As students grapple with hands-on activities designed to help them grasp the concepts, the teacher can also provide language supports to help them acquire the new English words connected to these concepts. One analysis of science textbooks found that a year of secondary science class introduces students to more new vocabulary than a year of a foreign language class! Each of these vocabulary words represents dense content concepts that often require exploration and experimentation to grasp. Like many English Language Learners, the student in the example above needed to focus on the vocabulary level of academic language development. Upon further questioning and probing, it was clear that without some extra support, this student was unable to use academic English to express his understanding of the concepts. So I asked the student, “What gets closer?” He pointed to the lens showing me he understood the question and the answer, but he was unable to name this object in English. Although I had a basic grasp of the focal point experiment, I wasn’t able to fill in the details of the student’s general answer. One student confidently said, “When it gets closer, it gets bigger.” The teacher completely understood this response and gave the student positive feedback. I wondered how these students would transfer their concept knowledge to academic English.Īt the end of the lesson, the teacher asked the students to explain what they had designed and how it would demonstrate the focal point objective of the experiment. When they spoke English to communicate with students from other language backgrounds, they used mostly social language to share supplies or ask for help with building their measurement tool. Using their mother tongues during this exploratory phase of the lesson certainly supported their concept attainment. I noticed how engaged the students were in experimenting with the focal point concept and the language they were using to understand. Sheltered instruction has to have dual focal points: language and content. The teacher circulated from group to group asking questions to challenge students’ thinking and formatively assess students’ concept development.Īs I watched what the students were doing and how they were working together, I realized that the project on focal points was also a metaphor for teaching a sheltered content class. They debated the design of their measurement tools and the results of their experimental trials. Students concentrated on building their own contraption and walked unobtrusively around to gather ideas and equipment from other teams. Cardboard boxes, tape, scissors, lenses, rulers, and other tools were strewn around the lab tables and freely shared among the students. While they built their tool, they spoke in five different mother tongues and switched to English whenever they interacted with speakers of another language. As I walked into the sheltered high school science class, students from five different countries worked in groups to design an experiment to test focal points of various lenses and build a tool to measure the focal length of a lens.
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