Book Club Assignment

Name(s): Sarah E. Abbott

Book: Behind the Mountains

Author: Edwidge Danticat

Title of Activity: American heroes- Rosa Parks

Celiane was diagnosed as having a mild speech and language impairment (SLI) and is currently receiving services. The following language lesson was derived from the sixth-grade social studies curriculum at Jackie Robinson Intermediate School for the purpose of pre-teaching upcoming content material and providing Celiane with language support to help her achieve new academic knowledge and language skills. It i meant to be given to Celiane in two-three 30 minutes therapy sessions (one pull-out and two classroom-based therapy).

Language/Content Objective:

  • Celiane will explain in writing and in speaking the meanings of the terms racism, prejudice, equal rights with self-cues and learning strategies.
  • Celiane will practice using these words in sentences related to the topic with 90% accuracy given visual and written cues.
  • Celiane will answer yes/no and wh-questions related to text with 80% accuracy.
  • Celiane will recall a time when felt convicted to do what was right despite others’ opinions, given prompting.

Please identify the pedagogical, linguistic, or literacy principles that ground your project. (These principles should come from course materials.) In one or two sentences, explain the principle and provide a reference from course materials.

  • Sheltered instruction: (Smiley & Salsbury, 44; SIOP)- Sheltered instruction is group of instructional strategies that can and should be used with any English language instruction program. It helps support development through cues and scaffolds and meets the needs of diverse English language learners.
  • Use of visuals: (Faltis, 140)- Visual supports help students to contextualize new ideas and vocabulary by displaying content information. Visuals also help students understand the different ways that language is structured.
  • Ask questions (Faltis, 142)- Asking questions is part of Sheltered Instruction and is useful for facilitating verbal interaction with English language learners.
  • Cooperative learning (Smiley & Salsbury, 47)- Research shows that “cooperative learning practices, especially for Latinos, because these learning strategies are more compatible with the social and family structures in which Latino language minority students are most productive” (Smiley & Salsbury, 47).
  • Peer partners: (Scarcella)- Peer partners are useful for providing feedback, and support, offering a different perspective, sharing ideas, and even teaching.
  • Text Talk Method-

“The Vocabulary Improvement Project for upper elementary ELLs, an adaptation of Beck and McKeown’s (2001) Text Talk method, involved explicit instruction in developing word-learning strategies, such as analyzing morphological aspects of words. This program led to improved performance in ELL’s word knowledge and reading comprehension (Carlo et al., 2004),” (Smiley & Salsbury, 55).

Please describe in detail how you envision the activity to be carried out. You can write this as a bulleted list or in a paragraph. The goal is to make the directions sufficiently clear that a reader could imagine and carry out the activity. If it’s not obvious, also explain how your artifact fits in.

  • Teach Celiane study strategies for reading comprehension
  • Scan the text for familiar words or cognates
  • Highlight important information in the text
  • Look for answers to wh-questions
  • Pre-teach vocabulary words related to chosen hero prior to reading text:
  • Prejudice, civil rights, segregation, boycott, civil rights movement
  • Use signs, gestures, and pictures to teach new words
  • Break down words and examine cognates
  • Have Celiane to fill in definitions with new vocabulary words (cloze procedure)
  • Instruct Celiane to write her own sentences using the new vocabulary words given a model and sentence diagram
  • Ex: “Rosa Parks fought against ______when she ______.
  • Celiane will compare her sentences with bilingual peer partner who demonstrates greater English language proficiency. Together they will discuss in their native language of Spanish the meaning of these words.
  • Read the chosen text aloud and ask yes/no and wh-questions with visual cues (pictures) to increase language comprehension.
  • Celiane and her peer partner will read the same text silently and highlight important information using several wh-questions as prompts.
  • Then they will discuss in their native language of Spanish the meaning the text.
  • Celiane will write a summary of the text and a short reflection answering several questions given sentence starters.

Ex: If you had been Rosa Parks, what would you have done?

If I were Rosa Parks, I would have ______.