Mode Continuum Definition

During these sequenced activities, students were supported in transitioning from the informal and oral end of the language continuum to the more demanding academic writer of the continuum. Thank you Holly. This is the product of a student who took a 6-week course with me at Bethel University (online course in the graduate program). This is the only course dedicated to EL, and I have changed my approach from a language-heavy approach to the framework of disciplinary competences and LANGUAGE IS AT THE SERVICE OF LEARNING, which you have noticed so well. My main scaffolding came from Gibbons and Hammond on scaffolding. If you want to know more about the mode continuum, please read this public article by Pauline Gibbons. It is a powerful tool/framework. Here is a brief description: “The continuum [fashion] reflects the process of formal education itself, as students must make changes in an increasing number of areas, moving from personal and everyday ways of forming meaning to socially shared and more written discourses of certain disciplines. The development of literacy in each subject of the school curriculum involves the learning of technical language, grammatical patterns and generic subject-specific structures. As the continuum [fashion] suggests, these school-related registers tend to include more written discourse that tends to be less personal, abstract, lexically dense, and structured than the everyday personal language students are familiar with. Although more conversational texts tend to have strong personal involvement, poor explanation of meaning, and interactive features, these more academic texts require a great deal of explanation of lexical content, but allow little interaction or personal involvement (Biber, 1986). www.u.arizona.edu/~piskula/ScaffoldingESLbyContent.pdf rationale: Students work with a science mentorship text that models the cyclical explanation that students write at the end of activities for their performance assessment. The text is read aloud and presented as factual information (Gibbons, 2015).

The language associated with explanation is introduced, including the temporal connections and causal relationships needed to structure a cyclical explanation of the water cycle. Students examine the structure of the text (order, paragraph order, sentences, present tense, and vocabulary) and discuss these points. Complete the activity with a post-reading strategy (such as cloze text) to help students practice the concept of a cyclical explanation in academic parlance. It will be a large group activity. Justification and role of the teacher: The role of the teacher in this activity begins with the modeling of the process of reading and deconstructing a text. Since this is a new way of analyzing a text, it is necessary that the activity begins with the whole group working together on a passage that corresponds to the content and reading skills of the class. Teacher role: Create a prompt that encourages, not restricts, student responses (use “Paragraph Opener”). Invite thoughtful responses by allowing enough time for the activity. The command prompt should model for students the types of writing used in the assessment tool. Justification and role of the teacher: In this activity, the role of the teacher is to support, model and actively lead an academic discussion about the experiences of the first activity. Groups of students in the first activity will “share their learning with the whole class with the help of the teacher” (Gibbons, 2015, p. 83).

Since each group participated in a different experience, each group contains the information needed to shape the understanding of the entire class community. This forces students to report to the whole class, rather than simply refining their language in small groups without sharing it aloud. In addition, description and rationale: Students will participate in one of two scientific experiments that model the main processes of the water cycle. The first experiment consists of distilling simulated seawater by boiling. The second experiment involves the creation of a solar still. Enter your contact information below or click an icon to log in: Without the five activities that existed before, students would not be ready to tackle this activity effectively. – Describes the cycle in linear language, indicating that it begins and ends. This activity creates a “real communicative situation” (Gibbons, 2015, p. 84). ELs who have studied the water cycle in their previous schools or who have knowledge at home or in the community are encouraged to build on their scientific knowledge in this lesson. Question 42 1 1 Points In Philippians, Paul argues that true joy and peace are not. Gibbons` (2015) study showed that students who listened to other students` reports during a teacher-led reporting activity improved their own writing.

I expect the same result when small groups report back to the class as a whole. Since students are the experts in this activity, ELs can contribute and co-construct their knowledge with native English speakers with the active support of the teacher. All students should be guided through this process, whether native or non-native and less familiar with language awareness in scientific texts. As this process will be new for all students, ELs and non-native speakers will be able to work together throughout the group and participate on an equal footing with the support of the teacher. – Does not contain the energy source for the cycle. You comment with your WordPress.com account.