Kaina Santana

Sister Mary Ann Jacob

EDU 360
13 April 2017

Being that the educational system is constantly changing, educators keep up with the

changes and alter their teaching accordingly. According to the new U.S. Census Bureau report,

by the year 2020 more than half of the children attending school in the US are expected to be of

the minority race or ethnic group. This means that we will have an abundance of English

Language Learners in the class room in less than four years. Due to these rapid changes in the

school system teachers as well as scholars are looking for different ways to accommodate the

new population of ELLs. What can educators do in order to help the ELL population succeed in

the same pace as native English speaking students?

I did my observation hours in an urban middle school in Brooklyn, Lew Wallace PS/IS

284. The schools demographic contains a ratio of mostly African American and Hispanic

students, 69% Black 31% ,Hispanic and 1%White . I decided to focus more so on the ELL

students because of the growing population of students immigrating to the US knowing little to

no English. One of the biggest difficulties that I noticed is that these students are expected to

learn at the same pace as the other English speaking students but they did not seem in tune with

the lesson because of their language barrier. The student that I decided to focus on, Jean Carlos,

who came from Dominican Republic was paired with another Spanish speaking student,Kayla,

who is also Dominican but was born in the US. My cooperating teacher, Ms.Souffront, saw it fit

to join the two together because of that racial connection. However, my goal is to find a possible

method that Ms.Souffront could use so that she is not taking away from Kaylas learning
experience. Is there a possible way for her to teach the ELL at the same pace as the English

speaking students?

The majority of this research was influenced by the changing statistics in the 21st century

classroom. A variety of research has been conducted in order to find out which type of methods

can be used in order to influence ELL students to establish a better understanding in class. The

research I looked at specifically for my paper is Literacy for English Learners and Regular

Students, Morphing into adolescents: Active word learning for Englishlanguage learners and

their classmates in middle school and Differentiating Instruction to Create Access to Learning

for ELL and Unengaged Students.

Meltzer and Hamann conducted a study in order to prove that instruction for ELLs rely

heavily on the teachers professional development. They argue that in order to be able to teach

ELLs and regular students the educator must emphasize the five sets of synergistic classroom

practices, teacher modeling, more time spent reading and writing, and more speaking, listening,

and viewing related to the discussion, creation, and understanding of texts. First, they

acknowledged the problem which is that 1.3 million teachers have at least on ELL enrolled in

their classes and they are completely held accountable for bringing students' content-area

reading, writing, and thinking skills-in English-up to speed, whether the students are

monolingual, bilingual, or trilingual speakers with minimal resources and time. This problem is

important because we cannot expect an ELL to be up to speed with his classmates when he/she

must first be up to date with the English language. The study introduces the audience to a set of

three kids Luka, Maria and Antonio. Luka has been a enrolled in schools for the past three years,

he has a deathly sick mother and several siblings, he wants to do good in school so that he can

someday take care of his family but he is barely passing his classes. . Maria is a seventh grader
whose life and schooling in her native country were disrupted by civil war. Lastly, Antonio grew

up in Puerto Rico and has knowledge of the English language but he not trying very hard in

school resulting to bad grades. It turns out that content area literacy professional development

needs to include explicit instruction and modeling of before-, during-, and after-reading

strategies; relevance and connections to students' lives; and multiple opportunities for reading,

writing, and speaking about content in all classes.(Meltzer 2). Motivation and engagement is

established through having a safe and responsive learning environment. In other words, the ELL

needs to feel comfortable with their surroundings in order to open up and be willing to learn.

Teachers can do this by asking the student questions, offering students choices of writing topics,

assessment modes and reading selection. The entire point is that teachers must make the student

feel like he is a part of the class, as though there is no language barrier. Meltzer never provided a

procedure but he did state that after his research he realized that providing solely professional

development in teachers is the first step. Teachers are to be held accountable for their students

development. He found that the more pressure the teacher has, the better he/she will work on the

students growth. The limitation to this study is that holding teachers accountable isnt always

fair.

Kieffer and Lesaux took a shot at attempting to find the best method for teaching ELLs.

They conducted research on morphology and how it can improve academic vocabulary. They

tested their study on urban sixth graders their method is supposed to be effective with English

Language Learners, but is meant to be used with all students. Finding forms of vocabulary

development is important because it is the first step to the students long journey. Once you get

the ball rolling with language development, everything else falls into place. The researchers

procedure consists of the following: students need to do the following: (1) recognize that they do
not know the word or do not have a deep understanding of the meaning of the word, (2) analyze

the word for morphemes that they recognize (i.e., roots, prefixes, suffixes), (3) hypothesize a

meaning for the word based on the word parts, and (4) check the hypothesis against the context.

