Chatters 1 Trey Chatters Fostering English Learners’ Confidence Published: November 2014 Authors: Rhonda Bondie, Laurie Gaughran, and Akane Zusho In the Article, “Fostering English Learners’ Confidence”, the main focus is showing different ways in which students can gain knowledge and confidence within the classroom through various effective activities. The activities in this particular article could help all learners, but the main targets are students who are still learning to fully comprehend and speak the English language. The setting where the activities were put to the test was in International Community High School located in the Bronx. This was a great place because this school is highly populated with foreign students, including teenagers from El Salvador, Bangladesh, Iraq, and even more countries that went unnamed. The article made it a point, from the very beginning, to stress the importance that group work plays within this particular school. Most of the students have been reported as having low literacy rates even in their own native language, yet they are still expected to fluently know english in subjects that may be totally foreign to them. As mentioned earlier, group work is a very important tool within this school, so they start off each day by the students engaging in conversations revolving around what the lesson was the day before that. This tactic helps the students to be more engaged in class because they are encouraged to talk with their peers about what they may or may not understand, and this will also help them learn some new vocabulary within the English language. While group discussions are a great tool, it can also have a downside, an example could be group work being used for students to think about other things that have nothing to do with the lesson Chatters 2 and/or a student could just wait around for their partners in their group to do all the work for them. Routines were put in place in order to combat these problems that group work could tempt students to fall victim to. ALL-ED is the name of the network of research-based learning routines that are used in order to make the student more successful overall in school. ALL-ED routines were put into the school and it was observed that students’ communication and independence skills skyrocketed in a considerably short amount of time. A specific routine mentioned in the article is called Elbow Partner Exchange. An example of elbow partner exchange is students within the classroom discussing with their peers who are right beside them. The students will observe a problem that is put on the board and discuss what they may know about the problem and how they would solve it. This is a great method because it not only gets the students engaged, but it opens up the opportunity for students’ peers to teach them different ways to solve problems and if they are all having difficulty with the problem then they will not feel alone. This method is also great for the teacher because they can grasp what prior knowledge the students might already have, so it makes the lesson that needs to be taught a little easier on the teacher. All in all, the methods of group work that this school uses are great tools for students to instill the confidence and knowledge that they need in order to be successful in the academic world.
