Read, Write, Reflect, Repeat: Making the Skill Connections

The next few weeks will be strange. Here in Japan we are beginning baby steps of returning students to the physical classrooms of the new year that began in early April. I’m looking forward to meeting my students in 3D! What that first step looks like here is each day of the week assigned to a department (M: math/computer; Tu: English; W: science/music; Th: Japanese; F: social studies/art) for “consultation classes.” So my English classes (both English language arts and EFL) each have an assigned time on Tuesday where students can come for an hour of help if they want and need it. The other 4 days, I am conducting online education, as usual. Except that an unknown portion of my students may be attending other classes. So I was working to come up with assignments that would be worthwhile as well as doable for students not attending live online classes. 

Suddenly I realized I could pick up an important reading/writing/reflecting thread: parallel construction.
This past week we were bringing an essay through its final drafts in one of my classes. For the editing class, I’d scanned the revised drafts for error patterns to teach a mini-lesson on. I noticed a majority of students had made errors in parallel construction. So I pulled some examples from their work and taught the lesson.

The next day when students turned in the final draft, they reflect on their learning in a Google form. Here are the questions I asked:

• What is something you worked hard to improve or do well in this piece of writing?
• What is something you want to work to improve in your next piece of writing?
• What's something you learned about the topic, the world, or yourself while working on this piece?
• What is something you learned about writing while working on this piece?

I noticed the mention of parallel construction: “I want to improve more on the parallel grammar when writing the sentence.” 

Today as I was creating next week’s online assignment, I thought, “I should include a mentor sentence component.” Then I thought, “I should pick up on the interest in practicing parallel construction.” But would I be able to find parallel construction in the chosen article that would be simple enough for these advanced high school EFL students to be able to understand and to benefit from patterning? Yes!!! Here are the 2 mentor sentences I found:

• “We nurse one another, romance one another, weep for one another.” (paragraph 2)
• “The same is true for people who steal or despots who slaughter.” (paragraph 6)

Here are the modeling exercises I came up with:

• For sentence 1: Write a sentence modeled on this one. Write about some group of people you are a part of--basketball teammates, KIUA students, Japanese people, Christians, teenagers, or some other group of your choice. Use this pattern: We _____ one another, _____ one another, _____ one another.
• For sentence 2: Write a sentence modeled on this one. For example:
• We’re having days that are warm and nights that are cool.
• I enjoy being with Japanese who are reserved and polite and Americans who are outgoing and warm.
• I prefer dogs that are friendly to cats that are aloof.

I can hardly wait to see what students do with this—whether they will appreciate that this is a response to their reflection on this past week’s essays, whether I’ve been able to calibrate my ELA expectations for EFL, and whether these advanced 11th and 12th graders are able to latch on to the connection between reading English and writing English.