The example they used is Invent, the student will see the word invent, it will be defined and

then the teacher moves on to teach them the word invention and its meaning. After reading this

part of their study I realized that the approach is to break words up into understandable chunks

for the student. The biggest limitation of this study is timing, this would definitely have to be

used as an afterschool program of some sort.

Lastly, Adam Wooten, Marisa Bateman, and Michael Crouch researched how to

differentiate instruction to create access to learning for ELL and unengaged students. This topic

is important because students with different disablilities and capabilities are all placed in general

Ed classes. Differentiation is crucial for the assurance in development of all students, or most.

From their research they found that differentiating doesnt only help ELLs but English speaking

students as well because it further reinforces their knowledge in their ow language. They didnt
specify the group of students they worked alongside but they found that giving the students

options in class is the most effective way to differentiate. For these researchers the best way to

approach the ELL is to use the SIOP model. The SIOP Model consists of eight interrelated

components: lesson preparation, building background, comprehensible input,

strategies, interaction, practice/application, lesson delivery, review & assessment. For lesson

preparation the teacher must include language and content objective and meaningfulness of

activities. Building backgrounds is mainly just making connections with the lesson and the

student. Comprehensible input is having the teacher tailor her speaking, academic tasks and

using other techniques to improve comprehension. Strategies and components are established

through scaffolding instruction because it promotes critical thinking skills. Practice and

application is an activity that is specifically made to expand language and content learning.

Finally, review and assessment provides the teacher with a way to see if what they taught was

effective.

Based off of my research and my survey I came up with the plan of using the Spalding

Method. Ms.Souffront, my cooperating teacher, was nice enough to let me perform this exercise

for the class. This method was perfect for Jean as well as his peers because its main purpose is to

teach students in such a way that they are provided with auditory, visual and tactile learning, it

incorporates vocabulary and definitions for Jean to know what new word he is learning. For

example, we were looking at the word pair. By following the Spalding Method, this is how

Ms.Souffront and my attempt looked:

1) Write the word on the board -> Pair (this also supports Colorin

Colorados point of having visual aids for the ELL)

 2) The next step is to give a definition of the word, I told Jean that pair

means a set of two things.

3) Next, we modeled it in a sentence, this is the most important part

because this is where the Jean Carlos was able to see the use of the

word. -> I have a pair of shoes

4) Next, the class as a whole repeated the sentence. At first, Jean Carlos

did not want to partake in this step. He was afraid of his accent, but

after a little push of motivation he said the sentence as clear as day!

5) The next step I took with Jean Carlos was to have him form a

sentence on his own but this time, he had to find a pair of anything in

the classroom(tactile) and create the sentence. He found a pair of

books and wrote down I have a pair of but he did not know how to

say books. After following the same exact steps from 1-4 with just Jean

he was able to successfully speak, write and read the sentence.

Although this method was successful, after thinking about the amount of time it took for Jean

to understand the words definition and pronunciation I began to think that this may be the

downfall to this method. If there are 5 ELL students who all process information differently, how

would I differentiate this method? A class period is normally 45 mins, would I have a sufficient

amount of time? I think that in order for the Spalding Method to work in a timely manner, it has

to be paired up with another strategy. I also found out that this method was used for lower

grades. However, my next step is to somehow use the SIOP model because it is tailored

specifically for adolescents. But I also wanted to incorporate technology. On a smart board, I will

write down the objective of the lesson as well as vocalize them, in this moment I let the student

know all of the activities and reading and writing that we will do in the class period. This way

the ELL is mentally preparing himself for what is to come and my regular ed students will have a
check list in their minds. By the end of the lesson the students should be able to validate that they

learned exactly what was in the objectives. The next step is to assure that the students are

engaged in the lesson throughout a majority of the lesson. This means that I would have to

prematurely prepare activities that call for a great deal of engagement. Lastly, I will make sure

that my lesson is paced in a manner that is manageable because I learned that students tend to

just give up if they do not understand the task or if it is too advanced.

Conclusively, I found that there really isnt an 100% successful way to teach ELL

students and that is the scary truth. Yes, many researchers can say that their approach worked but

every student is different so can you make the argument that itll work for everyone? No.

Through my research I learned that ELL students need visual, auditory and hand on activities in

order to help them further their development. Hopefully in the future we will be able to provide

ELLs with every resource they need in order to perform at their optimal ability.

Work Cited

Kieffer, M. J., & Lesaux, N. K. (2010). Morphing into adolescents: Active word learning
for Englishanguage learners and their classmates in middle school. Journal of
Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(1), 47-56.

Meltzer, J., & Hamann, E. T. (2005). Meeting the Literacy Development Needs of
Adolescent English Language Learners Through Content-Area Learning-PART TWO:
Focus on Classroom Teaching and Learning Strategies.

Wooten, A., Bateman, M., & Crouch, M. (2014). Differentiating Instruction to Create
Access to Learning for ELL and Unengaged Students. Widening the Circle, 303.