ArHeCREATE
Austin Texas
October 2009
Participants
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Charlie Geier
Ramsay West
Audra Rasmussen
Meghan O’Shea
Jennifer Dodson
Angela Moore
Conference Format
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12 different speakers over two days
3 Q & A sessions with speakers
1 intensive small group with participants from around the United States
3 intensive small group sessions of an hour with Washington Township teachers
focusing on processing new information and implementation
Highlights and Important Information
 ELL is fastest growing sub group – 284% in last ten years
 400 home languages in schools
 Largest group immigrated before Kindergarten
 Achievement gap is most striking at middle and high schools
 At grade 3 everyone looks about the same, but then it begins to change due to
greater language demands, lack of knowledge of all purpose words, lack of
reading comprehension
 Must create meaningful activities with text
 Breadth and depth
 Academic discussion impacts writing and reading
 WORD GENERATION – teaching all purpose words across all of the
curriculums in different contexts – same words across all contents
 Enhance content-area literacy and learning by building knowledge, cultures,
interest, and identities
 Homies – high interest and uses lots of print
 You have to repeat words – word density
 What “little language” are we asking kids to understand
 TEACH THE PURPOSE OF READING AND WRITING
 To have highly competent readers, students must have knowledge rich contexts
and domain specific strategies
 Oral, world, topic knowledge
 Content-area fluency drops with technical requirements
 Discussion and oral literacy develop reading comprehension
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Explicitly teach academic vocabulary
Teach morphology and word contexts
Teaching cognates is helpful, but only transfers to the ability in L1
Kids respond at different paces. The rate of growth is not different, the place in
which they started is drastically different
Context clues, Vocabulary Mapping
LTELLs – long term English Learners – 7 plus years – most are 3 grade levels
behind
Various program features
Activate prior knowledge, Read Alouds, teacher collaboration
Newcomer Programs
ALIAS program
o Read article and discuss concepts
o Define words
o Answer text-based questions
o Sketch target word
o Morphology introduction
o Morphology review and practice
o Answer questions in new contexts
o Read supplemental material, plan writing
o Write paragraph
Graphic organizers
Concept mapping
Word learning strategies
Increase student opportunities with comprehensible input and output
Teachers have to value oral literacy
Unpack the complexities of the word and identity
Teachers are to maximize opportunities for students to actively engage in
discipline specific talk
Applications and Next Steps
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Vocabulary treatments
Student gist statements – 10 words
Flash cards
Foldables/exit tickets
Ask and generate questions – teaching to write good questions
Target words – academic word lists – marzanos
Relevance and useful
Content is learned through language and language is learned through content
Gradual release of teacher responsibility to student responsibility
Demo experiences for teachers
Barnga
Focus on oral literacy
Content gap visual
o IB/inquiry connections
Implementation/teaching of Material
o Team meetings
o Department meetings
o Meet with principals to share what we learned
o ENL district meetings
o PLCs
o Development of school site-based task forces
o Recruiting more teachers
o Imbedded professional development opportunities
o Project Alianza connections
o Evaluation committee connections
o District Web-site initiative
o Politely force/encourage teachers to use the same language
o Grade level in-services
o Before school
o After school coffee
Timeline
o Meet individually with ENL coach on implementation in own classroom –
October - ongoing
o Present at ENL district meeting – October
o Meet with Principals to discuss possibilities of PD – October
o Recruit and develop site-based task forces – October – November - ongoing
o Lead professional development – by the end of 1st semester