This blog captures the experiences of an instructor in a pre-service ELL course carrying out a collaborative project with her university students and a small school district around questions and answers.
Step 1: My partner and I agreed to work together on this question.
Step 2: From class discussions and readings I believe it is important to let the ELL students know that when they are reading and come across a word they do not know, it is not necessary to look the definition up unless it would help to make sense of the material at hand. If the student looks up the definition of every word he/she may not know, it may slow down his/her reading abiility and also make it difficult to get the idea of the context. If the ELL student descides to look up a word he/she must keep in mind that the majority of words in the English language have more than one meaning, therefore he/she must make sure that he/she is using the correct definition.
I came across this on google and thought this would be really helpful in the sense of developing an ELLs vocabulary with a strong connection to reading comprehension.
I agree that it is important to encourage students not to look up every unfamiliar word in a dictionary. They need to be taught strategies for looking at the context that a word is in and guessing the meaning. Once they have a guess, they can reread the sentence and replace the unfamiliar word with their guess. If the sentence makes sense, their guess is a good possibility. There are multiple ways to find clues in context that tell the reader if the unknown word is a noun or verb and what kind of information is missing. Teaching students to fill in the knowledge gaps in more meaningful than just looking up words in a dictionary.
Step 1: My partner and I agreed to work together on this question.
ReplyDeleteStep 2: From class discussions and readings I believe it is important to let the ELL students know that when they are reading and come across a word they do not know, it is not necessary to look the definition up unless it would help to make sense of the material at hand. If the student looks up the definition of every word he/she may not know, it may slow down his/her reading abiility and also make it difficult to get the idea of the context. If the ELL student descides to look up a word he/she must keep in mind that the majority of words in the English language have more than one meaning, therefore he/she must make sure that he/she is using the correct definition.
I came across this on google and thought this would be really helpful in the sense of developing an ELLs vocabulary with a strong connection to reading comprehension.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.prel.org/products/re_/ES0419.htm
I agree that it is important to encourage students not to look up every unfamiliar word in a dictionary. They need to be taught strategies for looking at the context that a word is in and guessing the meaning. Once they have a guess, they can reread the sentence and replace the unfamiliar word with their guess. If the sentence makes sense, their guess is a good possibility. There are multiple ways to find clues in context that tell the reader if the unknown word is a noun or verb and what kind of information is missing. Teaching students to fill in the knowledge gaps in more meaningful than just looking up words in a dictionary.
ReplyDeleteReading a wide range of texts is a great way to expand vocabulary, especially with fluent readers.
ReplyDelete