Prompting Fluency in Writing for ESL Students

I found a way to help my ESL students generate a variety of ideas for writing. 

At the beginning of the year, I tried picture prompts. I thought it would be a fun way to get the words flowing. They could describe the picture. They could write a story about the picture. They could write from the point of view of a variety of people, animals, or objects in the picture. They could put themselves in the picture. The possibilities were endless! All I got, however, were lists of what was in the picture. Eventually I gave up.

Enter my lifeline, The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox by Larry Ferlazzo. My goal is to try just one new strategy from it each week. I was marching through the book, still early days, and posted a blog about vocabulary. There was a flurry of activity around it when I posted it to a Facebook group of ESL teachers, sending me back to the book—is it only for middle schoolers? No. Does it have strategies for beginners? Yes. Does it deal with writing or only with vocabulary? 

I scanned the table of contents down to writing. I noted for the inquirer that there were plenty of strategies for writing, and then realized that since writing was the place I was struggling with my class, I should skip ahead and dip into some writing strategies. I saw Strategy 17: Using Photos or Other Images in Reading and Writing. It sent me back to my earlier failure and I wanted to see what Larry had to suggest. 

I used the New York Times picture prompt “On the Street.” Check out all the New York Times picture prompts—a great resource for photos, but while the prompts may be sufficient to get a native speaker ELA class’s ideas flowing, the next step was the magic for my ELLs.

Larry Ferlazzo’s assignment “Examining an Image (for Intermediates)” (Figure 17.3) was the magic fairy dust. At list of questions prompting the students to think about the image in a variety of ways:

1. Describe the objects in the image.
2. Describe the people and/or animals in the image.
3. Describe the different activities you see happening in the image.
4. Describe the mood of the image. Is it happy, sad, or something else? What evidence do you see that supports your answer?
5. Write a title for the image and explain why you chose that title.
6. What might the people in the image be thinking or feeling? Why?
7. If you could see outside the frame of the image, what things or people would be there? What do you think would be happening? Why?
8. What year do you think the image was taken or made? What evidence do you see that supports your answer?
9. What questions do you have about the image?

One student focused on the detail that one person has an umbrella up and the rest don’t. Maybe it’s starting to rain and people are worried. Other students focused on the robots—either as real robots that were mixing with a nervous population in the future, or as people in costume excited to go to a party. One student specified the location as New York, noting the buildings in the background.

I wonder what will happen if I use this prompt with an image once a week from now until Christmas. I hope it will increase fluency in writing so we’ll need less and less time to do the exercise. (This time took quite a while—15 minutes in class, 15 minutes at home, and 10 more minutes in class to finish.) I also hope it will increase flexibility in thinking, so that after Christmas I could give a shorter prompt and students could come up with a variety of ways to approach it on their own. Finally, I can track errors and teach one mini-lesson per exercise on common mistakes.  This week’s was subject-verb agreement in this phrase: “There is a lot of people.” I think the next image I’ll use will be a Norman Rockwell painting. 

And that is just one exercise of many given for each of the 45 strategies offered for ELL students in this book. If you teach English language learners at any grade level, any ability level, and you’re feeling the need for an infusion of new ideas, I highly recommend this book.

What do you turn to when your teaching is needing a shot in the arm?

P.S. More recommendations:

• Larry Ferlazzo's blog
• All the "Best of" lists Ferlazzo has curated (He claims to have 2,000, and I don't doubt it. The first is "The Best Art Websites For Learning English" and the last is "THE BEST WEB 2.0 APPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION IN 2020 – PART ONE"
• Other books in the series give strategies help English-proficient students as well as ELLs in subject areas. I haven't read them, but if they're anything like The ELL Teacher's Toolbox, they're worth their weight in gold:
• The Social Studies Teacher's Toolbox
• The Math Teacher's Toolbox
• The Science Teacher's Toolbox

Four Keys to Hacking Student Writing Conferences

“Can I ask a question about this machine [computer]? How can I make this text look like that text?” And we had a little mini-lesson on margins, tabs, and centering text.

