Having taken an entire school year to study teaching English Language Learners, the SIOP Method became my bread and butter in some respects. I have already mentioned this fact, and that I now tend to look at all teaching with ELL colored glasses. In fact, I spoke with my previous professor about this new view and he smiled and told me that it wasn't just an ELL centered view. Instead he pointed out that I was actually opening myself up to a culturally inclusive view for my teaching and my classroom. I like this idea even better than my colored glasses. So culturally inclusive it is.
No matter what I call this point of view, a great deal of it has to do with the SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) Model. SIOP is a way to teach ELL students either within purely ELL classrooms or in general education classrooms. In fact, statistics show that all students, not just ELLs, benefit for this type of instruction. Ultimately, it would behoove all teachers to look into SIOP at least once in their careers. The article read for today was a very brief overview of the main points that make up SIOP. Instead of going further down that road, I would rather pick out the pieces that I felt I could add something to.
The first little nugget I am choosing to focus on is the idea of Language Objectives. Every student in the teaching program, or those currently teaching, have heard of Lesson Objectives. These are the goals of the day for the students within the classroom. The students will be able to identify the rising action, climax, and denouement within the text. The students will be able to count by multiples of three from zero to ninety nine. Etc.... Lesson Objectives are specific and attainable and fit with what is actually being taught in the classroom. Language Objectives need to be just as specific and attainable. It is the part where they fit with what is being taught that is the most important. For a teacher to figure out the Language Objectives, they must know exactly what they are going to teach that day and then ask themselves what language their students will need to know to accomplish those tasks. This seemed simple the first time that I heard about it; I was wrong. For the previous Lesson Objective stated where the students will be able to label the points of the plot of a given text, there are multiple language obstacles to overcome. A few might be the vocabulary used (plot, rising action, climax, denouement), the structure of a plot line and how to properly label it, summarizing the action within the text to fit in the plot line, understanding the key terms or phrases within the text that will point to the plot points, and being able to explain what they have discovered to others. There are of course more issues that language learners face, this is merely a short list on one Lesson Objective.
My next little nugget is the idea of Building Background. This section of the article seems to be missing something very important in my opinion: the transfer of L1 knowledge to L2 usage. Let me be more specific. First, I use the term L1 to mean a student's first language. I use this term broadly because their knowledge base may in fact include multiple other languages. I am using the term L2 to mean their conversion to the American English language. A previously stated, this may in fact be their fourth or fifth or sixth learned language. So L1 and L2 are a simplification that encompasses the idea of one or more languages being converted to American English. Now that this little bit of explaining is done, let me make my point about transfer. The article says that it is important for teachers to connect learning as much as possible to what the student has already learned. The connection is much deeper than this statement suggests. In a students first language they may have created helpful learning strategies which they can then apply to what it being taught in the classroom. Students come to the class with a certain number of schema, some more than others. They might be highly aware of the natural world with very little academic study. Knowing this, the teacher can make inferences to the natural world so that the student can connect their current schema with the new academic one being taught. A student may also come from a highly academic culture and be well versed in school culture within their country. This can be a blessing and a curse. Take for example writing an essay in the L1 culture may include a structure that does not seem logical to a Western teacher. The student may be writing in a much more free flowing manner without a concrete beginning, end, or thesis statement. It would help for the teacher to understand that this student is not writing poorly, but following a different schema than is taught in America. The teacher might applaud their work and tell them that they are doing well in that form of writing, then suggest they build on that knowledge to learn a new form of writing an essay. This is more useful in my opinion that the simple overview given on using a students background that was given in this article.
My last little nugget has to do with the Lesson Instruction. Author Stephen Cary in English Language Learners, Answers to Teachers' Top Ten Questions, gives the best example I have come across for what a SIOP lesson should look like while instructions or lectures are being given. He calls his model the Show-and-Tell model and counter is with the Tell-Only model. And he would express his point during presentations to other teachers.
"In order to give teachers a feel for the drawbacks of tell-only modeling, I sometimes abruptly switch to Spanish in the middle of a workshop and describe what somebody in the group is wearing. I describe without showing what I'm describing, then ask question about the description. The second time around, the person stands next to me while I point to and describe each item of clothing - blue sweater, gold necklace, beige slacks, and short-heeled shoes, for example. Folks with little or no Spanish find the exercise slightly jarring, but tolerable and even amusing if I quickly follow the tell-only description with the show-and-tell model. When I save the show-and-tell model for later, however, and run through several back-to-back tell-only descriptions, things turn ugly. Participants squirm, stop listening, and send mild curses my direction. Twice I've had people leave the room ... many also say how frustrated and angry they felt during the tell-only descriptions. Teacher talk quickly shifts to describing how much frustration and anger English beginners must feel when the 'show' component is missing - not for four or five minutes as it was during the workshop, but for hours at a stretch in school" (104).
English Language Learners need instruction that includes visuals, miming, hands on activities ... ultimately show AND tell. And this type of instruction won't just help language learners, studies have proven that this type of instruction is helpful for native speakers as well. It is also helpful for every grade level and every academic ability level.
Don't sell your students short on their learning experience. SIOP is worth the time to investigate!
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