Digital Bookmaking: Bringing Students' Stories to Life

How do you help students who have never learned how to read and write in their first language make the connection between written text and spoken language? I think this has to be one of the biggest challenges instructors working with beginner-level adult refugee students face. Recently, I've been trying out something called the Language Experience Approach, or LEA for short, and I've had some encouraging results.

 LEA begins with a group activity or experience, such as a class field trip to a nearby neighborhood location or a cooking lesson. The instructor takes pictures during the activity, and with the help of the pictures, students come up with a story about the experience they've just shared. The students take turns adding to the story to tell what happened, while the instructor writes down what they say, word for word. The class can then spend the next few classes using the words in the story in different activities to practice skills like spelling, phonics, pronunciation, sight words and sentence formation. What works well about this approach is that you are basing your instruction in language students are already familiar with as well as connecting this language to a real life experience. To get a clearer idea of what LEA looks like, check out this video.

One of the LEA stories the students in my classroom have written is about a field trip we took this summer on the Buffalo Garden Walk. Most of my students are very interested in gardening, and several have their own garden plots in the summer, or at least grow a few vegetables in containers in their back yards. I thought it would be interesting for them to see some of the other gardens in their community as well to have the chance to meet and practice using English with some of their American neighbors. During the trip we took pictures, and afterwards my students created a story made up of sentences they told about all of the pictures. Even my most shy student was able to contribute a sentence, and therefore have an important role in the story writing. As students were telling the story, I wrote it out on a large piece of chart paper, and had the students who were able to copy it out in their notebooks (I typed up a copy for students who weren't able to do this). This story became the basis of our sight word practice, word study, and phonics instruction over the next few class sessions.

Now here's where digital bookmaking comes in. LEA is great because it helps students make a connection between spoken language that they can understand and written language that they can't yet read. This happens first of all when pre-literate students hear one of their classmates saying a phrase and watch the instructor writing the phrase down. It should also happen during the various follow-up activities that are based on the vocabulary and sentences in the story. A digital bookmaking tool like Bookr or Bubblr can further reinforce the connection between written text, spoken language, and meaning. 

Depending on the technology available in the classroom as well as students' familiarity and level of comfort with using it, the instructor can either create on her own, or have students help her create a digital flipbook that juxtaposes the pictures from the trip with the sentences the students have generated for each of them. For example, the instructor might add an image to the book and have a student volunteer to tell her the sentence that goes with that image, or conversely, type and read a sentence and have a student pick out the image that goes along with it. This gives the students another opportunity to hear each of the sentences being read while also seeing them in writing.

Another variation on this, which comes closer to digital storytelling, might be to use a tool like imovie to create a slideshow that includes images, audio and text, allowing students to hear the story being read while seeing the corresponding pictures and sentences that go with each sentence. I experimented with both of these tools to see how they would work with the LEA story my students wrote. Here's what I came up with!

In addition to helping reinforce the connection between spoken and written language, another objective of using a digital bookmaking tool with the Language Experience Approach might be to build students' self-confidence as writers. How empowering for students who have never had the chance to learn how to read and write in their first language to see their own words published in a book, even if it's just a digital book, for now.

Confessions of a Microblogging Skeptic...

I admit, I was skeptical. Although I’ve heard a lot of people talking about using twitter, I’ve never had any desire to get one of my own. Twitter has always struck me as something that had the potential of taking up a lot of time while offering little substance in return. So it was a bit begrudgingly that I created my twitter account for this class. After all, I wondered, how much useful content can really be conveyed in tweets of 140 characters or less? 

Apparently a lot. Perhaps I just got lucky, but over the last week I’ve spent following a dozen educational microbloggers, I’ve come across a LOT of useful information – blog posts about classroom strategies, links to articles and videos about teaching , a webchat on working with ELLs, to just name a few. Yes, not everything that’s tweeted is relevant to the context in which I teach (a lot is not) but it only takes a few moments to glance through the unhelpful tweets to find ones that point to exactly the kind of resources I’m looking for. 

