eduese

Click on the Best Sites for ELLs button above for a list of the sites presented at NECC 2008 - San Antonio.

NECC 2008 has been a blast! Yesterday, at our poster session, ¡Sí Se Puede! Enhancing Bilingual/ESL Instruction with iPods, I had the chance to meet people from around the world. Most were interested in the use of iPods with language learners. We shared the iPod project that we’ve been developing in Austin ISD. We’ve set a wiki to publish what we have developed so far, you can find it at ipoded.pbwiki.com.

Songs have always been a great way to pick up a new language. Many original and traditional songs are being produced and shared online for educators to utilize. The .mp3 versions of the songs are free to download and can be listened to on a computer or on an iPod. The songs can also be burned to a CD after downloading. Kids Music Web offers traditional songs along with lyrics. Tip: copy the lyrics into your word processing application, print them and keep them handy for students read along while listening to the songs.

If you are looking for some free sites that can help develop your students’ English language skills, here are three that are worth looking at.
Puma Rosa is an interactive site heavy on the audio and designed for Spanish speakers.
ELLLO - English Language Listening Lab Online is a well developed site that includes audio, slideshows, quizzes and worksheets.
Mango Languages is a probably my favorite of the three. It is a very well developed learning site that includes both audio and text. The site covers twelve languages including ESL for Spanish, Polish and Brazilian Portuguese.

As a young English language learner, newscasts were very important to me. I’d watch and listen carefully not only to keep up with current events but to also improve my vocabulary and pronunciation. I even picked up a keen sense of dress and hairstyle (see photo). Similarly, ELL students need to hear quality models of English presenting information on high interest topics. Two great sources of news are Breaking News English and VOA Special English. Both provide .mp3 versions of their news stories that can be listened to on a computer or on iPods. Both sites also provide printable transcripts of the news stories. Breaking News English even provides lesson plans and worksheets for each story.

Despite all the negative press about bilingual/ELL education and immigration policy (we have overcome allot, we can overcome this too), this is still a good time to be a bilingual/ELL educator.

Bilingual/ELL educators now have access to more instructional tools than ever before. These digital tools include the computer-based programs that we can use to produce and publish things like videos, slideshows and e-books as well as the Web 2.0 websites that we can use to collaborate, publish and reflect on our creations.

While these tools are not usually labeled as “educational,” I believe that they hold more potential for teaching and learning than the commercially produced software currently being purchased by our schools. Even better, these tools normally come loaded on the computers we buy or are available for no cost to use on the Internet.

For educators, these tools are vital because they quietly push our students to do the most important thing that they can do as learners, communicate. Kids are using these tools at home, libraries and computer centers on their own time to create their MySpace pages, photo slideshows or video mashups. Why not use them in school to teach your content? When used to their full potential, educators can leverage these tools so that students create text, presentations and videos about the content that the we are trying to teach.

For bilingual and ELL teachers, digital tools are even more invaluable. Digital videos and images can be used to build background and to contextualize the content that is being taught. Digital production tools, like iMovie, Photostory and Garageband give students what they need to not only present the content that they are learning but also to practice and perfect their English skills. Most importantly, Web 2.0 tools, like blogs, wikis and video sharing sites, provide a venue to publish our student’s work and thus a provide a world-wide audience with the potential to provide much-needed affirmation through feedback and comments.

Computer-based and Web 2.0 tools are now so numerous that it is very difficult to keep up with them all. It is even more difficult to do this while teaching a room full of students. So… I will try to help you sort through the digital fog and find the best web tools, digital devices and computer resources for bilingual/ELL teachers and students. Check back regularly or better yet subscribe to the eduese blog and wiki to keep track of my findings. Please help to get a conversation going on any of the topics posted here by commenting on the blog or wiki.

Finally, please remember, this is good time to be a bilingual/ELL educator.

From Daily Kos:

Two days before Jim Cummins stood behind the podium at the annual conference of the organization of California Teachers of Other Languages (CATESOL) in San Diego, the place buzzed about his coming appearance. Four standing ovations indicated that he did not disappoint.

^{Jim Cummins}

No surprise. A treasured, no-nonsense voice in the world of second-language acquisition, during the past three decades, Cummins, now a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, has touched the life of many an English as a second language teacher, inspiring thousands with a thoroughly grounded iconoclastic approach to the pedagogy of language. He has shattered myths, developed new theories and concepts, promoted innovations in the classroom, affected policy, and arguably done as much to shift the paradigm of language instruction as Noam Chomsky 20 years earlier did to shift scientific thought toward a paradigm of innate universal grammar.

Cummins is Canada Research Chair in Language and Literacy Development in Multilingual Contexts at the University of Toronto and a prolific author of books on second language learning and literacy development. His research has focused on the nature of language proficiency and second language acquisition with particular emphasis on the social and educational barriers that limit academic success for culturally diverse students. Recent books include Literacy, Technology, and Diversity: Teaching for Success in Changing Times, Language, Power and Pedagogy, Negotiating Identities: Education for Empowerment in a Diverse Society, and Bilingual Children’s Mother Tongue: Why Is It Important for Education?

In a simultaneously scathing and humorous talk, “I’m not just a coloring person,” Cummins laid out a case that what is happening now in the schools is not science but ideology, with federal and state policies imposing a pedagogical divide in which “poor kids get behaviorism and rich kids get social constructionism.” In practice, that means skills for the poor and knowledge for the rich. That ideologically based approach ignores and rejects research into the way students learn, particularly how they learn language and how to read, he said.

