Hello all 

And thanks, Janet for pointing out that for a lot of teachers it can be
a significant burden collecting authentic texts, working with "stuff"
that students bring to class, and yeah-right-who's-got-the-time
modifying existing texts. 

The "Language Experience Approach" makes a great deal of sense for
beginning learners who are "emergent" readers and writers. It is based
on the assumption that it is much easier to read something that is based
on a common experience with language generated by students than it is to
read something that is disconnected from their life experience. 

How does LEA work? 

1. Create a common experience for students - a field trip works and so
does a hands-on activity that has a point to it, a how-to perhaps. News
accounts that everyone has heard about - especially if they are a few
days old and have been on TV in different languages work also. The point
is to have a common point of reference on a topic that engages students
("how to iron a shirt" would leave me cold, for example). Years ago I
saw the teachers at REEP demonstrate how to make instant pudding and
they later had a pudding tasting, identifying their favorite flavors -
the students were fascinated by the whole process. Butterscotch lost, by
the way, no surprise there.

Here then is how Language Experience might work as part of a How-to
process: 

2. Demonstration: Introduce tools and materials to the students.
Demonstrate the steps either by yourself or have students follow along
(making a paper airplane in preparation for a contest, say).  

3. Ask students to recreate the steps orally that they just observed. If
you can, create a story board on the board or a flip chart that reminds
students of the steps- simple drawings are fine.

4. Work with the class to write down the steps on the board - asking
guiding questions, such as - what should the title be? What is a good
first sentence? We have steps, right? What is step number 1? As
individual students generate the language, check with the class - what
do you think? Should we write this? Yes, no? Any changes? 

5. After you have created the story with the class, read the story to
the class and then with the class - asking students again if they like
the sentences and the story. You can use joint reading (with the class;
echo reading - you read a sentence, students repeat it; shared reading -
students take turns reading a step). 

The point of a Language Experience Lesson is to use the language that
students generate since that is the language that they know and can say
orally. In the conventional model, ONLY the students make corrections in
the text and the teacher leaves it alone, errors and all (and no,
students won't pick up an error that they saw once on a blackboard and
it becomes fossilized). 

It makes sense to have the text on newsprint so it can be reviewed and
used again. But I also know teachers who type the Language Experience
text up at home and print it for students to read the next day in class.


As part of that process, many teachers end up making tiny changes in the
language to get it a little closer to standard English (they don't
usually touch vocabulary, just sentence structure. Purists, however
frown on meddling with students' language. 

As for me, I would leave the language alone when writing it down in
class and then perhaps make tiny changes as I print it up - mostly for
clarity so that students still have a text to work with in class that
represents their language - 

By the way, Susan Gaer - whose site on home remedies is an excellent
example of student generated connected text - told me one time that they
first time her refugee students had written their stories of how they
escaped, she had fixed them up before she printed them as a collection
of student accounts of their lives. She now feels that in straightening
out the students' grammar, she had destroyed much of what was powerful
in the students' language - the language they used and the errors they
made represented who they were as people and as learners on a journey.
The basic sentences she created in standard English did not capture the
spirit of the stories the same way that their writing had done. 

Lessons learned ..... 

Heide 




-----Original Message-----
From: specialtopics-bounces at nifl.gov
[mailto:specialtopics-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of Isserlis, Janet
Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2007 8:45 AM
To: specialtopics at nifl.gov
Subject: RE: [SpecialTopics 289] Authentic materials

Kathleen's observation:


>- Having sudents bring things in is necessary and vital, especially for

the "bringing the outside in" element of "what works."  But I am
realizing that they are not sufficient to create the "rich" "exploration
of a variety of texts" that Drs. Wrigley and Condelli talk about.  For
things like... poems, short news articles, personal stories....  I need
to find them.  When I as a teacher am struggling to do a good job of
teaching life skills in an authentic and student-centered way, to go
beyond that, to enrich that, to teach a very full range of metacognitive
and other reading skills (especially things like phonics that I don't
know that much about) sounds like a huge challenge (but definitely an
exciting one!)

makes me think, too, of the work many of us do with Language Experience
writing - where we/learners encode their spoken words into written form,
as part of a process of helping new readers 'see' their words, and as
part of a process of generating and using meaningful texts.  The next
step[s] have to do with building bridges from those texts to other
materials, relevant to learners but also generated from beyond the
classroom, in order to help readers broaden their abilities to take on
all kinds of texts.

Heide's hands-on work, particularly, has been helpful to many
practitioners in broadening our practice and the kinds of texts and
other materials we use with learners.

Janet Isserlis


-----Original Message-----
From: specialtopics-bounces at nifl.gov on behalf of Kathleen Reynolds
Sent: Sat 4/14/2007 10:53 PM
To: specialtopics at nifl.gov
Subject: [SpecialTopics 289]  Authentic materials