorizing arbitrary lists of words, etc), the ESL and Exceptional Learning research gives the best practice advice available.

Languages and Children: Chapter 9

This chapter shows how much cultural emphasis can be a vehicle for implicitly learning a language, as well as the greatest motivation to learn it. I love the idea of starting with a culturally integrative lesson to help teach vocabulary and language. As Curtain and Dahlberg allude, it can help bridge a gap that ELLs might fear crossing: knowing more about the country in which they now live. The Classroom Exchanges idea jumped out as particularly interesting as I suspect it would get the adrenaline pumping in the veins of these young learners: a great recipe for learning success. I also love the ideas that integrate technology and uniting students with other students around the globe.

Languages and Children: Chapter 3

This chapter gives an overview of three kinds of communication: interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational. I love that it gives concrete examples and suggestions for teachers to use in their classroom, beginning with stepping stone activities. As we have discussed in class, it is most important that we help students build a bank of meaningful and useful vocabulary in order for them to partake in these three kinds of communication. My brain wants me to organize these three in my mind as if they were three steps in a process, though Curtain and Dahlberg emphasize the holistic nature of communication. Again, I will visit this chapter again to sample some of the activities they provide.