Strategies Which Teach The

Strategies which teach the

CUEING SYSTEMS OF ENGLISH LITERACY

SEMANTIC SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE SYNTACTIC SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE GRAPHOPHONIC SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE

Before the Shared Experience

·  Develop prediction skills based on visual aspects

·  Prior knowledge/predict endings to texts

·  Brainstorm what is known about a topic

·  Concept mapping

Observation, Interaction and Discussion of Shared Experiences

·  Excursions

·  Videos

·  Varieties of books/big books

·  Behind the News

·  Library references

·  Guest speakers

·  Hands on activities

·  Other visual stimuli (posters/concrete aids)

Recounts / reflections on shared experiences

further developing the field of knowledge of shared experiences

·  Exploration of concepts through children's first

language

·  Recounting the shared experience

·  Questioning/Clarifying (vocabulary building)

·  Matching words and pictures/paragraph to sub-heading

·  Role plays/drama/puppets

·  Teaching and learning about oral and written genres that reflect the shared experiences

·  Teaching how-to-read between the lines (things implied, predicting) as well as about explicit meaning

·  Demonstrations by the teacher of recounts / reflections

·  Doing other shared activities within the same field of knowledge

·  Discussions (including open ended questions)

·  Retelling stories, events, activities (using sequencing activities)

Before Reading and Writing

·  Teacher-modelled sentences/texts

·  Teacher-modelled sentence building

·  Deconstructing texts (looking at the parts of the

generic structure, the language features, the vocabulary etc)

·  Matching the topic sentence to the paragraph

·  Oral-language barrier games (using an illustration from the text to be read)

During Reading and Writing

·  Using big/shared book and group negotiated writing to point out, talk about, teach and demonstrate grammar, vocabulary items and punctuation

·  Group negotiated text in which meaning carried through the grammar is changed:

- the tense

- the person (Ist, 2nd, 3rd)

- singular/plural

- processes (verbs)

- content words (nouns)

After Reading and Writing

·  Establishing a proof reading/ editing and conferencing sequence which has a place for checking the grammatical items

·  Conferencing group-negotiated and student writing, concentrating on grammatical structure and language features

·  Reconstructing the original genre from scrambled sections of the genre

·  Presenting a syntactically incorrect version to children to 'correct' (using the correct model for comparison if necessary)

·  Reconstructing text from talk to writing – dictagloss

·  Supplying alternative words for particular grammatical structures in the model text/group negotiated text (whole class first, then individual)

Before Reading and Writing

·  Develop phonemic awareness (aural/oral) of the

sounds of English

- beginning/medial/ending sounds

- plurals

- rhyming sounds

- compound words

- syllables in words

- stress and intonation in words

- creating alliterative rhymes

- explaining how English language sounds

are made

During Reading and Writing

·  Using big/shared book. and group' negotiated writing to point out, talk about, teach and demonstrate

- letter sounds

- letter combinations

- letter names

- word shapes

·  Following the words of known songs and rhymes on large charts

·  Picking out individual words in shared book/ finding the same word in other sentences in the text

·  Finding all the words that begin with/ end with/ have particular letter combinations in them

·  In shared book and group negotiated writing, talking about the letters that would be changed in particular words to create new rhyming words

After Reading and Writing

·  Create and display list of words/flip books using words from the texts being used with the students which

- make up word families

- have the same beginning sound

- have long and short vowel sounds

- have the same ending

·  Extra visual stimuli to explain concepts

·  Pre teaching content and process words

·  Brainstorm for specific information related to the

shared experience

·  Board games/computer programs which revisit

concepts

·  Concrete experience of new concepts

·  Story maps

·  Concept mapping

·  Information gap activities

·  Teaching topic-specific vocabulary and use of English

·  Reconstructing texts (from talking to writing) dictagloss

Recording Shared Experiences

·  Writing modelled and negotiated texts

·  Teaching the generic structure of written texts

·  Completing cloze exercises structured for meaning

·  Writing negotiated texts which innovate on the model text

·  Group negotiated reading/writing/individual drawing

·  Classifying the information on a concept map

·  Group editing and conferencing of written work

·  Sequencing large chunks of text into the whole text

·  Sequencing pictures to represent a meaningful whole

·  Group-negotiated sentence expansion (putting more information into the sentences through the insertion of other words)

·  Comparing texts for grammatical features

·  Group-negotiated writing of alternative sentences

which

- say the same thing

- say something different through the

placement of different words, or the

different placement of words in the sentence

·  Create and display word banks/lists of words

- with the same meaning

- opposite meaning

- with the same ending

- with the same function In a sentence (prepositions, conjunctions, verbs etc)

·  Matching pictures with sentences for tense

(future, past, present)

·  Unjumbling sentences by matching words with

a model

Establishing Independence in Reading

and Writing

·  Cloze exercises structured for syntax (grammatical

items - prepositions, conjunctions, singular/ plural forms, tense etc)

·  Sequencing sentences into paragraphs (punctuation on separate cards)

·  Sequencing words into sentences

·  Providing sentence starters In order

- to match supplied endings

- to unscramble words to create the ending

- to write an ending that fits

- represent the future/past and present form

of the same word

- rhyme

- are organised in alphabetical order

·  Matching words and pictures

·  Cloze exercises structured for graphophonic gaps (beginning/ ending of words/ silent letters/vowel clusters etc)

·  Play teacher-made board games using words used in class, structured to teach graphophonic skills

- Junior scrabble (matching words)

- Scrabble (building words)

- puzzles (identifying words)

- Bingo/Boggle

·  Give students mnemonic devices (memory joggers)

- I before 'e' except after 'c'

- when 'ing' comes to stay the e goes away

- there's a 'rat' in sepa'rat'e

- the paper stationery has an 'e', when the car

is stationary, it has an 'a'

- the Principal is your 'pal'

- She'll always end up as your friend

·  Teach and develop dictionary skills

·  Organise words used in class in alphabetical order

·  Establish a spelling program based on the words the students are using, incorporating all of the above strategies

These strategies need to be placed in the context of talking about the concepts being taught, the English language (its grammatical features and sociocultural aspects) before, during and after modelled reading and writing, shared reading and group-negotiated writing.

Production of participants in a workshop session on

READING AND WRITING IN ENGLISH

Working as an ESL specialist professional development course for ESL general support teachers, May, 1996, Darwin

compiled and edited by Fran Murray, ESL Teaching and Assessment