I began this blog as a way to share my thoughts as an experienced teacher that's been thrown into an entirely new world. I've spent the majority of my 18 years in second or third grade, focusing on increasing reading fluency, stamina, and comprehension. Until 3 years ago...
On the last day of school, my principal called me up to her office to tell me that I would be teaching the Structured English Immersion class the following year. In Arizona, highly qualified teachers were previously required to have an SEI endorsement, which I do, so I should be able to handle this, right?
Wrong!
I made an assumption that it would be the same as teaching third grade, I'd just have to add more visual aids, give more think time, throw out a few sentence frames... some minor tweaks, but basically the same curriculum.
I know you're laughing at me right now, I'm laughing at me too.
I quickly discovered that my students needed so much more. And I was overwhelmed, like a first year teacher who doesn't even know the things she doesn't know- O-VER-WHELMED.
To begin with, I had students reading at every level from prekindergarten to beginning fourth grade. Actually, I shouldn't say reading, I should say decoding.
In the past, once a student had unlocked the key to decoding words, building vocabulary and comprehension was the next step. I wouldn't have called them easy steps, but my English speaking students often had loads of background knowledge to draw upon.
With my ELL students, I learned that their decoding skills were great, in fact many of my monolingual students could read 60-90 words per minute, but that meant zero for comprehension. My students read English the same way I read Spanish. I can decode, but there's no meaning behind the words.
I realized that building vocabulary was the most vital step to allowing my students to comprehend what they were decoding, and so I began my journey as an SEI teacher with my first challenge, mastering the teaching of new vocabulary.
In my next post, I'll share some of the research and strategies I've used to increase vocabulary acquisition with my ELLs.
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