challenges of using identity texts in the classroom challenges of using identity texts in the classroom

Check out this Twitter moment with a lot of resources. The activities in this collection break new ground in being designed to enable teachers to constantly draw on and make use of students . For those who may not have encountered families, cultures, identities, or abilities like theirs in literature, mirror texts do more than aid in engagement. The information can quickly become out of date. The best reader's theater scripts include . Like students themselves, these dynamics may change . Our classroom library bookshelves and mentor texts should feel intentional, purposeful, and transforming; to that end, many educators and administrators are eager to infuse more culturally responsive, multicultural, and inclusive stories into the classroom. Having said that, I can totally understand the problems people have with textbook readings as they usually exist and are usually used, and the appeal that authentic materials can have. The same is true of punning newspaper headlines. Strohmeyer, B., & McGrail, L. (1988). (2011). Brief description . Assuming there are some levels of students so high that any grading would make a text too easy (and even then it must be possible to rewrite it so that there is more useful or even more challenging language in it), if you did take a text written for native speakers and try to match it by language level to a selection of articles from EFL language textbooks you would almost always end up with it in Proficiency (i.e. This is true in both background experience and interests and, more importantly, in identify-affirming texts. (TLDR: theres no opposing perspective to mass genocide.). very Advanced) level. You can also find examples of different types of identity texts (along with a range of other resources) on the authors. Read Emily's full blog on diverse texts in Mirror, Mirror, on the Shelf. new educational tools, technology integration presents significant challenges to educators at each level of school systems. When students are given a purpose for their reading, they are able to better comprehend and make meaning of the ideas in the text. The resulting texts were a beautiful tribute to the linguistic diversity in the classroom, one that validated students linguistic identities and supported all students in learning more about plants and their life cycles (see Figure 5 for pages from, As I hope is evident from these examples, identity texts can be a meaningful way to validate minoritized language speakers by inviting students to engage in authorship to bring their home languages into the classroom. Mirrors are texts that reflect students lived experience. 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG. Multilingual education in practice: Using diversity as a resource, . Prasad found that the process of translating their descriptive sentences helped establish bonds among group members and fostered an appreciation of one anothers languages. The two surest ways of checking that most of the grammar is of the right level are using graded texts and rewriting authentic texts. Needless to say, the last thing that will motivate an Intermediate student is to be told how much there still is to learn! RAFT is a writing strategy that helps students understand their role as a writer and how to effectively communicate their ideas and mission clearly so that the reader can easily understand everything written. The 3 main challenges teachers face in today's classroom . . Prasad, G. (2015). (2003). adult . To learn about our use of cookies and how you can manage your cookie settings, please see our Cookie Policy. Getting to know students as individuals continues to be the most important way to connect them with identity-affirming texts. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Identity texts: The collaborative creation of power in multilingual schools. In my university classes, I have conducted this same identity text exercise with in-service and pre-service teachers and am always amazed by both the rich linguistic diversity of my students and the ways that such a simple activity helps students to encounter one another in new ways. halfway through the Intermediate level textbook if they are halfway through the Pre-Intermediate level) and guessable from context. This does not necessarily mean that all the grammar has to be exactly the same as they have already covered in their books, as grammar is easier to understand than produce and seeing it in context for some time before they tackle it in class will make it easier for them to pick up. journal entries. By examining the advantages and disadvantages of using authentic texts in the classroom, in both practical and pedagogical terms, I hope I will be able to give some hints on how to bring the advantages into classes and avoid the disadvantages with both authentic and graded texts, and to give a balanced view for those who are still undecided on when, how and how much to use authentic texts in their own classroom. De Gruyter. 2) Have you experienced cultural dissonance as part of your professional life? A recent review conducted by the Cooperative Childrens Book Center examining diversity in childrens books found that, of the 3,134 childrens books published in 2018, a full 50% of books featured characters who were white. As just one example, she points to the Mississippi Department of Education, which includes this as one of their priority indicators on its curriculum rubric: Anchor texts provide a balanced and accurate portrayal of various demographic and personal characteristics, such as gender, race/ethnicity, identity, geographic location, cultural norms, socioeconomic status, and intellectual and physical abilities.. In what follows, I provide some examples of identity texts from my work and that of Gail Prasad, an Assistant Professor at York University who first introduced me to identity texts. The practitioner usually observes the child for 20 minutes to half an hour, so as much information