LAUSD Local District 4

February 16, 2011

Chapter 3
Literacy in the Curriculum:
Challenges for EL Learners

Chapter 4
Engaging with Academic
Literacy: Examples of
Classroom Activities
 Discussion Questions
1. Describe the relationship(s)
between language and
learning academic content
in secondary classrooms.
2. How might a person argue
that all secondary subject-
specific classes are
language classes?
3. Explain how language
plays a dual role as a
doorway to either invite in
or shutout learners.
 Everyone Gives Information
Discuss and Decide
Supplies: envelopes with Build It clue cards
a set of 2 cm cubes (Two each of red, yellow, orange, blue, purple,
green)
Your group’s goal is to build structures described in the clue cards.

Open one envelope and pass all the clues out to members of the group.
Each of you, may look at your own clue(s) and tell your group what it
says, but do not show the cards to anyone else. Build it!

When the group is done, review your clues to make sure that you really
are finished. Then call the teacher over to make sure the group has
correctly completed the task.
Metalanguage – using language to talk about language

Communicative activities – the focus is primarily on

using language in order to complete a task. Language is
used in a meaningful context for authentic purposes.

Form-focused activities – the focus is on learning about

language. The activity centers on the language itself.
1. Explain how each visual is a possible
example of a challenge that English
Learners face when trying to read, write,
and/or speak English.
2. In what ways do these challenges become
even more difficult when students are
attempting to use language to learn
specific academic content?
 Being literate in a subject is not only about learning
new vocabulary and knowing what those words mean in the
context of the subject. It also involves seeing how they link
within a broader conceptual framework. Thus we need to
have some prior understanding of the key concepts, the big
ideas,” embedded in the text.
~English Learners, Academic Literacy, and Thinking: Learning
in the Challenge Zone, pp. 44-45

…Subject-specific literacy is also closely tied to the

ways of thinking and reasoning, and ways of reading and
writing, that are valued in a particular subject… each
discipline has its own conventions and patterns of thinking
that make it distinct from others.
~English Learners, Academic Literacy, and Thinking: Learning
in the Challenge Zone, p. 45
 Math

1. Using excerpts from the State of California Content Standards and

Frameworks, discuss what makes your assigned content area or
field distinct from others in ways of thinking and reasoning, and
ways of reading and writing.
2. Describe the field’s conventions and patterns of thinking that
might make it different from the other content areas or fields.

Science
 Math

1. Each group member should explain what makes their field unique or distinct.
2. As a group discuss the literacy skills and process skills needed by students to truly
access the knowledge in each field.
3. Why might secondary teachers want to teach all students, especially ELs to think,
reason, read and write as a scientist, mathematician, historian, and language
specialist?

Science
History-Social Science Content Standards for California Public Schools

10.7 Students analyze the rise of totalitarian governments after World

War I.

3) Analyze the rise, aggression, and human costs of totalitarian regimes

(Fascist and Communist) in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union,
noting especially their common and dissimilar traits.

10.8 Students analyze the causes and consequences of World War II.

1) Compare the German, Italian, and Japanese drives for empire in the
1930s, including the 1937 Rape of Nanking, other atrocities in China,
and the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939.

2) Understand the role of appeasement, nonintervention (isolationism), and

the domestic distractions in Europe and the United States prior to the
outbreak of World War II.
History-Social Science Content Standards for California Public Schools

10.7 Students analyze the rise of totalitarian governments after World

War I.

3) Analyze the rise, aggression, and human costs of totalitarian regimes

(Fascist and Communist) in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union,
noting especially their common and dissimilar traits.

10.8 Students analyze the causes and consequences of World War II.

1) Compare the German, Italian, and Japanese drives for empire in the
1930s, including the 1937 Rape of Nanking, other atrocities in China,
and the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939.

2) Understand the role of appeasement, nonintervention (isolationism), and

the domestic distractions in Europe and the United States prior to the
outbreak of World War II.
 Early Challenges to World Peace
Challenges to peace followed a pattern throughout
the 1930s. Dictators took aggressive action but met only
verbal protests and pleas for peace from the democracies.
Mussolini and Hitler viewed that desire for peace as
weakness and responded with new acts of aggression. With
hindsight, we can see the shortcomings of the democracies’
policies were the product of long and careful deliberation.
People at the time strongly believed that they would work.
~World History Connections to Today: The Modern Era, p. 372

1. Identify any nominalizations or nominal groups in the above text.

2. As an introductory paragraph to chapter 14, how might this text
shutout or close the door on EL students in the learning process?
 Warm Up

How does the picture to the left

represent the idea of bullying?
How are decisions made in
situations that involve bullies?

Describe an experience of bullying

that you have witnessed or
experienced in your life. How did
power play a role for both the
person being bullied and the bully?
Write one sentence that shows one thing
that you know about Germany, France,
Great Britain, or the USA after the signing
of the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI.
 Person Discuss their Describe the Academic
Actions with Actions in Vocabulary
(Country) Your Partner Writing
Lil’ Hitler
Aggression

Teacher
Appeasement
United States
Isolationism

Japan Aggression
Historical Interpretation

1) Students show the connections, causal and otherwise, between

particular historical events and larger social, economic, and political
trends and developments.
Aggression

Appeasement Isolationism

Causes of WWII
 Two Sides of the Same Coin

Using information from your T Charts, the readings, visuals, and other
historical documents including your textbook, create a two-sided coin that
illustrates two different perspectives explaining responsibility for the attack on
Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese perspective should be on one side and the United States’
perspective should be on the other side.
Use a combination of words, visuals and symbols.
Treaty of Inflation Great
Versailles Depression

Aggression Appeasement Isolationism

Axis Allied
Powers WWII Powers

Holocaust Atomic
Bomb

United Marshall Cold

Nations Plan War

Israel
Seven Intellectual Description
Practices
1 Students engage with key ideas and concepts of the
discipline in ways that reflect how “experts” in the field
think and reason.
2 Students transform what they have learned into a
different form for use in a new context or for a different
audience.
3 Students make links between concrete knowledge and
abstract theoretical knowledge.
4 Students engage in substantive conversation.
5 Students make connections between the spoken and
written language of the subject and other discipline-
related ways of making meaning.
6 Students take a critical stance toward knowledge and
information.
7 Students use metalanguage in the context of learning
about other things.