Recommendations for Language Acquisition
The Language(s) of Education (LE) is an overarching concept for language as a subject, language across the curriculum (LAC) and foreign languages (FL). Mastering the LE is a prerequisite for being able to participate in society in all the different discourse communities a learner will meet. This includes a variety of skills acquisition and competences starting from the most basic reading and writing skills acquisition to being able to understand and reflect upon complicated texts and situations that will imply advanced linguistic and cultural competences. A definition of the competences covered by LE will therefore include what the learner knows, what the learner can do and what the learner is able to understand, think about and reflect upon. The aims for LE cover all of these.
Language acquisition:
Learning how to read and write and developing these abilities over many years, with increasing demands, has been at the core of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. New text forms and means of communication represent new challenges for LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Thus the need for broadening the repertoire of tools for analysis and interpretation increases. This means that producing texts and understanding texts also play an important role in young people’s lives, and constitute a necessary competence for their access to participation in society. The implications of not developing sufficient competence are serious. The desirable outcome of the learning process is described in terms of competences and exemplified through assessment.
While discussing the aims of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, we must also bear in mind the fact that LANGUAGE ACQUISITION is taught to learners of all ages in a progression over many years. Emphasis on various knowledge issues and skills acquisition will naturally vary for different age groups. The examples listed below are meant to cover general aims at the end of schooling.
Aims for teaching/learning language across curriculum
In all school subjects, knowledge and skills acquisition are to a large extent presented and acquired through language. On the one hand, the learner needs to master language in order to be able to learn in different subjects; on the other hand, a focus on language itself provides new possibilities for the learners to learn. Writing as a means of learning across the curriculum is an example of this. Reading and writing strategies are also learning strategies. The meta-perspective on language and the learning-to-learn skill developed in LANGUAGE ACQUISITION or FL through response to and mediation of written and oral texts seem to have positive effects on all learning across the curriculum.
Not only does every subject contribute to learners’ competences, it is also important that all subjects undertake a joint responsibility for linguistic development within limits defined by the specific aims of the subject. A variety of teaching methods that enhance abilities to use language in varied ways will also enhance learning processes.
Aims for teaching/learning LAC:
- developing subject specific concepts and genres
- developing varied strategies for learning through language use
- developing meta-perspectives on knowledge
- learning to learn
- developing mediation skills acquisition
- developing cognitive academic language proficiency
This article lists down various skills and recommendations related to the skills to overcome performance hassles.
Reading Fluency
Fluency is the art of pronouncing the words correctly and thus expressing it in correct letters. A lot of times even though the students know the word but not knowing correct pronunciation and spelling causes to disrupted understanding of the text and thus affect comprehension. Fluency can be built using phonic sounds and drill to some extent.
Recommendations to improve Reading fluency
Read Aloud: one person reading correctly and others following can build the understanding of fluency. Teachers and educators can do this in several ways in the classrooms:
1. Teacher read aloud: in this teacher can read aloud and students can keep moving their fingers along the text where teacher is reading
2. Choral Reading: the teacher reads and student repeats the same text behind the teacher
3. Peer reading: students can be paired up and be asked to read together and correct and assist each other when required
4. Independent/ silent reading: students can be asked to silently read the text on their own
Regular Dictation for 3 letter words, 4 letter words and so on can be done in the class for correct spelling development
Writing as a skill
Students may experience various difficulties in writing in a language due to many reasons. These difficulties may be mild or strong, and vary in their nature and intensity. Teachers need to adopt a student focused approach to help these students get over their difficulties in writing.
Spelling
To ensure that students become competent in spellings, it is important that teachers inculcate the habit of writing practice on a regular basis. On a daily basis, teachers can make flash cards for words or write words on the class board, and ask students to copy the words in their notebook.
To encourage students to develop an interest in words and their spellings;
· Teachers can ask students to maintain a word book.
· Students should be asked to look up the dictionary and write an unfamiliar word in their wordbook each day
· Teachers can randomly choose five students each day and ask them to share their word of the day. If time is a constraint, this can be done as a weekly activity
· Weekly dictation sessions can be conducted to check student improvement levels in correct spelling. These sessions can be made a little more interactive by making students correct each other’s spelling
· Another strategy is to give them editing exercises. The teacher can write a short paragraph with a few words spelt incorrectly on the class board. Students should be encouraged to point out the spelling errors in the paragraph
Punctuation
Confidence in using grammatical rules in terms of punctuation and capitalisation is important for students to be able to express their ideas clearly. Errors in punctuation and capitalisation reflect poor familiarity with a language. Rules regarding usage of period, comma and capitalization need to be reinforced repeatedly to build the required confidence in students.
· Give students a list of simple sentences with punctuation marks (periods, commas) missing and no word with capitalization. Discuss these sentences with the students and emphasize the usage rule for the punctuation, if required
· A variant of this exercise is to give students a list of sentences with relevant and irrelevant punctuation marks and ask them to identify the irrelevant ones
· Self-review and peer review exercises too can be incorporated in classroom activities to strengthen the skills acquisition
Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension refers to the ability to understand, interpret and reflect upon the meaning of what is being read. Strong reading comprehension skills acquisition aids the foundation for other subjects. Reading and comprehension is essential to develop language proficiency.
