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The focus for this assignment is information narratives, and I have picked 1988: Lilly
from the MyPlace (Australian Children's Television Foundation, 2011) as the topic. I
have chosen 1988: Lilly for this assignment as there are many opportunities for EAL
learners to connect with the material (moving, new schools, different languages) as
well as appropriate connections for the non-EAL students in the classroom (such as
starting a new school and making new friends). The information narrative was
chosen for this topic as I wanted to embrace the variety of material on the topic, and
to encourage students to enjoy and appreciate historical fiction as much as I did in
my primary years.
Word count: 112
Justification:
Catering for mixed ability students was one of the main focus areas for the lessons.
Grouping is an idea that was discussed by Hertzberg (2011) stating that students
should never work individually, but rather in pairs, triads or groups of four. In doing
so, this allows students to contribute ideas and deepen their understanding of the
material. Hertzberg (2011) states that students often feel more comfortable
interacting with their peers than with teachers..working in cooperative friendship
groups encourages students to take more risks and thus make more attempts to
practice the target language (p.52). By using a grouping strategy, and ensuring
students continually change who they are partnered with, I also allow further
opportunities for learning to take place. By ensuring students are placed with
students of different abilities, I also allow students to be stretched and grown in their
learning. Tasks throughout the unit plan, including detailed and brief lessons are
planned to ensure mixed ability group discussion based learning, which ensures
scaffolding learning within the groups. This is evident within lessons such as lesson
2, when students in mixed ability grouping discuss the information in the third video
of 1988: Lilly (Australian Children's Television Foundation, 2011) and fill in the tchart, and lesson 3, when students are placed in expert/homegroups, using groups
of three to discuss and complete the headlines thinking routine. In addition, this
assists EAL students as Tangen and Spooner-Lane (2008) state that visual aids
such as pictures, charts, graphs and semantic mapping help students negotiate
meaning and make connections between lesson content and their prior knowledge
(p. 67). Furthermore, in order to cater for the mixed ability class, I use the strategy of
a pull out group of like ability students, in order to focus on student understanding,
and to clarify ideas for students (Fountas and Pinnell, 1996). By using guided
reading in lesson 2 and 5, I allow students to make connections with the material
being studied by their peers, and also allow for discussion opportunities, and also
allow opportunities for teacher scaffolding and modelling to further grow student
understanding.
Ways of teaching the information narrative was an important aspect of the unit
planner. Wing Jan (2009) states that the purpose of the information narrative is to
convey factual information within a narrative structure (p. 255). When teaching the
information narrative to students, I wanted to expand the prior knowledge they would
have about writing a narrative, and increase their writing capacity to include
information about other factual topics. This required me to teach students knowledge
about the other topics prior to teaching how to write an information narrative and to
also teach elements about language about the information narrative. AusVELS
(ACARA, 2013) states that students in year five need to learn how to understand the
difference between main and subordinate clauses and that a complex sentence
involves at least one subordinate clause (ACELA1507) and also understand the
use of vocabulary to express greater precision of meaning, and know that words can
have different meanings in different contexts (ACELA1512). This also links into the
knowledge that Wing Jan (2009) states students should learn when teaching the
narrative, stating that students should learn descriptive language to create vivid
imagery.adjectives (p. 235) and conjunctions, words to join words, phrases and
clauses (p. 237). Both of these concepts would allow students to have greater
descriptive language (ACELA1512) when writing information narratives and
describing characters, places and events, and greater cohesion when writing
(ACELA1507) (ACARA, 2013). Thus these two topics became the focus of my two
lessons based on text vocabulary. When teaching these two language types, I
ensured that I used activities that ensured appropriate scaffolding. In lesson 7,
students complete a cloze activity as a whole class, which was combined with
student discussion about the adjectives used, in order to encourage student learning.
Teaching oral language skills was also an area in which it was important to include
within this unit planner. Students from EAL families need support to increase their
oral language skills to the skill level of their peers (Dixon and Wu, 2014). Hammond
(2012) states that the most obvious area of need for EAL students is support in their
English language development. Such support must address development in spoken
language as well as in English literacy (p. 225). Hertzberg (2011) states that oracy is
fundamental to reading and writing progress (p. 49), and thus it is important that
teachers spend significant time for purposeful oracy learning (p.49). Furthermore it
allows students to continue to explore and problem solve in order to clarify ideas or
concepts with self (inner talk) (Hertzberg, 2011, p.49). By building up students oral
language skills, I am building up their abilities to learn across the curriculum
(Hammond, 2012; Hertzberg, 2011). Oracy learning is an area that I focused on
throughout my unit planner, as I wanted to ensure students had the chance to build
up ideas before they began their individual written piece. Strategies used within the
unit planner to engage students in oral language include using thinking routines such
as see-think-wonder (lesson 1), generate-sort-connect-elaborate (lesson 7), and
other oral language activities such as think-pair-share (lesson 8), text reconstruction
(lesson 5), cloze activity (lesson 7), dictogloss (lesson 3), t-chart (lesson 2) and
back-to-back viewing (lesson 1). By using oral language activities such as these, I
ensure students have the opportunity to verbalise their ideas and extend them
through student group discussions, in order to clarify ideas and deepen their
understanding.
References:
Dixon, Q., & Wu, S. (2014). Home language and literacy practices among immigrant
second-language learners. Language Teaching, 47(4), 414-449.
doi:10.1017/S0261444814000160
Fountas, I. C., & Pinnell, G. S. (1996). Guided reading: Good first teaching for all
children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann
Tangen, D., & Spooner-Lane, R. (2008). Avoiding the deficit model of teaching:
Students who have EAL/EAL and learning difficulties. Australian Journal of
Learning Difficulties, 13(2), 63-71. doi:10.1080/19404150802380522
Other References:
Do, A., Do, S., & Whatley, B. (2011). The little refugee. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen &
Unwin.
Seely Flint, A., Kitson, L., Lowe, K., & Shaw, K. (2013). Literacy in Australia:
Pedagogies for engagement. Milton, Qld: John Wiley & Sons Australia Ltd.
Wing Jan, L. (2009). Write ways: Modelling writing forms (3rd ed.). South Melbourne,
Vic.: Oxford University Press.