“I’m not making any changes. I didn’t think we were supposed to.” And we had a little mini-lesson on individual differences in the level of polish in initial drafting on paper, whether it’s more efficient for an individual to make revisions as one types or to type up a written draft without thinking and then revise.

“I moved these sentences into the next paragraph because I realized they were on a different topic.” Yeay! (In response to my follow-up question to "Did you make changes as you typed?" "Oh, lots!" "Can you show me one?")

“Is this right?” In answer to this question, I asked the student to get all his words on the paper first, then see what he thought about how they looked and sounded. And then in the editing I could help with anything he hadn’t been able to identify.

“Is it okay to start this sentence with ‘But’?” Here’s the beauty of conferring individually. Whereas the previous student didn’t have near enough words on the screen yet to be wondering whether they were “right,” this one was ready for a conversation about audience, purpose, and reading like writers: how a lot of the YA fiction he was reading has sentences starting with “but” because that’s how we talk; however, a non-fiction essay for school probably doesn’t want to sound conversational. It wants to prove you know the writing conventions. So what you’ve really written is a compound sentence—just change the period to a comma and make it all one sentence. Or change the “but” to a “however” if you really want to keep the period and sound formal!

I love having these individual conversations with 6th and 7th grade writers. And it is so much more rewarding to answer a student’s question about something she’s tried with her writing than to try to get her to value what I think she should try!

And yet, writing conferences with students STILL make me nervous. When I buckle to those nerves and hesitantly approach a student, afraid to interrupt her writing flow, afraid I won’t have anything to offer him, asking, “So…how’s it going? Any questions?” it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. Any student worth his or her salt has learned that the mature, trustworthy, independent answer to those questions is supposed to be, respectively, “Fine,” and “No.” Sure enough—10 minutes and I’ve made the round of the class. They’re all fine and have no questions. 

But when I think of the skills I targeted and taught, the ones the students are supposed to be practicing and incorporating in this piece of writing, I want to help focus students on those skills. I become truly curious about what they are doing and how they are doing—not just about whether they are accomplishing the targets, but about what they are thinking about those targets and how their writing and learning process is working. Finally, I want students to own that writing and learning process—not just to quietly listen to the lessons I teach and accept the feedback I give, but to be able to monitor their mastery of those lessons and feedback, to ask their own questions, to identify the ones they find key, or difficult, or empowering, and to get the help they want and need. 

So here’s how I set myself and my 6th and 7th grade students up for the good writing conferences that happened this week:

1. I identified the purposes of the writing and the skills I’d targeted and taught: Five non-fiction text structures (descriptive, sequence, compare/contrast, cause/effect, problem/solution); writing a paragraph with a topic sentence and at least 3 more sentences, all related to the topic sentence; and writing about something they are good at or enjoy doing so that students can focus on the skill and not learning new content and so that I can learn something about them. 
2. I told them that as they worked, I was going to come around and ask them 3 questions that they should be prepared to answer: (1) Where are you in the process of writing the 5 paragraphs and typing them up? (2) How comfortable are you with typing? (3) What about your writing process—are you making any changes as you type?
3. I told them after my 3 questions, they would ask me 1 question about their writing.
4. I found myself truly intrigued about the different topics the students had chosen, the different strategies they used for processing words from paper to computer, and the different questions they had.

It was a coaching process. Some still said they didn’t have a question. And I said they could think about it, and I’d get back to them after I’d been around to the other students. The thing is, I didn’t have time to get back to some of them. We filled up the entire period with excellent individual conversations about students’ writing.

So here are my keys:

1. Identify targets
2. Prepare questions
3. Elicit student questions
4. Be truly curious

How do you engage students in conversations about their writing?

Expanding My Teaching Toolbox

"Does anybody remember what drastic means?" I queried.

"Oh, oh! I know!" one student bounced in her seat, eyes sparkling, making a little steeple above her head with her hands and beginning to tilt sideways as if to fall out of her chair.

