Effective English Language Skills 

Samantha Giangrasso

Overview

Children who are English Language Learners are not able to effectively manipulate sentences and use correct grammar to effectively express academic ideas about content. Students do not speak in full sentences or mix up word order, causing for confusion to the listener and muddled ideas. For example, when describing a theme in a story, a student recently said "the lesson of the theme of the story is to always be nice because the person is nice to others because of the story." It is clear that students have correct ideas about the content, but are not given the means to manipulate the language around their ideas to clearly present their thinking.

Teachers will be given a professional development session where they will learn specific sentence stems and Academically Productive Talk protocols to encourage the use of oral language between students across classrooms.

The following slideshow gives a bit more information about data in Chelsea Public Schools, and specficially discusses English language abilities.

Below is a transcript and video of students who are beginning to use Academically Productive Talk protocols. The protocol they are using is called "Bees and Flowers" where students move around the room and find a partner to share their ideas with. They are expected to use provided sentence stems to explain their ideas. As you can see in this video, you can hear that students are beginning to use stems to present ideas about the content, and are practicing reciting what others say. Students still need encouragement to explain their thinking and to question each others ideas. This is the first step in students engaging in Academically Productive talk with one another. The goal of this case study was to examine how orally speaking and using language enables students to further grasp academic concepts, and to provide teachers wil protocols to allow for academic discussion in their classroom.

Ideas

Research based data was be used to craft a professional development session where teachers will implement the use of Academically Productive Talk in their classrooms. This will encourage students to converse with one another as a means to develop higher order thinking skills about the content. Teachers will learn specific sentence stems and Academically Productive Talk protocols to encourage the use of oral language between students across classrooms.