During the testing of my upper-grade students with the Speaking test of the Language Assessment System tests (LAS Links Assessments), which are given to bilingual students every year, I often observe that their oral language needs improvement. In speaking about pictures, which display a sequence of four events in a story, students often lack specific vocabulary and developed academic sentence structures, those that contain different subordinate clauses. They have a hard time making transitions from one picture to another in a series and therefore are not able to show a connection between them. They do not make comprehensive inferences based on the pictures. Their speaking is flat and monotonous.
The New Haven Public Schools district is currently promoting effective strategies in teaching reading comprehension in elementary grades through a plan for the development of oral language offered by Mondo Publishing. This company has developed the successful oral language instructional program - Let's Talk About It! - based on the premises that many students, English Language Learners particularly, "have developed reasonable control of social language, but have little proficiency in the instructional language" and that "students exhibit poor comprehension skills and in many instances there is a gap between decoding and comprehension."
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According to the developers of Mondo, Crevola and Vineis, there is a significant difference between students' ability to read words (decode) and their understanding of what they read. The New Haven teacher Katherine Massa provides an evidence of this discrepancy: an "example I see in students who have low language skills is that they 'look' like fluent readers when you listen to them read, but when it comes down to comprehension questions and being able to retell what they have just read, they can not do it."
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The authors of the Mondo program claim that reading comprehension is impeded because oral language is not developed so that the sentence structures and use of vocabulary are at a proficient level. Therefore, when students read a text, they cannot transfer the knowledge of vocabulary and sentence structures to reading from their oral language, simply because their oral language does not include this vocabulary and these sentence structures. The Mondo program uses photographs to develop oral language, which triggers improvement of reading comprehension skills. The program developed a formula for success: "what we see, we can talk about; what we talk about, we can write down; what we write down, we can read." The research conducted by Mondo shows that the percentage of students labeled "at-risk" who were taught with the oral language program considerably decreased because their reading comprehension improved significantly. Even though the Mondo oral language program is targeted at elementary grades, I believe that the elements of it that I use in my unit are beneficial for the upper grades in which I teach this unit. (The difference between Mondo oral language lessons and lessons developed for this unit will be discussed in the Strategies section below.)
In developing my unit, I have striven for the synthesis of teaching goals and ideas that have been proved to be functional. I want my unit solve several problems that bilingual students have. Thus, this curriculum unit has the following goals: 1) to improve oral language and, therefore, 2) to improve reading skills and, mainly, 3) to teach writing about something what one sees.
Knowing how to describe what one sees is primary; therefore an important objective involves eliciting the vocabulary needed to discuss a photograph. Elaboration of description is another of the unit's objectives. It addresses the difficulty that bilingual students have describing a photograph with a variety of details and sentences. The next step is to interpret the picture. Students are asked not only to transmit what they physically see, but also to explain what situation might be behind an image. Finally, attention is drawn to grammar and sentence structure. I plan to conduct several mini-lessons on topics such as different kinds of subordinate clauses, pronoun referents, sentence fragments, the past tense of regular and irregular verbs. Using grammar conventions is challenging for English Language Learners. Grammatical points need to be taught explicitly. When teaching writing, I always try to incorporate a grammar lesson in my instruction.