Language Variation and Technology in the classroom

Out of both of the classes I sit in on there are only 3 language learners or bilingual I am not quite sure what exactly the case is for each of these students. But I haven’t noticed anything to extreme in any of these students which would hinder them from keeping up with class and actually learning the material which is being taught. I am also in a Smart class room which I feel has been very beneficial to the students. Every day Mrs. D starts the class off with planner entries on the smart board for the students to copy down in their planners which will be check randomly and periodically throughout the year. This is a great use of technology I feel because she is not only telling the class what they are doing she has it written down so if the students are not listening then they have a visual layout what they will be doing in class and what us assigned for homework. Mrs. D also uses the smart board to do grammar every Monday. She will put up 3 sentences on the board and have students come up and fix the errors on the board and explain why they fixed what they did. I find this to be a very useful tool because I feel that it is important for the students to not only be able to mark and correct grammar but to be able to verbally explain grammatical rules is key in fully understanding grammar. The class also participates is a computer base program called “Teen Biz” which they do in the classroom on the computer every Friday. I feel that the integration of technology in this classroom is great and I feel that it is an advantage for these students to not only hear, but to see what is being taught to them. Students learn in so many different ways and this technology makes it easier for the teacher to reach more students. I haven’t seen any negative aspects of technology use in the class room at this point, but I have noticed it has help students more than hurt them.

Discourse

Mondays are when I have my practicum so needless to say being in any environment with adolescents you’re going to have discourse. Today I notice Relevance in the classroom. Today the class worked on a worksheet on Participial and Gerund phrases, the students were supposed to underline the phrase and label whether or not it was a participial phrase or a gerund phrase during this exercise one of the students asked the teacher what ignorance meant, the teacher answered simply that, that question wasn’t relevant to the topic of the assignment and that at the end of class he could look it up in the dictionary. This was interesting because this student normally doesn’t ask questions but is often a disturbance in the class room. He will just randomly start talking to other students from across the room. He was not only asking irrelevant questions but he wasn’t participating in working on his worksheet. Every Monday in Mrs. D’s class she has the students BEST which is a grammar note book, she puts 3 sentences on the board and calls on students to come up and make the corrections, after the student makes the corrections she asks the students why they made the corrections they did, they then try to explain why they corrected what they did.
Ex: The Baseball team (one, won) the trophy (to, too, two) years in a row.
The students would use Discourse Markers when trying to explain why they chose what they did. This is a great way to show and explain to the other students how and why the student chose the words they did. Every student gets a chance at coming up to the board to correct and explain why throughout the year.
Turn- Taking is something that didn’t work well in class today. After the students finished their worksheet individually they then worked with the other students at their table as a group to discuses and go over their answers, then the Mrs. D handed out small whiteboards to each group to play a game. Mrs. D then read the sentences out lout one at a time and each group had to put down what type of phrase was in each sentence, then she would have the groups write down if the phrase was a participial phrase what was the phrase describing in the sentence and if it was a gerund phrase what was the phrase being used as the subject, direct object, indirect object, predicate nominative, ex.…this was hard for the 3rd period class to do. There were out bursts along with inappropriate language being used if their group didn’t get the question right.
I haven’t really noticed a pattern when it come to discourse in the class room, there are few students who ask questions, but when questions are asked Mrs. D does her best to explain to the student. After she explains to the student she then asks if she answered the question and if not will try her best to put it into language that the student will understand then will ask the entire class if they have any questions about what she just explained. In 3rd period more than half of the class is on IEP’s and I have noticed that not many students in there ask questions at all, a lot of students don’t even participate in their work. Mrs. D isn’t going to give the students the answers, but she does her best to get those students involved in what is going on in the class room or she will have the resource teacher pull them out for more one on one time.
I have noticed how hard it is to try and give each student independent one on one time, but Mrs. D tries her best to accommodate each student.

As far as gender is concerned I would think that females would ask more questions, but I have noticed that when questions are being asked they are mostly from boys, boys. But when it comes to answering questions it is a mixture between girls and boys. I have also noticed the some of the students that other students pick on are more hesitant to answer questions. But for the most part a lot of the IEP students which seem to be a majority of males do not participate at all and are less likely to ask questions.

Writing

Yay another blog down! Well so far in my practicum I haven’t yet got my hands on some of the student’s writings. They are currently working on story/ heroic tales which are due Wednesday, so I am going to go in again to hopefully get a look at what they have been creatively working on and if what Mrs. D has been working on with them in class has actually work/ improved their writing skills. What they have been working on for the last couple of weeks which I am sure has been a lot longer is parts of a sentence and parts of speech, they are being tested on this tomorrow so maybe I will be able to look at their tests and see what the most common error that was made. Mrs. D told me on my first day that the students didn’t know the subject, verb, adjectives, est. so she was working with them to build their knowledge on these things, she said that if the students didn’t know these things how can she expect them to write proper sentence with proper word order. She is also having the students explain why the subject is the subject why it’s a predicate nominative and not a predicate adjective…. This has falls right into the section in class of sentence structure. I have a feeling that there writing isn’t going to be much different from their speech. But because my practicum day is on Monday which is their grammar day like I mentioned before I am going to go in on Wednesday so I can take a look at their writing and hopefully be able to finish this blog entry.

The first day of my practicum

The first day of my practicum, was by no means what I was expecting at all, which was a great thing! My practicum is taking place at South High School in which I will be in a Freshmen English class. The two classes that I am observing are pretty normal to what you would expect in a freshmen English class, but the second class of the day is somewhat different from the first class, even though they are both freshmen English classes the second class has a large number of IEP students so there is a ESE teacher also in the class room. I met with my teacher about 20 minutes prior to the start of class to go over the lesson plan for the day and if I had any questions for her, which was extremely nice of her to do. Of course I had plenty of questions as did she so twenty minutes went by pretty fast. I learned that there is no attendance policy, students can miss multiple days as long as it is excused by their parents, I also learned that any student can take an honors class; because they have no standards or requirements.

The lesson for the day was sentence structure, identifying the subject and verb in the sentence, identify the complement and the direct object. The teacher informed me in the beginning of class that her students simply did not know these steps/components/ rules in English so she had to stray off course to teach and try and get her students to understand and know this material before moving on. I was pretty shocked that this was what was being taught in class and that 95% of her students did not know these basic steps in grammar.

Close to the end of the class she allowed the students to start their homework, so that if they needed any help or had any questions she would be able to help them, during this time she allowed me to walk about the room and help students. She gave me strict instructions to not give the students the answers, but to try and help them work it out. This proved to be a difficult task because the students were expecting me to give them answers which I did not but they were getting frustrated with me, I did not let it get to me I just tried another approach to the question and hoped it would help them understand or figure out the correct answer on their own.

The class room itself is a smart class room, the teacher uses a smart board and there are multiple computers in the class room too. Because my practicum is on Monday and on this past Monday there was no school due to presidents day I arranged with my teacher an alternative time to come into the class room, so I will be at South tomorrow at seven, which is exciting because the school is on block schedule will be joining them for their literature part of English, which is something I am looking forward to and I will hopefully be able to look at some of their writing. Over all I enjoyed my first experience at South and I am looking forward to what this experience is going to bring me, I know I will be learning a lot!