Proficiency Standards
Refer to your profile of an ELL that you wrote in your Week One discussion forum. Revise this profile and describe your student’s proficiency standards as described in Table 2.1 (p. 51) and Table 3.1 (p. 91). Based on these proficiency standards, the cultural and linguistic background of your student, and your student’s personality, design an activity and an assessment that will help increase your student’s English skills.
For the activity, make sure to include reading, writing, listening, and speaking components. In other words, your activity must require the student to read, write, listen and speak according to the appropriate proficiency standards. In designing this activity, think about strategies you would frontload to and/or work with the student. Think about how you would teach an EL student. Think about ways you will provide proper scaffolding to make the content comprehensible for ELLs.
For the assessment, create a task that measures the student’s performance of the activity. Read the document, Performance Assessments for English Language Learners. There are many different types of assessments that can be used to assess a student’s language abilities. However, some of these assessments, such as the state standardized tests, may not effectively measure a student’s true abilities due to various reasons. Standardized and other formal assessments may not be reliable and valid for English language learners because of the extraneous sources that can confound the outcomes. Therefore, performance-based assessments and authentic assessments are said to be the best opportunity to gain insight of the knowledge and abilities of English learners. Create a performance-based assessment that will assess content and language proficiency. Justify how your assessment tool effectively assesses ELLs.
Your paper will include a revised student profile, an activity, and an assessment. Your paper must be three to four pages in length, not including title and reference pages, be formatted according to APA style guidelines as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center, and use at least two scholarly resources in addition to the course text.
Student profile:
A typical ELL in my community will be born in Cuba. For this specific case I will be presenting the story of Antonio Castro a nine years old boy that arrived to Miami when he was seven. Both of his parents left the country on a mission because they are doctors and decided to request for political asylum; abandoning their mission, leaving their child behind in order to give him the opportunity to have a better future once they were able to claim him and reunite the entire family on a free land, where dreams, ambitions and hard work will actually be a reality and not just illusions. He started school here in Miami at the second grade. His mother tongue is Spanish, he lives with his mother in an area called Kendall; goes to Blue Lakes Elementary; and it is important to mention that she does not speaks English. Antonio spends 1 weekend over 2 with his father that does speaks English. He is an extremely social child, enjoys talking to peers and adults alike, loves dancing, music, fun activities and is not shy to participate in class. As previously mentioned both parents are highly educated. The mother teaches sonogram classes to adult students and the father works as a physician assistant on a private clinic that specializes in weight loss and anti-aging while studying to pass his Board exam and become a license Doctor in U.S.A. Parents are not together; each has already established a new family and Antonio has to juggle between both houses respect and follow the rules of two different families, besides the adaptation to a new country, new language, new school, new people, even new food. At a first sight Antonio does not has any special need but after deep analysis a well prepare instructor, a school psychologist or counselor will realize he does needs support in order to address the psychological damages inflicted upon the child when both parents left him behind with maternal grandparents from a very young age. He portraits anxiety and concentration disorders caused by the fear of being abandoned again. Although he is a friendly child, he struggles learning English, getting good grades and talks a lot in class when he is supposed to be concentrating on school related activities.
There are several interesting activities in order to get to know my students, and I am sure many will decide to use oral exercises to acquire information about their students, but keeping in mind those pupils that may be shy to share their experiences and feelings out loud I have chosen to use writing exercises to get a better understanding of who they are. Example timelines, I will give my learners a blank timeline where I will ask them to mark important events of their lives and develop in five sentences the most important occasions. Later on I will review each and every one of them and in future classes I could ask them to share, explain and describe in details one those important happenings. I strongly believe that this activity will be beneficial for ELL students and specifically for the case I presented because it will give the chance to the learners to seek for help from a dictionary or other tools if they do not know exactly how to express themselves, and the continuity of the exercise could be done when they have develop better verbal skills. A second activity I will like to implement in my class is “Who Am I? On a small piece of paper, each student writes a few sentences about himself or herself. Then all papers are collected and put in a small box or a hat. The teacher takes one paper and reads what it says, and the students have to guess who wrote this paper. Example: “I have long brown hair. I like casual clothes. I enjoy hiking and traveling. Who am I?” Note: As you can see from the example, the students may not know about the person’s hobbies, but they can certainly guess who that person is by the appearance (the hair and the clothes). I suggest that the teacher instruct the students to be neither unbelievably mysterious nor totally transparent in their descriptions” (Shvidko, E. 2013). Once again it is an adequate exercise for ELL’s because it only requires a couple of words and numbers that are the same in almost every language, while it gives them the opportunity to also practice their spoken abilities.
References:
Shvidko, E. (2013). Writing activities for ELL’s: Getting to know you. Retrieved on September 3, 2013 from http://blog.tesol.org/writing-activities-for-ells-getting-to-know-you/
…………………………..Answer preview………………………
The number of English Language Learners (ELLs) in American and other states schools has doubled over the past 20 years. Achievements gaps of between the ELLs and non-ELLs students are deeply pervasive, rooted, complex, and challenging for the National Education Associate affiliates and members (NEA). It is clear that the NEA has addressed every complex issue by linking research and advocacy that can assist ELLs to understand English and other new and existing activities………………….
APA
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