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Sunday, April 25, 2010

Prompt #3: Goldenberg



The culturally competent teacher should be able to use a variety of assessment techniques appropriate to diverse learners and accomodate sociocultural differences that affect learning.

A few weeks ago, after I finished reading with my reading buddies, my assigned teacher was giving a spelling test to the class. All the words were grouped around the letters "-eam" and "-ean". One of the words on the list was "stream". There was silence throughout the classroom [quite a rare occasion] after the teacher had announced the word and I saw confusion on a couple of students' faces. Then one boy called out, "What's a stream?" Several other students questioned likewise. The teacher replied by saying, "Like a river... you know, a small body of flowing water." Some nodded their heads while others clearly did not understand but were too focused on spelling the word correctly. As for myself, I stood there, slightly shocked that a second grader did not know what a stream was. And then I remembered I was in a Providence school, and the chances of one of these students seeing a stream in their everyday life was most likely small. Growing up in a small, rural town, by elementary school I was well aware of rural-like terms, such as stream. I had never thought that certain words may not be as frequently used in an urban setting until that spelling test day.

In FNED, we are learning that, as teachers, we will have to take into account many factors and positions that makes up a student in our classroom. Whether these factors are lingual, ethnic, sociocultural or setting, they each shape the student and affect their performance on different assessments. For example, a student who lives in the city and has never heard the word "stream" before might have a difficult time spelling it correctly. On another level, a student who primarily speaks Spanish may have a difficult time on a spelling test in English. That is why teachers should use a variety of assessment techniques appropriate to the diversity in the classroom. On a future spelling test, my teacher may decide to use words that are oriented around the city, such as: sidewalk, block, taxi, etc. Or a teacher in a classroom with Spanish speaking students may use spelling words that are found in their culture. Each are examples of a culturally competent teacher who is paying attention to the differences that make up a student body.

I believe this prompt and lesson on culturally competent teachers strongly connects to the theorist Claude Goldenberg, who wrote an article entitled, "Teaching English Language Learners". In this article, Goldenberg discusses different techniques on how to teach children who are in the process of learning English because it is a second language. He specifically wrote about "transferring", a process by which, if a student has learned something in one native language, it can be easily learned in another language, because the knowledge is already present in some form.

Personally, as a VIPS tutor I work with two students who primarily speak English, and I have not had much of an opportunity to work with any students in the class who do not. So I am going to apply Goldenberg's lesson on transferring to my example. Think of rural and urban settings as two different "languages". If a student from the city knows the widely-used word "river", a teacher could transfer the knowledge of what a "river" is to the lesser-used word "stream"- stream being something found in a rural language. Goldenberg also dissused a process of "scaffolding", in which a teacher gradually introduces something to a student. A teacher in a city school might gradually introduce words found in other settings into a city-set curriculum, in order to introduce their students to a variety of spelling words.

Literal language barriers do not always have to be the factor that sets students apart; students may also be diverse in their ethnic "language" or cultural "language". It all depends on certain techniques a teacher uses to take these factors into account.

1 comments:

Courtney F said...

Alaina,
I think this is a really well written blog. When you discussed the spelling word "stream" I was also shocked by how many of the students did not recognize the word. You make a very good point when you say that teachers need to take such things into consideration when giving assessments, in this case spelling.
I could not agree more with your connection to Goldenberg, I also made a very similar connection to him in my third prompt. My classroom is an ESL classroom, so the students I work with are struggling with English on a daily basis. Perhaps it is because I have not been able to work with them in spelling that I have not seen these more geographical separations in contrast to the cultural ones I witness every week.
The teacher I am working alongside with makes many adaptations to her lesson plans and assessment techniques every week in order best fit her students abilities, and this flexibility and awareness will certainly be something that will be a crucial piece of our success as teachers.
Best of Luck,
Courtney