Making Content Comprehensible
When planning lessons, teachers need to use their expertise and available tools to make the required content comprehensible to all students, including ELLs.
GUIDING PRINCIPLE 1
Where possible, it is preferable (and more manageable!) to have all students learning similar content. Whether the topic is the study of fluids, pioneers or the impact of globalization, design lessons so that all students can participate at their own level.
Shelley Moore suggests that teachers design the initial task in their lesson so students at the lowest ability level in their classroom can participate and then notch up the subsequent activities and tasks to meet the needs of the majority of students. For example, when studying triangles, all students start by matching up the three types of triangles. Some students might stay at a picture, matching, fill in the blank, vocabulary development level, but the rest can move on to identifying equal sides, calculating area or measuring angles - whatever the desired outcome is.
Diane Heacox uses the concept in her differentiation work of laddering up or laddering down our expectations depending on the student. If we are studying planets, some students might simply name the planets in order and list one or two characteristics while other students can compare planets. Another group might be able to apply their knowledge and move on to a creating process where they plan an interplanetary visit and identify what they are looking forward to seeing and what clothes they should pack.
Make use of a wide variety of resources to help students develop understanding. For example, while studying Aztecs, you have decided to undertake a mini-inquiry to build background knowledge of students so they can get a sense of what Aztecs ate, their clothing, weapons, homes, beliefs, etc. In order to meet all needs, you provide students with a range of texts, from the simplest elementary level, highly visual browsers to more challenging texts to short video clips or multimedia texts. Set out the materials in stations, ask students to note the big ideas in a graphic organizer and then share as a whole class what was learned. All students can be successful in a task such as this one.
Examples of multi-grade levelled texts:
Newsela, Dogo, Tween Tribute, What’s In The World, News in Levels
Hi-Lo Readers, Big Idea and Remix (Pearson), Ladders Series (National Geographic), Talk About and Fast Track (Scholastic)
Brief Videos; Annotating videos (EdPuzzle, Zaption)
Browsers - Dorling Kindersley
Use Bloom's Taxonomy to guide how you might support and challenge students at different levels of ability. Here are a few resources designed for ELLs:
Blog post: Bloom's taxonomy and English Language Learners (Word Document below by same author, Judy Haynes)
NSDC Article, Winter 2008: Asking The Right Questions
Guiding Principle 2
Use the power of students to make meaning together.
Inquiry Projects
Stations and Centers (Reading, Writing, Listening)
Conversation Groups
Close Reading Strategies and Discussions - Blog Post: Ideas for "Close Reading" with ELL Students
Guiding Principle 3
Use digital tools to simplify text to make it more accessible to ELLs.
Google Docs provides the option of translating documents into 80 different languages - Tip Sheet
Text to speech and speech to text (Ex. Read & Write for Google Chrome Extension)
Mercury Reader - Chrome Extension - cleans up webpages, removes ads, adjusts font and text size, and offers printing optimization
Apps for translating worksheets:
Translate Photo - Camera Scanner OCR & Translator
Text Compactor - simplifies reading level of texts by creating summary sentences based on the frequency of words appearing in the text. This tool works best with expository text.
Rewordify - simplifies key terms. The reworded words are highlighted (see example to the right with yellow highlighting). There are a few different options for how the changes are shown. Students can click highlighting to hear and see the original words. The site also offers "learning sessions" to help students learn new words from the text they chose to paste on the site. Rewordify documents can be saved and shared.
Simplish.org - uses an 850 word vocabulary and a scientific dictionary to simplify texts. Any scientific terms are explained in footnotes and students can create their own personal dictionary as they learn new words.
WordSift.org - input text - it pulls out academic vocabulary and creates a word cloud (see volcano example to the right)