Marc Finks

Module 1, Unit 4, Activity 3

I will be working with second graders and teaching them the different parts of flowering plants and what their functions are.

Jin has recently arrived in the states, and she didn’t learn any English in her home country, South Korea. Even though she is clearly watching everything around her and taking in as much as possible, she doesn’t say anything in English, and so she is in the Pre-Production phase. To accommodate Jin and other students like her, I will use a lot of colorful pictures that show each plant part and videos that show them functioning.  We are also lucky to have a school garden near the playground, and so we will visit it a couple of times and examine the flowering plants, while pointing to and identifying the different parts of the plant. We will also play Plant BINGO as a class, and I will have the students work as partners, so that she start to follow along as her partner shows her which square to cover each time a certain word is announced.

Howard is also from South Korea, but he has been in the United States for several months, and he has begun talking regularly in English – especially among his friends. While he still has severe grammatical and vocabulary errors, he seems to be growing confident in his ability to speak English. He seems to be in the Speech Emergent phase. While looking at the images and examining the plants is interesting to him and helps him understand everything better, he is also able to read and learn some of the written words. Howard really enjoys Plant BINGO and is able to do it without any help once he learns the words, and, later, he is able to draw a plant and label the parts correctly based on what he has learned. He is also able to fill out simple worksheets, as long as the contextual clues in each sentence are clear enough for him to deduce the word needed to fill in the blank.

Julia has been in the United Stated for almost nine months. When she is among her friends, she chats without any hesitation or self-consciousness, and she is more confident about volunteering in class. She still has trouble finding the correct word sometimes when she is trying to explain something, and she has some difficulty understanding all of the words in our textbooks. She is in the Beginning Fluency stage, and, like Howard, she benefitted from learning the parts of the plants by studying the colorful images and walking through our garden. She finishes the worksheets much quicker than Howard does. She is asked to choose a flower from the garden and to write down facts about it, and then try to write that into a short paragraph. She struggles with decoding the information from the encyclopedia, but once she has everything organized, Julia is able to write a paragraph about the flower, using short, simple sentences. She is also able to give a speech about it, but feels most comfortable just reading aloud from the paragraph that she wrote.

John arrived in the United States in kindergarten from Costa Rica, and he speaks really well. He doesn’t hesitate when he speaks, and is able to decode text as well as the other students. He still uses the wrong word or idiom from time to time, but, in general, he is in the Advanced Fluency stage. John enjoyed the images, the walks, the BINGO, and easily did the worksheets. He had much less trouble than Julia on summarizing information about his flowering plant, and he spoke confidently in front of the class when giving his presentation. John has shown an eagerness to learn more information, and so he will be assigned to do a report about the life cycle of the flowering plant that he chose, and to explain how insects play a key in the flowering process. He will work with a partner on this, and they will have to create an illustrative guide that they will use when they present their research to the class, and he will also have to write up a short report explaining what he learned. While he may have a little difficulty with some parts of this assignment, he and his partner should be able to successfully complete the work with very little assistance from the teacher.

Citation:

Language Acquisition: An Overview | ELL Topics from A-Z | Colorín Colorado. (n.d.). Retrieved October 13, 2014, from http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/26751.