Jigsaw Reading-Develop Writing Skills

Writing Process and Techniques  for Emergent Bilingual Students

Sabrina, Mavis, Maria Elisa, Lorna, and Tu

The Writing Process for ENL’s

• Prompts vs audience or dialogical responses.  

• Dialogical, collaborative, discussing with others 

• Families, homes, and communities are an asset to writing 

• Spelling and language acceptance = better writing 

• Students speaking in home language in class  =  better writing 

• Let students write in their own language (translanguage writing)   

• Writing is a process... think long term 

• Sometimes need explicit Instruction 

Translanguaging Writing Instructions

•  Writing is writing regardless of

  the language 

•  Give students opportunities to write

  complex text by giving them choices 

•  Read, take notes, conferencing and

  share and translate to produce final

  produce

Multiple Choice

Are families, homes, and communities assets to writing?

• Yes

• Sometimes

• No

Open Ended

A key instruction for translanguaging writing: writing is writing regardless of the ____________.

Writing Environment

Physical Environment

Create an environment that supports students 

• Have print around the classrooms (Word wall, anchor charts...)

Displaying students' works in the classroom. 

• The classroom environment offers examples of writing that exist in the real world (e.g., include their communities in their native language)

Routines and Expectations

​Routine only comes into being through repetition, and the best way to ensure that you repeatedly apply a system is by writing it in your lesson plan.

Make your schedule predictable and visible for students

• Develop Your Lesson Plans

• Start from the Ground Up

• Motivate Your Students

• Implement Practice

• Encourage Them to Write What They Know

• Let Them Collaborate

• Make the lesson fun

Poll

Choose the top 3 important things to you as a writing teacher (even if you are not).

• Develop your lesson plans

• Motivate your students

• Implement practice

• Let your students collaborate

• Make the lesson fun

Drama

• Drama can be a powerful multimodal technique for supporting students reading and writing, but especially that of emergent bilingual students in all grades. Through it, students can give life to stories and explore details in it

• Drama enhances children’s comprehension of texts, and language development, helps them summarize text orally and in writing, build vocabulary and oral language. It allows them to use their entire linguistic repertoire.

• Teachers can be involved on it by taking the role of actor, director, audience member, guide, and so forth.

• While reading aloud, the teacher can stop to ask emergent bilinguals to act out how a character feels. This is an opportunity to explore words and nuncaes in their meanings.

• The teacher can use drama as a teachable moment to provide translations of words in the languages the child speaks, write them on chart paper, and help them explore their meanings.

• Students could also act their own writings. 
  

Drawing

• Teachers can teach students to look at the drawings in books in order to help them become readers of illustrations and use ideas from others to enrich their own writing. 

• Drawings can:

  • Serve the purpose to understand the writing process. 

  • Generate ideas for writing

  • Add details to writing 

  • Intersect with writing when writing fiction by creating an mental image prior to writing about it. 

  • Enhance writing longer informational texts

Freewriting

• “The goal of free writing is the process, not the product.” The writer can change the topic when writing if he/she doesn’t have any more ideas. For emergent bilinguals, freewriting provides an opportunity to write using their entire linguistic repertoire without adhering to one language or another. 

• Freewriting can serve as a warm-up to writing. It can support the development of emergent bilingual student’s critical thinking abilities because it helps them feel comfortable with writing, as well to discover new possibilities or ideas for writing

Double Entry Journals

• Through them, students can make connections between the content in the text and their own lived experiences. 

• This informal writing tool can be used over time as students gather information and move to more formal writing (essay, project report, etc). 

• Students divide a paper into two columns. On the left-hand side, they write a quotation from the text they are reading with appropriate references. In the right-hand column, the student writes their personal responses to the quote. They can include agreements, disagreements, confusion, connection to their life, or questions for the author.

Personal Correspondence:
Letters, Emails, Texts, Notes, Diaries, and Journals

• Writing correspondence is ideal for emergent bilingual students because the writer selects the language in which it is composed by keeping in mind the audience. What makes the process of writing a letter or an email special is that it is personal. Your emergent bilingual students can write:

  • Personal correspondence to parents, friends, visitors, teachers, or a tour guide from a field trip. 

  • Letters or emails to an author or illustrator 

  • A letter from the perspective of a historical figure or a letter written to the historical figure

  • Thank you cards

  • A letter from the child to the parents about the child’s work, for when the parents come to parent-teacher conferences 

  • Letters or emails to a pen pal

  • Notes to classmates 

  • Diary or journal entries 

  • Letters to a character or letters from the character’s point of view as a way to enter the world of the story

Multiple Choice

Which writing technique makes connections between the content and students' lived experiences?

• Drama

• Freewriting

• Drawing

• Double Entry Journal

Multiple Choice

Drama engages students at what level?

• Single

• Double

• Multiple

Developing Writing Skills

SCRATCH is an App that allows young people to create digital stories, games, and animations.

Creative Tools and Techniques

• Emergent bilinguals are often left out of Computer Science instruction

• Coding that is linked to literacy is necessary for the 21st-century

• Emergent bilinguals can use linguistics to talk about coding

• SCRATCH is available in more than 50 languages

SCRATCH CODING APP

Instead of traditional paper and pencil tools, create a lesson that integrates oral language, drama, and drawing.

• Use a mentor text that has translanguaging

• Select a scene from the story

  • Invite students to dramatize the scene

• Prepare questions that will help students add key details to the scene

• Help students see how authors paint pictures with their words.

• Students may draw the details in a scene.

Drama and Drawing in a Mini-Lesson

Using Mentor Text: Exemplars

Have you ever heard the saying, "Writers are readers, and readers are writers"?

• Writers draw inspiration from other authors' craft... we learn without knowing we are learning.

• Choose books that mirror the linguistic and cultural diversity of your students. (e.g., Mango, Abuela, and Me or Drawn Together)

Questions you may ask:

• What do you notice the author is doing with language?

• Do all the characters speak the same language? Why is the author doing this?

Lifting a Line

Wall Talk

Visual Essay

(A picture is worth a thousand words)

Recommendation is to use text that has translanguaging. (Poem; short story; chapter book, etc)

This is described as an “Out-of-your-seat” interactive silent activity.

Typically a visual essay should
comprise of 10 to 12 images with
500 to 700 words.

Text Graffiti

Book Review

Students can ask questions, draw images, use symbols.
Text should be provided in English as well as the home
language of the students.

Rather than write a summary, students can
write a book review.
This can also be done as a video book review.

Match

Match the Following Writing Strategies

Lifting a Line

Wall Talk

Visual Essay

Text Graffiti

Book Review

• Lifting a Line

• Wall Talk

• Visual Essay

• Text Graffiti

• Book Review

Open Ended

Look at the second line. The student wrote a sentence in Korean and then pointed to the animal and the grass. Give your best guess on the meaning of the sentence.

Open Ended

In the last sentence, “我喜欢” means “I like…”

What question would you like to ask in order to gain insight into Zoe’s life?