My Experience With ELL

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The experience of teaching ELL students was very enlightening to me. At the time I was expected to teach this lesson, students were in the middle of their social studies unit of responsibility. They learned about various types of responsibilities, and one of them was responsibility to the environment. The actual lesson I was supposed to teach focused on the importance of making choices that would have a positive impact on students’ close environment. I was also to talk about environmental problems in the students’ neighborhood, and encourage them to devise some solutions to those problems.
Before I started planning the lesson, I asked myself whether the students possessed necessary vocabulary words to talk about the environmental issues. Vocabularies …show more content…

When I compared pre and post assessment, I was positively surprised and pleased with the learning outcomes and students’ growth. Initially, students were asked to write the words and/or draw the pictures of the vocabulary words. Most of them provided brief, but accurate answers. Some of the students struggled with the definition of “composting”; they thought it was “throwing garbage away”. They also had misconceptions about what “reduce” meant. One of the girls wrote, “reduce is to give/return something, so the factory won’t have to make it again”. All of the students struggled with the definition of “green”; besides the obvious explanation that green is a name of the color, one of the students said that “green” meant “cleanest”. When I first thought about which vocabulary words I should choose, I was not convinced about pre teaching “reduce” because I thought that word was quite commonly used, and students might have already been introduced to it. However, the word “reduce” was used in a new context, so that is why I decided to pre teach …show more content…

Students were able to quickly spot the incorrect answers, and while crossing them out, they explained why their initial responses were incorrect. Students were also successful in providing the new understandings of the vocabulary words; their answers were more explicit and accurate than in the pre-assessment part of the Magic Book, e.g. one girl expanded her thinking about the word “donate” from “giving something to someone” to “to give something to help someone”. In her new understanding, she explained the goal of donation - “to help

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