Conversations about Literacy

When I spoke to another teacher around his philosophies about teaching literacy to ELL's he felt that the most important aspect was that if a student could not speak a language then they could not write a language. This teacher, who teaches middle school social studies felt that for English Language Learners an important piece of learning was being able to verbalize their thoughts and opinions around a subject matter. In his classroom he operated around the modes of collaboration through think-pair-shares, partner activities, and collaborative strategic reading. He felt once they were able to speak the language the students when then be able to translate this into writing. Although, this teacher did not verbalize this I know that he does provide scaffolds in the classroom to help students such as accountable talk stems to guide conversations. Questions that I would like to further discuss with this teacher would be if he believes that language develops simultaneously, if he deems it beneficial to teach literacy skills concurrently or keep them completely separate. Another question I would love to inquire about is the type of systems and scaffolds he puts into place to help his English Language students take their spoken thoughts and put them into words. Another teacher I spoke to had a very complete understanding of the implications of having diverse learners in her middle school science classroom, "Teaching literacy to ELL students is a responsibility of every content area teacher. This is something that should be seen not only in language arts classrooms, but in science, social studies, math, etc. In addition to teaching skills in other contents, all teachers should consider the implications around content delivery when having ELL students in their classrooms. Curriculum should never be dumbed down for those students who are mastering a new language, but rather, should be scaffolded enough that the students can access the content. Lastly, teachers should consider making lessons relevant to students who are coming in from a different culture. Knowing a student's background and utilizing that knowledge when teaching not only empowers the student, but increases the likelihood that they will retain the content as well."