Academic language

Notes on NYSED Leadership MOOC-Expert Panel: Language Development

The value of these varieties (of non-standard English) for solidarity and for identification with the group oftentimes outweigh consideration of status or prestige or  social advancement. Kinda sad how this needs to be dissected and justified through academic lenses. The social reality is that dominant SES and political groups strongly influence what is valued in a society. (Freire & Macedo, 1987)
Teacher should help students extend competence rather than replace one variety with another.

How to tho?

• Providing opportunities for students to speak to each other

Help students build skills to not just share but go back and fourth in building/choosing ideas in extended conversations.
Think about how conversations could happen within an unit--elaborating, paraphrasing, providing evidence to establish goals for teaching. Ms. Trinkle not only has very high expectations for students to use their language but also explicitly teach/model how to build those skills. Additionally, the context is always authentic when it comes to the academic tasks she structured. 

Activity e.g.: students describe their idea or answer 3 times to different partners borrow ideas from previous partner to share with the next one. Double or triple round of turn and talk.

• Having English model

When it comes to schools high ELLs-linguistically isolated, teachers gotta be creative about having model to engage student in different types of language production.

• Listen to what students are saying.

Take a close look at the conversing. Are students engaged--do they really want to communicate with others?

• Valuing students' first language and encouraging them to be bilingual/see it as a positive assets.

• Figure out different ways to assess what's going on with linguistically rather than just look at vocab and grammar.

Acknowledging that hard to grab a hold of language development that involves discourse, having conversation, and word production. So finding ways to assess authentically is vital. Admins need to have a vision for that otherwise it's gonna be hard for teachers even if they want to do that. For Mandarin??