In this clip, Tai Sear, a beginning English Learner, reads his writing aloud, and I conference with him. It demonstrates how conferencing in the writing workshop model can help us meet the challenges we face while working with English Learners.
The beginning of this clip shows that Tai Sear has no fear of reading his writing aloud to me or to people around him. I believe this is because he feels like a valued reader and writer in our classroom community. The clip also shows how conferencing provides me with an opportunity to use differentiated instructional strategies for an English Learner. For example, I review his writing and follow it up with a compliment so that he feels like a capable writer. Next, I provide him with new vocabulary through real items, pictures or a visual dictionary. I can provide him with sentence frames to use with that new vocabulary. I can give him a task to complete that day, and I check back with him the next day. I can also rely heavily on the students around him to help, as you can see in another video clip. It still doesn't seem like enough time and help, but I truly believe that in the end, writing workshop is effective for all levels of English Learners. It makes students feel like writers, (and conferencing provides me with the opportunity to differentiate instruction.
| TEACHER: | Which one of these things that you wrote about? Do you want to - which one is the one you want to write about? We talked about that yesterday, right? You want to write about Angel Island. Right? So you started it. So just a second, let me get my stool, okay. And I'm going to sit down with you and you're going to read this to me and we'll decide what you're going to do next. Okay? Just one second, okay? |
| STUDENT: | I go to Angel Island with my teacher. He taught me and walked with me in the house. And I saw the snake. I walked around and I played skipping rocks in the water. I go to eat lunch hanging around the island. We took a I don't know to the island where I walked in the - walked so many - how many boats in there that we saw? Ten. |
| TEACHER: | So you did a great job, Tai Sear of describing the story or describing what we did and I loved how you even acted it out. You skipped rocks, remember? That was very special. And then what you did that was really interesting is you asked a question. You said, "How many boats were there?" So you asked a question and then you answered it. That's a great writing technique. Okay? All right. So I think you have the beginning. This is the start of your story but now we want to add more. We want to add more things. So you need to think back to Angel Island. What else did we do on Angel Island? What else? |
| STUDENT: | Me? |
| TEACHER: | Yeah, what did you do? |
| STUDENT: | I don't know. |
| TEACHER: | It's hard to remember, huh? It seems like a week ago. Let me get my pictures. I want to get my pictures, okay? Let's look through these just for a second. You remember where this was? Where is that? |
| STUDENT: | Angel Island. |
| TEACHER: | Yeah, where? |
| STUDENT: | In the boat. |
| TEACHER: | The boat! Did you write about the boat? |
| STUDENT: | The boat - the boat. |
| TEACHER: | So you talked about how many boats you saw, right? But did you talk about the boat we rode? Maybe you could talk about the boat. |
| STUDENT: | A boat to? |
| TEACHER: | That might be one topic. We could talk about the boat, the boat ride. And what did we see? |
| STUDENT: | A bird. |
| TEACHER: | We saw birds. What about this? |
| STUDENT: | Teacher in island. |
| TEACHER: | The teacher on the island. So you could add something about the teacher on the island. |
| STUDENT: | Taught... had... |
| TEACHER: | Yeah, you talked about the immigrants, right? The people who came from China to the United States. |
| STUDENT: | I write. I write. |
| TEACHER: | Okay, all right. So you want to use this and try to think of some more things you can add about our trip to Angel Island. Okay? And maybe you can look at some more of these. There we go. You can write about the ferry. |
| STUDENT: | What boat? |
| TEACHER: | Right. We're going to let Tai Sear use them right now because he's trying to remember the trip. Okay? All right? So you're going to look at the pictures and you're going to try to add more details. If you run out of room, where can you write more? |
| STUDENT: | Here. |
| TEACHER: | You can write here and turn to the next page and write here. Okay? But I want you to try to write as much as you can about our trip. Look at all the pictures and try to describe them. Okay? |
| STUDENT: | [laughs] |
| TEACHER: | [laughs] Not that one. |
| TEACHER: | So we had to walk to the boat, right? You can give us all those details. Excellent. Okay? |
| STUDENT: | Mr. White walking in the boat. |
| TEACHER: | To the boat. All right, you got it. |
| STUDENT: | Yeah. |
| TEACHER: | And so are you going to use the pictures? |
| STUDENT: | Yeah. |