I love teaching slam poetry and continue to teach students figurative language, story, and presentation through slam poetry. Because I teach higher grades, my lessons are not about teaching students how to read, but are about teaching them how to read, relate to, analyse, and write their own literature. So, my ELL adaptations might be a bit different than lessons for younger grades. In my region, we have an increasing number of ELL students, and I have had Arabic students in each of my classes over the last two years, which has been an interesting learning curve.
My questions for ELL instruction are how can we support English Language Learners when they enter at a later grade? How can we support English Language Learners in learning to read in English when the rest of the class is not learning to read?
This year, one of the Arabic students who is highly religious chose a slam poem about being trans. It was super interesting and compelling but seemed a very odd choice for her. She was so happy and proud of her choice, and I couldn’t tell if she didn’t understand what it was about or if she was subtly rebelling against her religious, traditional family. I really loved teaching her (she was so positive and hard-working!) but I think that there were many ways I could have improved my instruction for her. I am not super knowledgeable about teaching ELL, just like Dr. Cárdenas-Hagan said about most teachers in the podcast.
To adapt a lesson on slam poetry, I would provide the student a transcript of any videos I select, or show them how to see the transcript on YouTube or the website, using a school laptop. My classes usually complain that slam poetry is super fast, so I teach them to watch it a few times for meaning. Often regular-paced spoken English goes too fast for ELL students, so teaching them to slow it down even further or watch it multiple times is an especially important instruction piece. A transcript will support them in linking the sounds of the words to the written words.
I would also ensure that they are paired with a supportive, fluent student(s) who can work with them to understand the poem, if they want to work in partners or small groups. While circulating during the section of the class where students select and analyse their own slam poem, I would remind them of the similes, metaphors, and hyperboles that we already defined and discussed, and point them back to their self-produced list of figurative language (from an earlier class). I would support them in determining figurative language in the poem, by giving them prompts (‘do you see any like or as?’) or asking them leading questions. Once identified, we would then discuss together how the term is figurative language, what it means, and what it does in the poem. I would scaffold the analysis of the slam poem with the student, since poetic analysis requires high-level language abilities. We would consider a slam poem’s structure, step by step.
Depending on the slam poem chosen, I would work to identify cognates in the poem and connect the language in the poem to phonemes or morphology in the student’s native language. I love the idea of integrating morphology instruction into my general teaching, and it will be especially pertinent for English language learners.
One of the biggest takeaways that I had from the podcast and video was that good instruction remains good instruction for English language learners. There are small tweaks that can be made to support English language learners, but learning to read remains the same, regardless of whether a language is the student’s first language or not. The difference usually is that a student has to learn a language orally at the same time as they are learning to read it. We can support students in oral language development through peer support, pull-outs, and encouraging immersion, where cognates, similar phonemes, and similar morphemes are noted by the teacher. Students will be pulled out to work with an ELL teacher on foundational skills instruction in order to master the English code.
References
Cárdenas-Hagan, E. (2023). Reading instruction for English learners with Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan. The Windward Institute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gei-pgVdA_Y
Goldenberg, C. (2023). Science of reading research: Insight into teaching English learners with Dr. Claude Goldenberg. Just Right Readers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkZ1Iu_Nbpg