Wed, Nov 25, 2020 8:02 PM
Very Informative
My school setting comprises 21% of Hispanic students, and 11% are considered ELL. But of that 21%, many of them are the children of parents who only speak Spanish. School demographics have changed a lot in twenty years in my area. There’s much debate about the needs of English Language Learners. When I student taught, there were only a few ELL students in my setting. It was common for a fifth grader to go to a second-grade classroom for reading instruction. Since there were only a few students in this category, that was probably a good idea given that fifth-grader teachers during that time did not teach students how to read at the primary level or differentiate. Today’s classrooms in this same school may have almost half of the class categorized as ELL. If they all went to the lower grades, the school system could not justify paying that fifth-grade teacher.
We now know ELL students take five or more years to become proficient in academic English (Nargund-Joshi & Bautista, 2016). The article explained how a framework for language instruction called the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) and the 5E Learning Cycle are related. While the SIOP has more steps than five, each correlates to a 5E Learning Cycle phase. While I have learned about the 5E Learning Cycle during this course, I have never heard of the SIOP. This article could be very beneficial to teachers in my setting who have their ESOL Endorsements, just like me, but have not had any other workshops on how to best teach ELL students since earning the endorsement years ago.
The article does not blatantly answer the question presented in the title – “Which Comes First – Language or Content?” The reader can infer they coincide within the context of the academics being taught. This article is one I will share with my colleagues introducing to both the 5E Learning Cycle and the SIOP.