Final Design: HS ESL Independent Vocabulary Study

For this second blog reflecting on the process of implementing the Independent Vocabulary Study Unit for my Foundations Communications students I have chosen to provide an overview of the final unit design in order to provide a context, a clarity, for my course five blogs.

As described in my first blog of course five and my final blog of course four, for my final coetail course project I chose to create an independent vocabulary study unit for my beginning ESL students in order to help students achieve or exceed their expected annual learning progress in vocabulary acquisition and to develop their technology and information literacy skills as appropriate to the proposed unit of study (See ISB K-12 ESL Speaking and Listening Outcomes, ESL and TAIL Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions from UbD plan linked at start of this blog). The unit is a fairly self-contained unit on our school's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), pantherNET. All the instructions to get students started, to understand the scope and sequence of the unit, and to guide them through the teaching and learning cycle for this unit are located on pantherNET. There is a one page Introduction / Overview (Instructions) / Main Resource Page attached to an Online Glossary students will create with the words they independently select to study from self-assessment of the their level of understanding of the high-frequency words found on The Brown Corpus. Unit resources are linked on this page (through Google docs) as well as found as attachments on the main entry page for our course. From the main page, it can be seen that the course utilizes in addition to the online collaborative glossary (which includes embedded comments for shared discussion of each glossary entry), an online forum where students can share their reflections and learnings, and a wiki to share and link students' words throughout the course of their vocabulary studies. The online work is supported and reinforced by in-class (teacher-student, peer-to-peer, and independent) work, discussion, practice, assessment and reflection.

This unit is designed to (1) bring vertical alignment and coverage to our HS ESL curricula (Foundations 8/9/10, and EAP 9, 10, 11 and 12)— to introduce, reinforce and refine our HS independent online vocabulary study units in these five courses—and to (2) pilot additional Technology and Information Literacy (TAIL) Standards embedded in the unit so that our students' efforts to increase their vocabulary, and develop their vocabulary learning skills and strategies along with their technology and information literacy skills are introduced and scaffolded with our youngest and least proficient English language learners.

To this end, I redefined, modified, augmented, or substituted learning experiences and activities in the unit to develop students' technology and information literacy skills as appropriate to the proposed unit of study. I embedded opportunities for online collaboration between teachers and students and peer to peer through a redefinition of glossary comments and the addition of a class vocabulary study forum. The online creation of a shared glossary of student-selected words selected from The Brown Corpus along with the online comments and forum will substantially expand learning opportunities and experiences for the students as the time for such creation, sharing, collaboration, feedback and discussion would be hard to fit into current class structure and curriculum. I also embedded additional use of visual literacy strategies with the addition of a Word Map Graphic Organizer (which replaces simple answers to questions using the words as the students first formative task using the words) as well as addressed issues of copyright and fair use guidelines with the Word Maps and Online Glossary Entries. The Word Map Graphic Organizers are submitted online so that proper citation through active links to images found on the Web can be assessed.

I have also, following upon (adapting) the work of Vygotsky, included additional teaching and language learning activities and scaffolding at the earlier stages of the teaching and learning cycle as he proposes is necessary for students to become independent language learners:

Stage (1) Building the Field—extending everyday understandings (of the meanings of the words)

Stage (2) Modeling/Deconstruction—developing understanding of the structure (parts) and uses (of the words)

Stage (3) and Joint Construction—(teacher-student and peer-peer construction of meaningful discourse using the word)

Stage (4) Independent Construction—(student construction of meaningful discourse using the word)

By again redefining, modifying, augmenting, and substituting various elements from the independent vocabulary study of the older, more proficient ESL students, I have brought the HS ESL Independent Vocabulary Study Unit within the zone of proximal development for the Foundations students. Notably, I have provided more opportunities for modeling, sharing, feedback, collaboration, discussion (more formative learning experiences) before the final summative assessment. Specifically, I chose to replace the AWL with The Brown Corpus as the source from which students (upon self-assessment of their understanding of the words) draw words for their independent vocabulary studies. I have provided more model questions and answers using the students' chosen words. With the Word Map Graphic Organizer, students are asked to deconstruct the words more fully before attempting to use the words. And through increased opportunities for teacher-student and peer-peer collaboration through the online glossary, comments, forum and in class opportunities as outlined above, there are more opportunities for joint construction before students' independent constructions and understandings of the words are assessed.

All of these changes, both those related to technology and information literacy as well as research-based best practice for English language learning, have enlarged the scope and sequence of the unit as currently taught in the other ESL classes both in terms of the addition of TAIL Standards and the necessary scaffolding for rank beginners new to the English language. At the end of the year, I hope to share my work at embedding TAIL Standards into the HS ESL independent vocabulary study unit for my Foundation students with the EAP 9, 10, 11, and 12 teachers in hopes of embedding the same or similar standards in their own course-specific independent vocabulary study units.

Reflection on Course 4 Final Project

For my course 4 final project I chose to create an independent vocabulary study unit and assessment based around our ISB K12 ESL standards that incorporate the ISB TAIL (Technology and Information Literacy) standards. I had originally wanted to incorporate the ISB TAIL standards into our EAP 10 course unit on comparative writing and had discussed and begun to articulate how such a unit would look with Dennis Harter and Jeff Utecht (our two instructors for course 4) but was unable to then convince my EAP 10 team my 'technologically enhanced' vision for the curricular unit would sufficiently enhance student leaning to offset the extra time, effort and learning (and possible failure as we would be dealing with technology) on the part of the students and teachers in order to go forward with this unit plan.

I thus decided that I would lead by example and chose to integrate the ISB TAIL standards into a course in which I am a singleton teacher as there would then be no other teachers who not having taken this course need to be convinced it's our responsibility as educators to provide a 21st Century classroom where students can learn the skills, understandings and attitudes they need to be successful in the today's wired world. The class I chose is my Foundations Communications Class. The class is for 'near rank' beginners and has just been extended from a semester to year-long course, so as of yet there is no 'set' curriculum or curricular time line to work around so that a unit can be created from scratch integrating the K-12 ESL and TAIL standards. I chose to develop a vocabulary unit for the Foundations Communication class as the HS ESL department for the past two years has made vocabulary acquisition our HS ESL organization goal. Our department goal has been to improve and challenge student learning so that each student will achieve or exceed his or her expected annual learning progress in vocabulary acquisition. Furthermore, the team had already agreed to incorporate technology tools into our goal work by setting up a wiki website for students and teachers to collaborate on and demonstrate student learning as they work toward building a personal glossary of newly acquired words. This goal work was being done in grades 9-12 with all EAP (English for Academic Purposes) students but not with the Foundations students. It thus seemed ideal to choose to bring this goal work to the Foundations students while developing a brand new Foundations vocabulary unit incorporating K-12 ESL standards and TAIL standards that could serve as a model for the grade 9-12 EAP classes vocabulary units.

An initial sketch of this unit can be found on our course wiki.