The condition of poor comprehension seems to be relatively common and it has been estimated that one child in ten has some comprehension problems. As the usual focus of teachers is on poor readers, students with poor comprehension skills acquisition go undetected in class as they are fluent and accurate readers with normal decoding abilities.
The following are the difficulties faced by students in comprehension
· Though students can extract the factual information but are unable to find out the inferred meaning from the text. [skill missing : inference]
· Predicting the next course of action in the text. [skill missing : predicting]
· Students are unable to connect the text to their life, thus unable to answer the questions which require them to think why character’s thought, felt or acted in a certain way. [skill missing : connection to self]
· Students are unable to skim through the text. They can’t extract only relevant information without getting tangled into all the text they are reading and comprehending. [skill missing : skimming]
· Students are unable to visualize the text and thus are unable to create mental images, which helps in understanding and retaining what is read. [skill missing : visualization]
· Students are unable to link ideas from the text to decode the main idea of the text. [skill missing : main idea identification]
Recommendations to improve comprehension skills acquisition
· The classroom reading should not just focus on fluency but also should incorporate comprehension check questions at regular intervals of reading. Teachers can employ the Read aloud strategy to create interest in text and help in comprehension at smaller intervals
· The teacher can also make pairs among the students and make them do pair reading and provide them with comprehension check questions for each page of the chapter. These questions can be framed in such a way that will cover the major idea and important details on of the text
· The teacher can choose and ask students various types of questions to check the comprehension:
1. Summarization: teacher can ask students to read the text and summarize it in their own words. Students unable to express their comprehension in writing can be asked to share it verbally to their peer or to the whole class.
2. Predicting: teacher can incorporate questions which require anticipating. Can use questions like ‘Do you think Ravi will go for a movie today’? If yes, why
3. Inference: to improve inference skills acquisition, questions pushing students to infer should be asked. Asking a lot of why and how questions can help students in inference.
4. Connecting to self: students should not just be taught to understand the text but also make them relate it to themselves. This skill can be inculcated by simply putting students’ in place of the character or author and asking various questions on how, what etc.
5. Visualization: This is a basic skill which is incorporated in the early stages when students don’t even start to read. They start their reading by picture comprehension, followed by text comprehension.
6. Main Idea skill: To identify the main idea, students should be able to infer the meaning of the text and understand the underlying idea behind it. To do this, students can be asked to identify the important inferences or idea and annotate them (write them beside the passage) while they are reading the text. After the text is being read, students can be asked to re-read the annotated ideas written by them and derive the main idea.
Singular -Plural
Teachers can use the techniques given below to teach students;
· Make students line up into two equal lines, each student across from another student. Ask each pair to say one singular and plural noun out loud, and have other students in line confirm his or her answer
· Make flashcard pairs of singular-plural words. The number of pairs should be the same as the number of students in class. Shuffle the pairs and distribute one flashcard to each child such that either the singular/plural flashcard is with the student, or its matching pair is with the teacher, leaving the teacher with one flashcard per each child in her hands. Now one of by one the teacher puts the flashcard on the board — and the student who has its matching pair has to stand up and call out the word, and explain why it matches
· Write a singular noun on the board and then write its plural form incorrectly, such as sheep/sheeps. Ask your students if the form is correct by showing a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Try the activity using different words, occasionally throwing in common misspellings and irregular nouns. Then have student volunteers come up and write singular and plural words on the board to test the class
Sentence Construction
· Identifying sentences- Have each student make two cards (one will say SENTENCE and the other will say NOT A SENTENCE). The teacher then reads phrases aloud. If it’s a sentence, then children must raise the correct card. If it is not a sentence, then they raise the other card
· Forming sentences- Words of a sentence are written on A4 sheets of paper. 5–6 such sentences can be made. The class is divided into group matching the number of sentences made. Each group gets one set of sentence sheet and needs to arrange the sheets in order to form a meaningful sentence. Each group then has to explain why they chose to arrange the sentence in that particular manner. This exercise continues with harder sentences
· Students can be shown pictures and then asked to describe the picture in their own words. The teacher needs to check the construction and the creativity used
· Complete the sentence- An oral session where students are asked to use complete sentences can be made engaging by making them into team activities. Teams should challenge each other to complete a partial sentence in as many ways as possible. Exercises to identify complete sentences from a list of complete and incomplete sentences can also provide good practice. Encourage students to use adjectives, adverbs etc. to make their expressions rich and meaningful
Recommendations to improve the vocabulary:
· Word wall can be created and put up in the class (preferably next to the board). Firstly students can write few words from everyday learning and teacher can add meaning to these words. Secondly, teacher can list down the difficult words from the upcoming chapters and put them on the word wall and refer to them while teaching.
· Pocket diary: students can buy a small pocket diary and keep entering 2 words everyday they learn before they leave from school. They can choose their words from the daily learning and the student who is consistent can be awarded at the end of the month or so
· Picture recognition: students can be shown pictures of the vocabulary word and can be asked to identify the word looking at the picture. This can be done every morning before lessons begin
· Word of the day: everyday a student brings a new word to class (student roll number can be mapped to the date for making them accountable). The students can share their word with whole class, with meaning and a trick to remember the same
· Flash cards games: Flash cards are small cards with words written on them. They can be created by the students or the teachers and can be really useful to develop vocabulary in students. Can be used in different way such as an antonym, synonym, homophone, and Definition flash card
Do you use these recommendations in your class and share feedback on what went well and what can be improved.
