Teaching Issues
In second grade, my students are beginning to learn about plural endings. They breezed through the concept of nouns with no problem. However, plural nouns are giving them major problems. After interviewing my third grade student last week, I knew that plurals gave all ESL students difficulty. My student had stated that he found reading and writing in English easy and grammar was the hardest -- especially plurals! Teaching grammar to ESL students seems to be a challenge. With students not using and writing in English at home, they do not have the prior knowledge of using plurals and their rules. Therefore, they seemed to struggle with that mini-lesson this week.The mini-lesson began with a quick "I Have, Who Has?" game with plurals. I wanted to be able to see what my student's prior knowledge with plurals were. The students did well with the activity, however, I was afraid they didn't truly understand the rules. With this in mind, I thought of a way for students to visually see the rules and have something to refer back to if they needed it, so we created a tree map focusing only on adding -s, -es, and -ies to make words plural. Next, they each had a word sort bag with words and had to put them under which ending would correctly make it a plural. They worked in pairs with guidance from me. The students struggled and would not refer back to their tree map. However, once they began to work together and remembered their tree map, they all did just fine. At the end I wanted to test their knowledge on the subject without embarrassing any of the students, so we took out our white boards and practiced. I would write simple words on the board and have the students write the plural form. The students consistently wanted to just add "-s" to everything. We struggled and will definitely revisit the concept more this week.
After the lesson not going so well this week, I am going to create bookmarks for the students to keep with them as a reminder to help with the rules. Unfortunately, plurals is one of the harder parts of grammar for students to remember. Therefore, I think my students would benefit from having a constant reminder. I also think it will be important to provide my students with a number of opportunities to be exposed to the rules so they become automatic.
Second Language Acquisition/Ethnographic Perspective
With my students, allowing them to explore with a partner seemed to work well in promoting second language acquisition. They had to discuss the words and their endings to figure out which rule applied. They also had to defend their answer and revisit the concept if they disagreed. It helped them think about the rules and concept more in-depth. This particular group seems to be able to work best in a group or partnered setting. They are my lower group and sometimes are overlooked because they go with the answer others give. By having them have to work with just one partner and defend their answers, they did very well. They were able to build confidence in themselves by having to defend their answer.
In this group, I have 1 Arabic student, 2 Sudanese students, and 4 Hispanic children. With this group being so diverse, the issue of integrating culture and linguistic diversity emerges. Each student had a different level of understanding of plurals and their rules. Therefore, we worked on hearing just the "s" sound on words like "balls" and the "e" sound when adding "-es" to words like "churches". To better meet the needs of these second language learners, I think it would be good to know the rules of plurals in each student's language (if their are any) or what their knowledge is about plurals in English. Therefore, you can tap into their prior knowledge of plurals and better assist them. Culture specific items were not incorporated into this lesson because it was a brand new concept that we took the time to develop the skill.
