Think Piece 8- Multilingual Learners

                                                 (in English)          (in Spanish)           (in Italian)

           

            At this point in my life, I have not yet had the opportunity to work extensively with bilingual students or English Language Learners (ELLs).  I am positive that I would not have felt confident in my abilities to teach these students to write in English if I had not read chapter 14, What is Sound Writing Instruction for Multilingual Learners? by Jill Fitzgerald and Steve Amendum.  I wouldn’t expect teachers to learn the native languages of all their students, however in order to make lessons relatable to ELL students teachers must make the effort to familiarize themselves with the cultures their students came from.  This is something that I am excited to learn as a teacher.  I found that the suggestions, strategies, and examples of specific lessons, genres of writing, and the possible settings for teaching these lessons mentioned in the chapter were beneficial for my learning style.  The authors did not just give statistics, formal jargon, and research results.  They provided the readers with the experiences that Mrs. Chen had when teaching the writing process to multilingual learners. 

            I thought the practices mentioned in chapter 14 of Best Practices in Writing Instruction stemmed from Vygotsky and sociocultural theory, a theory that I too believe in.  Fitzgerald and Amendum wrote that “learning a new language involves active thinking and thinking with peers and adults” (p. 302).  These social experiences are essential for English Language Learners because it is likely that for many, school is the only place that they speak and hear English.  Even friendly or informal conversation will increase their vocabulary.  Even though speaking and writing have similarities, one of the main differences between them is that formal writing has rules, such as structure, tense, and grammar that can be difficult for any student, even when writing in their native language. 

            The description of the strategy known as TREE was creative and applicable to me as a teacher. 

“TREE is a four-stage mnemonic strategy used for writing a persuasive or opinion essay.  Students plan their essay using a structured format: 1) Topic sentence-tell what you believe; 2) Reasons (several)-Why do I believe this?  Will my readers believe this?; 3) Explain reasons-say more about each reason; 4) Ending-wrap it up right” (p. 301).

 I actually got excited when I read it because ideas began flying through my mind about how I could adapt and apply it to my own classroom, which will most likely be somewhere in high school, middle school, or upper elementary school.  This type of writing instruction could be first used as a modeling activity and gradually evolve into an individual writing planning strategy in a general education classroom, pull-out ESL classrooms, foreign language classrooms, or bilingual classrooms.