I quickly stifled a laugh. She had so perfectly imitated my action from the previous day for explaining a vocabulary word, but it was the wrong vocabulary word—topple! I gave her the correct word, and thanked her for proving that actions make vocabulary memorable, so going forward I would use them as much as possible. We’ll just try to keep the action attached to the correct word! 

In another class this week I realized that while all my students would know the word throw as in throw the ball, many of them might be confused about a phrase in the text we were reading: throw the switch. When I looked up throw in the dictionary, I found not just a couple of different ways to use throw, but 25! From throwing a punch to a horse throwing a shoe to a potter throwing a pot on a wheel. And that didn’t include the idioms (like throw in the towel) or phrasal verbs (like throw up and throw open). So I copied just the first 25 uses onto sheets of paper to hand out to the students. First I asked them to brainstorm all the different uses of throw they could think of. They came up with throw away, throw a party, throw yourself off a cliff, and throw yourself into a project. Next, I handed out the sheet and asked them to highlight all the ones they were familiar with, put a star next to the definition for throw the switch, and circle one they didn’t know that they would try to use sometime during the rest of the day. We had a great discussion about how many different ways one word could be used, and why it is important to look at the context and not assume the first dictionary definition is the right one!

Fostering word consciousness is one of the 4 components of vocabulary learning in Robert F. Graves' The Vocabulary Book: Learning and Instruction. Ever since I read that book 6 1/2 years ago, I’ve looked for a variety of ways to talk about words with students. But branching out from English Language Arts (ELA) into English as a Foreign Language (EFL) this year, I felt a need to expand my teaching strategy kit—including more vocabulary teaching strategies. 

Enter The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox by Larry Ferlazzo. I bought it mid-year, so I haven’t even gotten that far in it, but it is bursting with really practical ideas that I’ve used in my ELA class as well, like for reflecting on a term’s independent reading and doing sentence sequencing. (A 7th grader said, “Are we supposed to have memorized this?” I said, “No, but since sentences in a paragraph have been written in a certain order, and you can’t randomly put them in any order and have them make the same meaning, you can look for the clue words that signal how they fit together.” “Oh.”) Here’s one I'm trying next week: Have students take an online vocabulary quiz like this one at Test Your Vocab. Then have them take it later in the year to see their progress! My goal is to try one new strategy a week from this book.

Have a strategic evening!

One-Pagers: Enjoyable Assessment is NOT an Oxymoron

A fun reading assessment that can be graded at a glance--ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: The One-Pager! For this week’s teaching/learning adventure, I finally got around to trying it. A one-pager is a great way to have students show their thinking and doesn’t require a lot of writing. Now, in English class, writing is something unavoidable. More than that: It’s an important life skill that I teach, model, and assess, and that students practice. However, it seems like when I’m assessing a student’s reading, I should have other tools besides just writing. How can students with limited writing skill demonstrate advanced reading skill?

The one-pager uses a combination of words and images to demonstrate understanding of a book, chapter, concept, speaker, just about anything. They can be used in any subject in a variety of ways (see this Cult of Pedagogy blog for more ideas). I used mine in English language arts with 6th and 7th graders to assess their understanding of the novel Wonder we had just finished reading. I gave them a template with a border for significant quotations and the inside divided in two—the top for images and words demonstrating themes and the bottom for images and words demonstrating character interactions and development. Scaffolding included the individual notebooks we kept on each reading assignment and the partner hexagonal thinking discussion we did when we had finished the book. Both of these included significant quotations, character development, and themes. The notebooks also included images, emphasizing the visualizing strategy of effective readers. 

I availed myself of a set of 4 free templates with instructions (plus a rubric) available from Betsy Potash of SparkCreativity! when I signed up for her weekly email. (For secondary English Language Arts teachers, you might want to sign up for this even if you don’t want the freebies—it’s that helpful.) Here’s her blog post on the topic. I used the simplest one because, well, 6th graders. But you can make it a lot more complex. The most complex of the 4 options has a border and 8 squares inside, with requirements that include things like the following:

• A section that shows key elements of the author’s writing style
• A section that connects this text to some other text
• A section that connects this text to what’s going on in our world today
• A statement about why you think this text does or does not deserve its place in our curriculum.