as possible can be recorded. In order to make the most of a good text you have found by chance without that making it more difficult to prepare than just trawling through textbooks, there are several timesaving tips you can use. Language teacher identity has been at the forefront of pedagogical research in recent years; this has become particularly important due to the demographic changes seen throughout the world since 2015; since then, there have been significant changes in the cultural landscape of schools in general and language teaching in particular, which presents unique challenges for teachers in their process . After the text were presented, many students reflected that it was the first time they had ever heard peers speak their home languages, despite having known each other for years. In our research and teaching, both Gail and I have explored the use of identity texts with students from minoritized. Reader's theater is a strategy for developing reading fluency. As a child, I recall being particularly enthralled by books with strong (white) female leads, series like. They assert that: One thing the teacher can do is choose a story or sequence of stories that is more likely to have useful language in it. This is easiest with ESP students who can read stories on their area, and this approach is very common in Business English and ESP teaching. These skills can then later be transferred back to the readings they do in their normal textbook. Hoggett J, Redford P, Toher D, White P (2014) Challenge . Each class began the project by researching their plant and then, as a class, jointly constructed a text in English based on what they had learned. Being able to accurately assess each student can be difficult, as accommodations that are allowed during testing can sometimes be of limited . What can be done to remedy this lack of diversity in texts? Building students language awareness and literacy engagement through the creation of collaborative multilingual identity texts 2.0. Effective literacy instruction must rely on the science of reading and best practices in balanced literacy. Books are mirrors, she explains, when they reflect our identities and experiences, containing characters who look like us, talk like us, eat like us, celebrate like us, and dream like us. After each student had individually drafted sensory sentences to describe Toronto, the group worked together to translate all of the sentences into the languages spoken collectively by the group (see Figure 3). Results indicated that using identity texts increased self-awareness, built trust, enhanced belonging, and revealed common humanity, thus creating opportunities to develop a successful professional identity in a multiethnic milieu. And sliding glass doors offer students a chance to change their own behavior or perspectives around other people and experiences based on what theyve learned through reading. Prasad, G., & Lory, M. P. (2019). The latest e-books providing you with interactive classroom activities. Additionally, RAFT helps students focus on the audience they . Another technique is to underline the words that are probably new to them that you actually think are useful, so that when they get busy with their dictionaries in class or at home you know they will be somewhat guided in what they learn. of books as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. As you can see from that example, the fact that vocabulary is often repeated and easy to learn does not necessarily make it useful for anything other than talking about the news, but there are ways of making that vocabulary more interesting and spreading the effect to students who would gain more from graded reading. A broader understanding of how student demographics have changed over the last 50 years can provide more context. [F]inding texts that truly connect with all students can involve a fight for equity that pushes back against deeply entrenched notions of what is, and is not, a worthwhile text for teaching and assessing literacy skills. The narrative observation may be planned in advance to ensure that every child in the nursery is observed in . Prasad found that the process of translating their descriptive sentences helped establish bonds among group members and fostered an appreciation of one anothers languages. So, unless you are prepared to rewrite the text yourself there is usually no solution but to keep looking till you find the length you are looking for, Written by Alex Case for UsingEnglish.com, Featured For other people, however, the struggle of dealing with authentic texts can just convince them that reading in English will never be worth the effort. After students finished creating their books, I asked them to read the texts aloudin all of their languages. By integrating student agency into passage selection during literacy assessment, the goal is to give students more choice in the testing process, specifically regarding the types and content of text they see. More than 30 years ago, a study by Donna R. Recht and Lauren Leslie showedthrough a reading experiment that involved interpreting baseball playsthat students background knowledge could have a huge impact on their reading comprehension. . 