So after spending this entire year stressing over how I am going to bring my ELL students up to 8th grade standards, I stumbled across a method that I think will really help. I thought I might share it here.
My students, who all speak Spanish as their first language, often write the words that sound exactly as they hear them-- which is problematic because it is not correct. For a while I conceded to the fact that their language would just always be low, and so I focused on just working on improving their ideas and voice and organization.
One problem that my students have is that they write "When the rain falls, is wet" instead of "When the rain falls, IT is wet." I was conferencing with a student on Wednesday when I realized that I should look at the reason behind the problem instead of the problem itself. I quickly jotted down an example on the back of the page I was working on. I explained to the student that if you were to say "Esta lloviendo" it means "It is raining" even though it is only 2 words. In English, we must say "It is raining" because "Is raining" is incorrect.
The student looked at me with a recognition of what I had explained to her, and I realized that this is a poster I should have put up at the beginning of the year. In my next conference, I was working with a student who kept writing "dint" instead of "didn't." I showed him what "din't" actually stood for by writing "did" and "not" and saying that when they came together they crashed, and added an apostrophe. He looked up at me with a smile and said, "oh! I never knew that!"
I tell this story because when we have been talking about giving feedback to our students, we often guess what kinds of comments will discourage and what kind will actually help our writers progress. I had been making progress with my student's ideas and voice but still fell short when I would grade their writing pieces on the same rubric as all of my other students. By giving direct mini lessons on language issues like this one, I can eliminate a lot of the problematic aspects of my ELL's writing.
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This fundamental concept, that errors are only pedagogically meaningful if and when we understand their genealogy, so to speak, is the single most important lesson about the teaching of grammar that I ever learned. It's almost as if we as teachers need to recognize a psychology of error, a hypothetical reconstruction of the path(s) that led to the particular error in question,in order to have any hope of teaching the writer to avoid that error in the future.
ReplyDeleteSo for me it was easy to translate this error across languages. But I wonder how we find that"psychological error," as you call it, when it's not so black and white as Spanish and English? Are there tools we can use to "find that path?" If so, if they are common and not just specific to every different child, I would love to know a resource of where to find them.
ReplyDeleteInteresting concepts to consider.
That's a somewhat cute story. I'm not particularly good with foreign languages, and I completely empathize with not seeing how a nuance of someone's language can clash with my own. From what you've described, it seems as though a good way of helping ELL students understand English better would be to find some common mistakes of students to explain how they are mistakes in English, even if they're not in the students' language(s). I don't think that we could ever address all of the issues students have, but if we can focus on a few, like you did with "didn't," then we can at least help students a little bit at a time.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with this. I was just reading that book Holler If You Hear Me (about teaching in inner-city schools--it's one of those urban teacher books), and the author was lamenting the kids' poor grammar and the fact that they had never been taught various grammar things. And I was thinking...I see those mistakes in my students' writing all the time, and I never take the time to correct them. It's like Sarah said; I usually just assume that we have bigger fish to fry, and I let those errors go. It would be so easy to just slow down and take five seconds to correct little mistakes like that! I also think that focusing on stuff like that could give English class a little bit of the shine that math class has--the kids would really feel like they were "learning something," because they could learn specific, usable little "nuggets" of information, like they do in math, and they would be able to discern when they were right and wrong about something...which is often not true in English class.
ReplyDeleteOops--I just realized that I'm signed in to google as my boyfriend, so I think this is going to show up as a comment by "Daniel." This is actually Meg Cassedy-Blum.
I like what you say about the "math" thing, it's totally true, that they will feel like they are learning stuff they can use. Good point, Daniel.
ReplyDeletehehehe
The only problem is that it takes so much time to address all of those little grammar issues. Even in formally graded writing assignments, it's almost impossible to correct all grammar misunderstandings. And I rarely have time to correct many homework assignments. Peer editing is a good way to address various students' needs at once.
ReplyDeleteI wish I had more time!
I think that its important to distinguish between correction and awareness. Or to put it another way: is there a pedagogical value to errors? A teaching approach that can use error to help a student become a better writer, a better student?
ReplyDeleteA related issue: is our concern with grammar limited to proofreading or editing skills? Or is a broader conception of revision our focus? I know that the answer ultimately is (and should be) both, but given the time limitations that we all face, do we need to make decisions about relative importance?
For me, I have found that editing/proofreading skills are hard to determine in students, because they simply dont consider it important to review their work. I have found that most students are better at surface mechanics and knowledge of Standard Written English than would seem apparent from their writing, but that they simply haven't learned the importance of doing so. And in an age of speel- and grammar-check, is that really hard to sympathize with? To resturn to the parralels and contrasts with Math, many math teachers that I know lament the failure of students to check their computations, and they blame this at least in part on the use of calculators in the classroom (in my antediluvian days as a student, a forbidden instrument).
I dont stress this much, as I feel that getting students to believe that its important to proofread and check their work for errors is something that you cannot impose. You can of course create standards, and enforce them with grades, but I believe that the same students who ignore these issues know will continue to ignore them. Many teachers have found that publication is a good way to get students to engage in editing, as its "real world" standards are somewhat outside the usual (and often tiresome) "improvement morality" that we often use to try and persuade students to do what we want them to.
As regards the broader iea of revision, this seems to me much more interesting. How can we help students to understand revision as something more (and more interesting) than correction? This is something that I'd like to talk about in class on Saturday.
I've learned that when I spend hours "correcting" papers, my students hardly read my corrections anyways, so are they REALLY learning from them? No, they get daunted by the amount of ink on the page and seem to often shut down. I typically try to focus on specific skills that we covered during the unit- such as subject verb agreement, commonly confused words, sentence fragments and run ons- instead of trying to tackle all of them. I think it makes it less overwhelming for them and also easier for them to focus on specific elements of grammar. I think you really need to pound proofreading and model proofreading because kids often don't see it as important at all. But, if you point out that they should go back and proofread, the chances are they will catch many mistakes.
ReplyDelete