In my curriculum unit, I would like to investigate the possibilities of using visual materials, such as photographs, as sources of constructing new meaning in teaching writing to bilingual students in grades five through eight. I have developed a routine plan of activities working on photographs united by one theme - migration/immigration, which content covers three disciplines - language arts, social studies, and science. As research shows, oral language development promotes reading comprehension through the means of writing. Along with the main goal - to teach writing about what one sees in a photograph - the unit aims to enhance students' oral language and improve their reading skills. To ensure that students have the contextual knowledge necessary to interpret a visual image, working on writing about a photograph will be preceded by reading short texts on migration and immigration in one of the three content areas. I truly hope that my writing unit, which employs photographs as its basis, will assist me and perhaps other teachers working with bilingual students with the teaching of writing - a highly demanding cognitive skill. The strategies developed here are based on the premises that our vision is constructive and that students should be able to construct their own meanings of the photographs that they study. Using writing strategies in a three-step process, students write about their interpretations based on their prior knowledge and on the emotions aroused by a certain image. The unit may take as long as thirty sessions (each session is forty five minutes), but its duration can be reduced by using fewer materials (readings or photographs).
Problems
Bilingual students acquire a second language through its meaningful verbalization and application, therefore receiving the ownership of the language. When they are asked to complete an assignment requiring them to write about what they see, their task is even more complex than the task of native speakers because they need not only to understand what they see, but also to know appropriate words for what they see and understand how to use them properly. The ultimate goal of the seminar "Writing, Knowing, Seeing" becomes the goal of the unit - "to demonstrate that writing is a process that enables one to know what one sees" - an objective that complements my global teaching goal - to assist students with the acquisition of English. I generally view writing as a tool that helps us organize our thinking and demonstrate our comprehension in a structured way. My goal as a teacher in this unit is to help students with the verbal framing of their understanding of visual material. From my teaching experience, I know that bilingual students in grades five through eight struggle with constructing proper sentence structures and making choices of words. They are not sure how to express their thoughts in a concise and effective way. They often lack vocabulary that is necessary to describe what they understand and want to express. The neediest students dislike writing because it seems to be too challenging a task for them. Writing leaves them with the feeling of frustration and disappointment. This attitude carries over to all disciplines, including language arts, social studies, and science. My curriculum unit focuses on interdisciplinary writing in these subject areas.
I teach English Language Learners at Augusta Lewis Troup School, a middle school, in New Haven, Connecticut. The New Haven Public Schools district offers a program for bilingual students in which Spanish-speaking students are enrolled in a bilingual classroom with the balanced support of their native language from a Spanish-speaking teacher for the first thirty months or first three years of their school career. After the thirty months (which is at the beginning of the third grade), they enter a mainstream classroom, and at this point I begin working with such students, providing them with the Language Transitional Support Services (LTSS). I may work with them for several years until their scores in mandatory tests - such as the state Connecticut Mastery Tests (CMTs) and tests evaluating mastery of English in four language domains (speaking, listening, reading, and writing), the Language Assessment System tests (LAS Links Assessments) - prove that they have become proficient. I usually work with my students in small groups, ensuring that I attend to the individual needs of each of them.
My students largely have Latin American origins. Some of them were born in countries such as Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Guatemala. Parents of others have come from these countries before their children were born in America. Though their starting points in terms of geography may be different, in their families, these students all belong to the second generation of American residents. As history and the present show, members of the second immigrant generation still possess very tight ties to the culture of their or their parents' motherlands (in comparison with a third and other following immigrant generations, for example). Very often the dominant language of my students, as an inseparable part of their culture, is Spanish. They learned to speak in Spanish because their parents speak, in most cases, only Spanish. They keep speaking it as they grow because at home no other language is spoken but Spanish. For many children the moment of entering a preschool or Kindergarten class means the first encounter with and the beginning of the acquisition of the English language. The success of this acquisition depends on many factors including: parents' support (not necessarily support of the English language, but emotional support for academics overall), the quality of the teaching in a particular bilingual program, and the natural ability of a child to grasp a foreign language.