Cummins challenged educational practices resulting from federal No Child Left Behind legislation, with its emphasis on standardized tests and consequent teaching “to the tests,” saying instructional approaches now being imposed are something that most in the audience wouldn’t want their own children to suffer. These approaches have, he said, more to do with teaching rats than humans. He urged his audience to reclaim good instruction with attention to the lessons of social constructionism instead of treating students with a behaviorist approach in which, as B.F. Skinner proved, even pigeons can be taught to play ping-pong.

“We have choices,” Cummins asserted. “A lot of folks at higher levels in the hierarchy don’t want you to know that you have choices because the dominant model of school improvement that is being inflicted in many states as part of the No Child Left Behind reading-first approach is to impose what is viewed as a scientifically supported approach to instruction and to wipe out teacher choice, to make it as teacher-proof as possible.”

In spite of an array of ideological and bureaucratic efforts to undermine teachers, he said, “we always have choices. Even when we’re not conscious we have choices, even when we’re teaching in constrained conditions, where our principals, our superintendents, our administrators, our coaches, are ensuring that we use choice in as limited way as possible, we’re always making choices.” To make a positive difference under these circumstances, he said, “We need to make the choice to reclaim our identities as educators …”

Comparing the research into instructional methods that work with what actually happens today in the schools, particularly in inner cities, it is “very clear,” Cummins said, that the current approach in too many U.S. schools is 90% ideology and 10% science. Research is ignored, misunderstood, misinterpreted and distorted to favor that ideology.

Sprinkling the findings of researchers throughout his speech, Cummins repeatedly pointed out that when students’ identities are affirmed in the classroom, they feel comfortable investing their identities into the literacy activities and practices, and they learn more. When they are encouraged to share unique personal experiences, when use of their first language is not discouraged, when “decoding” techniques are not the end-all and be-all of instruction, when students feel they have a voice in the classroom and that people want to hear what they have to say, when “shared inquiry,” “critical literacy,” “grand conversations” and “social justice” are accepted parts of the teaching process, students learn better and become engaged with their own education. “I haven’t been able to find those terms in No Child Left Behind,” he said.

How does NCLB fit into the pedagogical picture?

Bilingual and English learners are now part of the accountability map. “That’s the good news. …That’s the end of the good news.”

On the negative side, he lamented:

• standardized tests dominate curriculum and instruction; first language literacy is discouraged and undervalued;
• going against extensive research into reading, the NCLB focus is primarily on early reading (that is, “decoding”);
• reading comprehension is neglected in the junior and intermediate grades, leading to fourth grade “slump.” In effect, students don’t know what they are reading;
• there is no focus on the affective sphere or student identity in reading engagement, and for low-income and bilingual/ELL students, transmission approaches dominate to the exclusion of transformative approaches.

One problem with the upcoming reauthorization of NCLB is that many policymakers don’t want to change and “there is a lot of resistance to listening.” In other words, it doesn’t seem to matter what the researchers who actually know something about instruction have to say.

Two causal factors underlie the assumptions behind NCLB and Reading First, both of them profoundly flawed and contradicted by researchers.

Causal factor 1 is students’ ineffective phonological awareness and phonics instruction, which Reading First advocates seek to remedy with a “systematic, explicit, intensive, sequential phonics instruction” and “direct instruction (pre-teaching) of vocabulary to promote reading comprehension.” The drawback, Cummins argued, is that one of things the U.S. National Reading Panel “showed, which has been systematically fudged and distorted by folks who brought you Reading First, is that intensive phonics instruction – what they call intensive instruction – showed no positive effect on reading comprehension beyond the first grade for either low-achieving or normally achieving readers. … For low-achieving kids, for normally achieving kids, any effects of phonics instruction washed out after grade one. That has not been broadly advertised by the Feds.”

Causal factor 2 is a lack of accountability to obtain quality control, for which the NCLB-prescribed remedy is “tests, tests, tests.”

Said Cummins, “Schooling has been reduced to the transmission of scripted skills and facts to the exclusion of inquiry, critical literacy, and social awareness. In schools across the country, instruction focuses relentlessly on teaching to the test. This is particularly the case in schools in low-income areas, which are considered most at-risk of failing to demonstrate ‘adequate yearly progress’.” He cited an ESL Maryland public schools teacher who calculated that in the 2004-2005 school-year, English learners in a fifth-grade class took five different standardized tests, some of them more than once. The consequences? “During the course of the year,” the teacher wrote, “my students missed 33 days of ESL classes, or about 18% of their English instruction due to standardized testing.”

Classroom practices undertaken to deal with these causal factors are “absolutely at variance with what the research is telling us.”

Just how far off the mark the NCLB’s behaviorist approach has taken us is apparent when “many of the reading programs being funded require that all children’s literature be removed from classrooms.” The rationale is that if students are exposed to texts for which they haven’t been taught the phonics rules, they will figure out that spending so much time on such rules is useless. Phonics instruction is important, Cummins agreed, but it should not be done “in a mindless way” that ignores the research into its efficacy.

Cummins offered an alternative to the NCLB approach – under which more and more inner-city schools are failing every day. That alternative is school-based language planning which instructs along the lines of what the research has shown. Boiled down to its essentials, Cummins said, literacy attainment is directly related to literacy engagement. Such engagement requires participation, and effective participation requires that student identity is affirmed, which means first language learning should not be discouraged because “new understandings are constructed on a foundation of existing understandings and experiences.”

His alternative focuses on a four-element approach: scaffolding meaning, activating prior knowledge and building background knowledge, affirming student identity and extending language in a way that uses the students’ first language.

One example of a technique for developing participation is the student identity text – a kind of “journal” that can be written, spoken, visual, musical or multimodal combinations of these, and which holds “a mirror up to the student in which his or her identity is reflected back in a positive light.”