ELLs and Strategic Reading
Using Iditarod News with ESL Students to Practice Inferring
This article shares one idea of how to use the Iditarod as a vehicle to practice inferring with English Language Learners.
Careful readers develop skills, such as questioning, re-reading, synthesizing, and inferring to help students understand what they read. One tool that is easy to implement in the classroom is current events, which provide an array of images and accessible text for young readers to practice comprehension strategies. It often is helpful to focus on current events that are part of the current content curriculum being studied. This can range in daily news from a specific area of study, to special events that are occurring around the content.
Some ideas that come to mind are fires in California, the Australian government issuing an apology to aboriginals, the Humane Society's boycott of Canadian fish due to seal hunting, and others. Another connection that can be made with elementary content is comprehension work using the Iditarod. The students become engaged because the news is about the mushers they are following as they learn about "The Last Great Race." They want to know where their dog team is, how they are doing, what is going on, and other aspects of the race.
Iditarod Newsletter as Teaching Tool
The official Iditarod website has a fairly in depth newsletter that is teacher friendly and provides updated news of the race several times per day. Teachers have access to information about the race itself, dog and musher profiles and up to date images of the trail and participants. Tapping this resource to develop lessons around inferring and questioning is an easy way to make connections between content study (Alaska) and the practice of using comprehension strategies to interpret the written word.
Each day there are new articles available along with images that can be printed out and glued together to make a poster. With this poster the teacher can read the text with the students, highlighting important information and discussing the stories.
As the class works through the text, the teacher can begin to model how to make observations that can lead to questions, which in turn help the readers understand what they are reading. Perhaps she would say "I see a musher putting medicine on his dog's feet." followed by an inference, "This makes me think the dog's feet might be cracked." The question that may arise could be "I'm still wondering if the dog can keep running if his feet are hurt?"
Guided Practice for English Language Learners
As the teacher reads and does a think aloud, she can write her thinking on a sticky note and put it directly on the poster near the image or the text to which she is referring. Slowly working through the text and thinking and talking aloud provides the kind of modeling the English Language Learners need to visualize and understand what they will have to do when it is time for them to work independently.
In this case they will need to observe the images, decode the text, and produce a question and an inference. This may seem overwhelming if a child is simply left on his own, but with proper modeling and guided practice the independent work doesn't seem so daunting. Once the teacher has completed the shared reading the children can turn and talk (think-pair-share) about what they see and what they are wondering. When they have finished this, they can share out with the group before starting their own independent work.
After the kids have had about 15 minutes to work alone, it is important to regroup and have the children share their thinking, co-constructing the poster with their words and drawings from their sticky notes.
Using Language Frames as a Scaffold
Solid repetition, using the same language frames and practicing the highlighting technique provides for authentic practice of careful reading strategies that can be transferred into the students' reading of other materials and also provides a scaffold for those students who are not yet in full production stages of their English acquisition.
Language Frames to use while modeling lesson:
I see ___________________.
This makes me think _______________________.
I'm still wondering_______________________?
This kind of explicit instruction permits ELLs the kind of structure and guided practice needed to build solid understandings of how to interpret different kinds of texts that will be given to them to read in an array of contexts. If the ELL can comprehend the message a text is trying to convey and they use questioning, inferring and observing to do this, it will help build their reading skills, which in turn will help with their acquisition of English itself.