Why I like the activity:

• It gives students an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of a reading and mastery of reading standards in a way that isn’t an essay.
• It is automatically differentiated: students can lean heavier on the art, on the words, or on more graphic, chart-like representations.
• Interesting connections can be made even in the process of creation.
• Students enjoy creating them, which makes the learning they do even more durable.
• Students enjoy viewing and discussing their classmates’ work and ideas, fostering even more ideas, connections, and appreciation; cultivating a classroom culture of collaborative learning; and furthering individual reading identities.

What would I do differently? Have a model to show students before they start, ideally on another book so they won’t get constrained by any particular thing I did. I knew I should have done this, and it just didn’t happen. I did work alongside the students, so they could see mine as it grew. And going forward, I’ll have these samples when I try it again this week with high school students! 

How have you used one-pagers?

 

Hexagons Spur Collaborative and Creative Thinking!

• You need to be brave to try something you’re afraid of. A part of growing up is learning to face your fears.
• Jack is being brave and stops being friends with Julian. Well done, Jack!
• I like this connection because Summer is really empathetic and becomes friends with August.

Every single 6th and 7th grader was deeply engaged in conversations about the connections between the characters, topics, and significant quotations from the novel Wonder. That’s what I saw in class this past Wednesday. I’ve been hearing a lot about “hexagonal thinking”  over the last 6 months, and this seemed the perfect opportunity to try it. We’d just finished reading the novel, doing 6-question journals on each of the reading assignments, sharing them in pairs each day in class. Now I wanted to help the students step back and make connections across the entire novel before demonstrating their individual understanding of the work as a whole. It was a huge success, and I highly recommend it.

What is hexagonal thinking? You know math manipulatives? It’s like thinking/connecting manipulatives. You can use it for any topic, subject, or activity where you want to promote new connections and conversations about them. 

How do you set it up? There are so many different ways, but basically, you make a bunch of hexagons. (It’s really easy in Google Draw.) Label them (or allow participants to label them) with significant elements of the topic at hand. 

I choose 3 categories: 2 that we’d put in our journals (characters and significant quotations) and 1 that we’d touched on frequently (topics). I made 6 character hexagons for each student partnership (August, Jack, Julian, Summer, Via, Justin), 6 topic hexagons (kindness, bravery, growing up, empathy, choices, friendship), and gave each student 2 blank hexagons for writing their own 2 significant quotes (not to duplicate a partner’s). Then I gave each partnership a large sheet of paper and asked them to arrange the hexagons on it in as solid a composite shape as possible. 

The hitch? Every place sides from 2 hexagons coincide, students have to be able to explain the connection from the book. There are many possible ways to do this, I told them—keep talking and rearranging until you and your partner are satisfied. When you are, glue the hexagons in place. 

Finally, I gave each student one paper arrow and asked them to find one connection they really liked, write an explanation on the arrow, and glue it on so it pointed to to the relevant meeting of hexagons. To celebrate the completion and possibly discover unique connections other pairs had made, we set them on the end of each row, and we did a tour of the posters. 

What learning goals can be accomplished with hexagonal thinking?

• Revisiting the text to make connections between different parts of it
• Collaboration 
• Creative, flexible thinking
• Great differentiation for ESL students and introverts who can participate and demonstrate their thinking with a minimum of words—spoken or written  
• Giving students an opportunity to use their journals (“But I don’t have any significant quotes!” “Those who have them in their journals can use their journals; those who chose the shortest quote possible for their journals can feel free to go back to their books.”)
• Brainstorming, scaffolding, and segue into a project or paper to demonstrate individual understanding

I loved seeing all the students actively involved in discussion, arranging and rearranging hexagons, checking journals and books. I was impressed with the quality of the connections and explanations I heard in discussion and saw written on their arrows (see quotes at the top of the page). I’ll definitely do it again, and I look forward to seeing the one-pager individual projects students turn in next week!

What activities do you use to scaffold making connections?