Action Research

Thoughts

            Action Research is a very straightforward concept. Because of the simplicity, it allows you, as a teacher, to get right to the business of solving problems. As a teacher who deals with a wide variety of educational and language needs, I feel fairly confident in my ability to solve educational problems. However, Action Research has allowed me to fine tune these abilities by zeroing in on the heart of the issue. This allows me to look for changes and solutions I can use that will not only solve problems for one student, but possibly prevent problems for the entire group in the future.

Ideas

            The biggest and most important idea I have had as a result of my Action Research is the idea of front loading students with simple English vocabulary. When I was using pictures to represent words with a target sound, I was encountering major problems with students not recognizing the words in English, but in their native language. Often, the words did not have the target sound in them. By taking the time to teach the words we would be using, I removed a lot of roadblocks before we encountered them. This eased the remainder of the lesson as we moved from oral to written language. Sometimes, changing the order of instruction can alleviate many issues instead of encountering them when sticking to a previously set order of instruction.

Suggestions

            The most important thing I can think of to suggest to other ESL professionals is to keep in mind that oftentimes, the words we would normally use to help teach sounds to our students are not the same in their language. We can not count on our students to have the same familiarity as native speakers of English. If you teach with this in mind and address the problems early, you will greatly improve your students’ chances for successful language acquisition while saving yourself a lot of headache in the process.

Lesson Observation #2

Teaching Issues – The biggest problem I noticed is that the story exists only in the teacher’s manual. It is to be read orally by the teacher. There is no big book for the students to look at and no visuals to attach to the story. The students enjoyed the story, but have a harder time connecting to it because they must listen for every detail. The biggest concern in this classroom is the fact that there is a bathroom in the room. Unfortunately, this causes problems because students constantly ask to use the bathroom. The classroom is right next to the front office. Usually, when visitors come to the school, this is the classroom they see. While this is nice, it can be distracting to the students and to the teacher as well. The students are grouped with a shoulder partner. What sometimes happens is that one or both of the students do not participate in the brief discussions. This means that students don’t practice critical reading strategies such as making predictions.

Second Language Acquisition – We acted out parts of the fable as well as giving different parts of the story a motion for the students to do with their hands. This allowed students to understand some of the more difficult parts of the story as well as helped with recall. For example, when I ask the students “What is a Fable?” the students answer by pretending to stroke the long beard of an old man and say, “An oooooold story.” An interaction that works well with these students is to share and check predictions with their shoulder partner. It allows students to verbalize a prediction about the story in a low stress environment with very low stakes. If their prediction is wrong, it isn’t that big of a deal. If their prediction is right, they tend to get excited. Picture vocabulary cards were a great example of a good material for these students. The picture vocabulary cards enabled ELLs to quickly make a connection with new words and allowed them to reference them easily as they came up in the fable.

Ethnographic Perspective – It would be very beneficial as an ESL teacher to know if my students have older parents or siblings that speak English at home. If the student has them and I know it, I know that I can give homework to these students that can be worked on with help at home. At the same time, if the student does not have any English speakers at home, I know that I am dealing with a different situation and may need to help identify resources that can assist families with learning English. The fable we are reading, “The Bundle of Sticks”, is one of Aesop’s Fables. Because there are no pictures, students are able to use their imaginations to fill in the ethnic details of the characters. The theme in the story, sharing, is universal and therefore crosses cultures. None of the characters have names and are therefore ethnically unidentifiable. To bring culture into the situation, I asked students to talk about ways they share things within their families. Some of the students responded in such a way that reflected uneven sharing within their families between siblings. Whether the unevenness was perceived incorrectly by the student or real is unknown. However, it certainly showed that even within out small group of students that we have lots of diversity when it comes to sharing.

Just some thoughts.....