 

Not only can twitter be used for the purposes of personal professional development, educators are coming up with new ways to creatively use it with their students and in the classroom. In 28 Creative Ways Teachers are Using Twitter the authors suggest using twitter to make announcements, have students follow conferences, and keep a class discussion going even outside the walls of the classroom to just name three possible uses. 

One interesting video called Leveraging Twitter in Large Lecture Classes to Increase Participation describes how a tech tool like twitter can be especially useful with large class sizes in which there is often not enough time during class for every student to contribute something to the discussion in the traditional sense, and in which many students do not feel comfortable speaking out in front of the whole class. While I'm not sure my concerns about using twitter with younger students outweigh the benefits, I could see twitter being used effectively as a discussion boosting tool in the large classes in which so many college freshman find themselves.

Fraud Prevention in the ESL Classroom

What do promises of lowered utility bills, mailings about life insurance, and phone calls requesting personal information all have in common? Not sure? All are examples of potential fraud or scams teachers and service providers working with refugee adults should be aware of and know how to warn their students against.

Although it is from several months ago, Heidi's post entitled Fraud Prevention Month on the ESL Literacy Network Blog brought to mind a number of situations the volunteers I supervise have encountered while teaching English to refugee adults in their homes. One volunteer told me how the family in whose home she was teaching English received seven phone calls from someone claiming to be calling on behalf of an insurance company and requesting their personal information over the course of single one and a half hour class. Another volunteer recently encountered a situation in which a man came to the door of the house she was teaching in and asked the family if he could see their gas and electric bill. He was very pushy about the whole thing and after the volunteer finally convinced him to leave, all of the students in the group expressed great relief. We later found out he was most likely a door-to-door salesman for an "alternative" energy company that promises low rates and then locks individuals into expensive multi-year contacts with high cancellation fees.

Teachers and service providers working with refugee adults have an important role to play in helping them adjust to and navigate life in the United States. An important part of this is teaching them how to avoid falling prey to these and other examples of fraud. Heidi's post includes a link to a list of topics instructors might cover in an ESL unit on avoiding fraud, as well as a number of other online fraud prevention resources. One of the most interesting of these is a website called Snopes.com which includes all kinds of fascinating information you might want to know about urban legends, frauds, scams, myths, and all other kinds of misinformation.

Inspired by this post, I decided to come up with my own list of simple tips for ESL teachers and other service providers who would like to help their adult refugee students avoid becoming victims of fraud.

 Tip #1: Teach your students to never sign anything unless they understand exactly what it says. This also means that as service providers we must set the precedent of not asking our clients to sign something without explaining what it is and why we are asking them to sign it, even if it's less convenient to do these things. 

Tip #2: Teach your students when it's appropriate to give out personal information and who it's appropriate to give this information out to. Follow up a unit on giving personal information with a discussion of whether it's "ok" or "not ok" to share each of these pieces of information with individuals like their doctor, their case worker, their neighbor, somebody on the phone, someone they just met, etc.



Tip #3: Teach your students that it's okay to say "no." Make sure your students know that it's always safer to say no if they're not sure whether or not they should say yes to an offer or if they don't understand exactly what they would be saying yes to. Teach and have your students practice saying phrases like "No thank you," "Sorry, I'm not interested," or "Sorry, I don't understand" that can allow them to still be polite while declining the offer.

Tip #4: Give students opportunities to practice saying "no" to sketchy offers and situations. Have students role play situations of how they would respond when someone comes to the door or calls on the phone about something that may be a scam.


 
Going back to the story I shared earlier about the utility salesman who came to English class, here's what the volunteer teaching the class did. Recognizing the importance of teaching her  students how to stand up for themselves in this situation and avoid being taken advantage of, she decided to follow up on this incident by teaching her students the phrase, "Please go away or I'll call the police/911." She wrote this phrase out on card stock for each of her pre-literate learners and role played a situation in which the utility salesman came to the door and students held up the sign with this message in the window instead of opening the door. The students felt empowered knowing they no longer had to feel like they were at the mercy of this unwanted (and in their eyes threatening) solicitor.