Description

This presentation is a report on an ELL teacher’s mainstream class observations, co-teaching experiences with a local language arts teacher, and surveying with students for a semester. As Short and Echevarria (2016) state, “academic language is a second language for all students” (p. 2) and every student is an academic English learner. This study examines how teachers find the gap between theory and practice by taking on multiple roles in classrooms and providing diverse support (Gottlieb, 2015). This leads to enhanced academic language learning which could meet the academic standards. The implemented project focused on creating an autobiographical book with students themselves as centerpieces. The main purpose of the project with the 7th-grade students was to give a grammar lesson on adjectives and adverbs based on communicative language teaching. Since grammatical competence is one of the core communicative competence with sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence, students need to obtain these four abilities (Canale & Swain, 1980; Savingnon, 1976). Through observations, co-teaching, and surveying, the findings indicate that teachers play multiple roles and provide students with various support using multimodality and active interaction. Specifically, interactive support helps students achieve academic language standards which should expand to all students including English language learners in K-12 education.

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The Power of Co-Teaching: Academic English Learning with Interactive Support

This presentation is a report on an ELL teacher’s mainstream class observations, co-teaching experiences with a local language arts teacher, and surveying with students for a semester. As Short and Echevarria (2016) state, “academic language is a second language for all students” (p. 2) and every student is an academic English learner. This study examines how teachers find the gap between theory and practice by taking on multiple roles in classrooms and providing diverse support (Gottlieb, 2015). This leads to enhanced academic language learning which could meet the academic standards. The implemented project focused on creating an autobiographical book with students themselves as centerpieces. The main purpose of the project with the 7th-grade students was to give a grammar lesson on adjectives and adverbs based on communicative language teaching. Since grammatical competence is one of the core communicative competence with sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence, students need to obtain these four abilities (Canale & Swain, 1980; Savingnon, 1976). Through observations, co-teaching, and surveying, the findings indicate that teachers play multiple roles and provide students with various support using multimodality and active interaction. Specifically, interactive support helps students achieve academic language standards which should expand to all students including English language learners in K-12 education.