L400/500 FA19

November 26 , 2019 Oral Literacy versus Reading and Writing Literacy “For all intents and purposes neither of us should have learned to read (much less write) given our circumstances of birth and the home conditions of our formative years.”  When I asked myself, “Says who?”,  Zulmara and Necochea  listed studies to support this assertion but they clearly didn’t adhere to them. Evidently the studies are one dimensional. Both authors write that the grew up in homes with little or no written literature and that reading and writing was not modeled for them. Yet, both became avid readers and writers.  They suggest that a key to their success was having rich oral and storytelling traditions in their families. Based on what my father told me about his background, he did not have much of any type of literature in his sharecropper home in South Carolina. Yet, he became an avid reader, much of it self-taught, filled our home with books and magazines, and read at ...

MS ELL Imagine walking into school on a random Monday in November to a new school...new classmates, new teachers - yes multiple because it’s middle school, and a new language… Imagine walking into class on a Monday in November where you have an ebb and flow with your students in each of your 6 classes a day, they know the strategies to solve equations or the steps to solving your science experiments, and now you have a new student that doesn’t speak any English in a class full of native English users...what do you do?! The meme above is a reference to the idea of how something can be so confusing to any one of us, but especially to a student speaking no English to each and everything happening in the classroom. What can we do as educators to help these students at varying levels of English acquisition to ensure they are first learning the content, but being evaluated on the content and not their language skills.   The reading brings about suggestions for hel...