1. making up the bottom 23%. ISBN-13 9781879965027. Mastering these conversations is necessary, it is often said, because shifting student demographics in higher education, including the increased enrollment of historically underrepresented students, require faculty . Abel, Keiran & Exley, Beryl (2008) Using Halliday's functional grammar to examine early years worded mathematics texts. Identity charts are a graphic tool that can help students consider the many factors that shape who we are as individuals and as communities. Minnesota State University-Mankato. Beyond the mirror towards a plurilingual prism: Exploring the creation of plurilingual identity texts in English and French classrooms in Toronto and Montpellier. In response, identity texts seek to challenge oppressive power relations by reframing the exclusive use of the dominant societal language in classrooms and by cultivating self-affirming spaces for minoritized students. The growing number of international students studying at Canadian universities has exacerbated the need to address identity, cultural aspects of teaching, and the commonalities of different cultures through a transcultural lens. This could be a good time for students to practice their guessing meaning from context skills, but that is only usually possible if they understand over 90% of the language around that word. If appropriate to the text, look at the connotation of words which the author has chosen. Cole, M. (1996). This is particular important with students stuck on the Intermediate plateau. Following a story is also not common on the websites that offer free simplified texts such as news stories. Diversity in Childrens Books (2018). This is not the case in most authentic texts, where the skill of a writer is often to make their use of language personal and therefore unrepresentative of how other people use English. Ways of avoiding this include using the English-language press of the country the students are from; using texts about something you know one or more students are interested in and knowledgeable about such as one of their hobbies; and using websites, newspapers and magazines that have an international readership. Theres a lot policymakers can do to support schools during COVID-19. Bishop argues that it is often the act of mirroring our lived experiences that gives books their deepest power. Animals received the next largest representation (27%), with characters of color (African Americans, Asian Pacific Islanders, Latinx, American Indians, etc.) For example, students at one of the Canadian schools worked in small groups to create identity texts entitled Our Toronto, using the sensory prompts My Toronto looks like / sounds like / smells like / feels like / tastes like to describe their experiences of the city. The vocabulary is not graded. We would like to thank all workshop participants for their commitment and interest in issues of identity, culture, and social justice. These advantages are dealt with in the next point. Intercultural Education, 26(6), 497514. One group wrote their text in English and Korean to describe the typical sights and sounds of the campus, from the blustery winter days to the energetic marching band. We thank all participants for their thoughtful participation in the Identity Text Workshops and for sharing their identity texts. Another possibility is just to use a short passage from an authentic text that only has the right kinds of grammar in it. It is use to promote and discuss about students' cultural backgrounds. In the same way, a graded text is rewritten not just to be simpler but also so that the language is the kind of generally used thing that students need in order to be able to communicate in the greatest number of typical situations, i.e. Aside from the common ownership of publications like these and the ELT publishers, there must still be perceived advantages to the use of authentic materials at all levels. As with many of the activities with authentic texts, there is no particular evidence that conscious examination of factors like this particularly helps the reading comprehension and language production of even higher level learners, and even less that it can be useful with lower level learners and students who read only in order to pick up and revise vocabulary and grammar that can help them speak better. As with communication, though, there are advantages to be had from occasionally giving students a more difficult text to challenge themselves and learn how to cope with. There are lots of interesting things you can do with a copy of the same story from a tabloid newspaper and a more serious publication, and people who have just got off their MAs in Linguistics almost all make an attempt to do so. Below, they provide perspective and tips for helping us reach all students with identity-affirming texts in the classroom. One solution with authentic texts is to use only an extract, but this can make understanding it even more difficult unless you can find some way of explaining very clearly what comes before or after the part you give them. Unfortunately, for many students, finding books that serve as mirrors can be a difficult task. In my university classes, I have conducted this same identity text exercise with in-service and pre-service teachers and am always amazed by both the rich linguistic diversity of my students and the ways that such a simple activity helps students to encounter one another in new ways. In the essay "Mother Tongue," Amy Tan explains that she "began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with.". I invite teachers to consider how they might integrate an identity text project into their own classrooms, to engage students in becoming authors of their own experiences in ways that represent their full linguistic selves. The easiest is to collect them in a similar way to that suggested above for authentic texts - putting any particularly interesting and/ or useful texts that you find when working your way through a textbook or exam practice book into files marked by ESP area, grammar point, length, country it is about etc. Chinese undergraduate students face challenges in adapting to American classroom practices and expectations but draw on personal, social, institutional and technological resources to respond to these challenges, according to articles presented by Tang T. Heng, a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University, at last . Following the civil rights and women's rights movements, a call for multicultural education in the 1970s and '80s drove schools to incorporate texts that would challenge stereotypes about . Heather Camp. It is also good, however, to try and look at it from their point of view. As a 2017 paper from the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment put it, for too long theres been an assumption at play within the field of assessment that