English Learner Profile

EL
by Ellen Lathrop5 views·Updated Aug 10, 2022
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  1. Hello everyone and thank you for taking the time
  2. to preview my english learner profile project with me.
  3. This project is completed in the summer of 2022 For course E. S. L.
  4. 6 47 with Melinda Harrison.
  5. First and foremost let's talk about my english learner and his background.
  6. So this semester I worked with student B.
  7. He is a 38 year old male from Jordans and his primary language is Arabic.
  8. He started learning English in his school days and he completed
  9. a his secondary school education um in his home country.
  10. He's actually a very recent arrival to the United States.
  11. He actually just came here in April of this year
  12. and he's currently employed in the automotive industry.
  13. So he's working in a body shop.
  14. His current learning context is um as a level two learner in the CP.
  15. But hopefully next semester he will be moving to level three or
  16. perhaps even level four based on his assessment from the semester.
  17. So one thing that hedge cock and pharaohs want us to understand is how L.
  18. Two readers unique characteristics will influence
  19. their reactions to a particular text.
  20. And so this particular context is um a very new
  21. immigrant who is looking to practice english for work purposes.
  22. He's actually able to communicate very well in spoken conversation.
  23. But he does find reading and writing more challenging.
  24. What we found throughout the semester is that level two C. E. P.
  25. Has not been challenging enough for him.
  26. Um if we look to the CPP placement test and find
  27. that it's 60 questions and they are primarily grammar and vocabulary
  28. based and although there are some listening comprehension questions within the
  29. test most of it is based on reading and writing skills.
  30. And I think this would explain why he placed in level
  31. two even though his spoken skills are a lot higher.
  32. And I think that's actually what made him such an interesting choice or subject for
  33. this project because there's such a discrepancy between
  34. his spoken skill and his writing skill.
  35. So for this project our goal was to introduce more reading opportunities for him and
  36. a practice professional writing.
  37. So we wanted his reading and writing opportunities to reflect what
  38. he would actually experience in his day to day life.
  39. So we have to remember that this is not a student who really needs
  40. academic language or anything super formal and so we'll keep that in mind.
  41. So for our needs assessment um we conducted a written questionnaire an
  42. oral interview and a few reading aloud exercises during our first meeting,
  43. ferris and hedge cock.
  44. Want us to understand that these needs are
  45. going to become our learning objectives and this
  46. is what's going to serve as the basis
  47. for our development of our materials and our practices
  48. and so it's the unique information that is unique to student b that
  49. is going to drive um how we teach or how I teach.
  50. So first and foremost we need to consider the unit outcomes first if you've
  51. taken a class with Dr Prado or if you're currently teaching in the C.
  52. E. P.
  53. Then you'll know that we try to implement
  54. backwards design in all of our lesson planning.
  55. So what that means essentially for our first step we're going
  56. to consider what our desired outcomes or results will be.
  57. Step two is to determine an assessment or what
  58. kind of evidence can measure our desired outcomes.
  59. And then lastly we'll think about experiences or
  60. activities that can lead us towards those outcomes.
  61. So the first question that we should ask ourselves
  62. is what does what does our students know,
  63. what do they understand and what are they able to do?
  64. So we first choose our desired learning language outcome and then we
  65. think about the acceptable evidence to determine if they've learned anything.
  66. So I actually based my learning outcomes on this project based on the level three C.
  67. E. P. Program.
  68. Learning outcomes and I tried of course to focus them on reading and writing skills.
  69. So the first was that I wanted my student to be able to determine a central idea and key
  70. details after reading authentic materials and in this case
  71. I wanted to use things like news articles for instance
  72. Another thing that I like to do,
  73. I like to ask my students about their reading
  74. habits in the beginning of the semester and this student
  75. in particular is 38 years old and he has
  76. not read for pleasure since his high school days.
  77. So we're talking about two decades where the
  78. student has not really read anything for pleasure.
  79. So the next learning outcome I wanted to focus on is the student's
  80. ability to identify a central claim and find supporting reasons within the text.
  81. And then lastly I wanted him to be able to make his own claims
  82. and use supporting reasons for the claim and then provide a coherent conclusion.
  83. So if we look back, this will be um some of our lesson topics that we talked about.
  84. One of my favorites was actually an opinion sharing exercise
  85. and we'll go over that in a little bit.
  86. Um but again,
  87. I just wanted to make sure that we
  88. were focusing on authentic level reading and writing.
  89. So here's what one of my lessons looked like for the first example,
  90. we had an article that we chose from Common Life dot org.
  91. I wanted to also tie in our digital tools report.
  92. So this is one of the things that I chose
  93. what I like the most about Common lit is that you can
  94. um look for materials based on the student's proficiency levels and
  95. then you can also narrow it down further by genre.
  96. So of course I wanted to um pick um
  97. nonfiction essentially.
  98. So our subject for this particular lesson was a question,
  99. should girls be allowed to play high school football.
  100. What I like about this up,
  101. What I like about this tool is that it
  102. already provides the guiding questions and assessment questions.
  103. So the first step of course is to provide a piece of writing and um to have the student
  104. read it and to see how well they comprehended
  105. the article and then it has embedded discussion questions.
  106. So in this case um our question was of course
  107. should girls be allowed to play high school football and then
  108. um they would use the article and their own opinions and
  109. experiences to come up with an answer to the question.
  110. So for the assessment we're considering in
  111. the writing did students use supporting evidence from
  112. the text to reinforce their opinion and are
  113. they able to provide a coherent conclusion?
  114. So if we're using the C. E. P.
  115. Lesson plan essentially we're thinking
  116. about our desired learning language outcome
  117. which is our students able to make a claim and
  118. give supporting reasons for this claim and then we think about
  119. the acceptable evidence which would be the assessment portion and
  120. then we can think about the specific activities in mind.
  121. So just some brief final thoughts.
  122. Again this project really helped to show me how we can
  123. use needs assessments as a way to guide our instruction.
  124. I think we were able to come up with some really nice long term english
  125. learning goals for the subject as well as some short term outcomes for the project.
  126. And then those learning goals in turn acted
  127. as the basis for our individualized curriculum design.
  128. Thank you again for taking the time to talk with me today,
  129. I am looking forward to hearing more from all of you.