while there are multiple ways for students to learn, students need to demonstrate learning in specific ways for it to count. Just as classroom readings continue to adapt to engage students more effectively, assessment methodologies should adapt to ensure that students are given the chance to demonstrate proficiency in the most accurate and effective way. In particular, it focuses on student work on multimodal identity texts during two academic semesters from 173 beginning and 205 intermediate students. Unfortunately, finding an interesting text is only the first stage, and possibly not the most difficult or important one. [Update: Gov. Each class began the project by researching their plant and then, as a class, jointly constructed a text in English based on what they had learned. There are some differences between communication and reading, though, as well as some possible false assumptions with both. The advantages of using authentic texts in the language learning classroom, Authentic texts can be quick and easy to find, Authentic texts can be up to date and topical, Its what students will have to cope with eventually, There is more of it around that students can help themselves to/ It is easier for students to find, There is more stuff for teachers to choose from, You can compare several versions of the same story, Students can follow a story and recycle the vocab, They might know the story already, making comprehension and guessing vocabulary much easier, The disadvantages of using authentic texts in the language learning classroom, The grading of the various parts of the text might be different, The information can quickly become out of date, The difficulty can put people off reading, The idiomatic language might quickly become out of date, If they want to learn every word in a text, the reading stage can go on forever and cover loads of useless language, Authentic texts are usually too high level, There might be language and cultural references that even native speakers from other countries, areas or age groups would not understand, It might include language that isnt in a dictionary, How to teach advantages and disadvantages- looking at both sides, The advantages and disadvantages of peer observations, The advantages and disadvantages of blind observations, The advantages and disadvantages of eliciting in the EFL classroom, Setting up a TEFL certificate course- Advantages & Disadvantages, Useful classroom language for teachers when using texts, Preparing for your first Business or ESP class, Preparing to teach your first EFL exam class, Teaching English Using Games & Activities. 200 Visitation Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556 USA You can help them love it. The grading of grammar in a text is usually more difficult to spot and easier to forget about than the grading of vocabulary, but in a graded reader the writers are even more careful about the grammar than the vocabulary. student demographics have changed over the last 50 years, study by Donna R. Recht and Lauren Leslie, mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, 2017 paper from the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, teaching science through a sociohistorical, narrative lens, Debate has also flared over whether to prohibit the teaching of critical race theory in K12 schools. The power to build inclusivity for LGBTQ+ students is not in the hands of teachers alone. Working closely with the kindergarten and first grade teachers, we brainstormed how the classes might create multilingual books that addressed grade-level science standards and represented students full linguistic identities. These influences are: (1) the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity of urban educationsystems as a result of greater population mobility . creation of multimodal identity texts is obviously a cognitive and lin-guistic process but it is also a sociological process that potentially enables students and their teachers to challenge coercive relations of power that devalue student identities; the identity text acts as a vehicle whereby students can repudiate negative stereotypes and . As with the authentic texts, though, you will need to make the lesson manageable and focused on the right skills, which will probably mean writing totally different tasks to the ones designed for higher level learners that are in the textbook. The assumptions are the same in both cases that they will have to do it eventually so they may as learn how to cope with it as soon as possible, that real language and real communication are best, and that you learn most by doing. Keep me logged in. Many of these things are easier with graded texts but all are possible with authentic texts too. Making meaning and expressing ideas through texts is an important learning focus because of the crucial role that educators play to bring the texts to life. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy , 31 (3), pp. You can also make the easiest authentic texts accessible to your lower level students by focusing your lessons on the language they need to one particular source such as street signs (included in the PET and KET exams). Positive Academic Identities. Trentham Books. As a child, I recall being particularly enthralled by books with strong (white) female leads, series like The Baby-sitters Club and Nancy Drew, that enabled me to see myself in the characters and to imagine the person I might become. The use of Mother Tongue facilitates in their learning since not all students can understand English most of the time. The resulting texts were a beautiful tribute to the linguistic diversity in the classroom, one that validated students linguistic identities and supported all students in learning more about plants and their life cycles (see Figure 5 for pages from All About Oak Trees; you can read more about the project here). You can also ask them to find similar examples for the next lesson. Bishop argues that it is often the act of mirroring our lived experiences that gives books their deepest power.