Ch. 8: English Language Learners in the Classroom

         Unfortunately, I really didn’t feel like this chapter pertained to me very much at all. The format of the whole thing threw me off (it was kind of corny!) with the interviews and people responding to each other like it had been rehearsed, and just the fact that they spent half of the chapter talking about the differences between English and other languages like Spanish and Chinese. I feel like this doesn’t have very much to do with my science classes, simply because the students will almost have to know English in order to participate. Even then, the students are practically learning a whole new language when they begin to learn the terminology of Science. I felt like I couldn’t use about half of this chapter, though I could certainly relate to it because of my experience in learning Spanish in high school, as well as in learning science terms.

            One of the points that was brought up in the discussion was scaffolding. I think this is a brilliant idea and I have learned about it in several of my education classes so far, so it is nice to see another connection here in this chapter. While the context of the word in this chapter is slightly different, the idea of scaffolding applies very well to science, especially since most science classrooms begin at the molecular level and build up to the population level. This way, a student can use prior knowledge to learn a new concept by building on to what they already know. For example, in my Gen Biology lab that I TA for, we took one lab to learn about DNA and what it actually is and does for our body. The next week, we learned about the genes on our DNA, and how those determine what your physical traits look like. By remembering what we discussed about DNA previously, the students were able to more quickly understand what a gene is and were able to use that as a bridge to the new information they were learning. All in all, while this chapter didn’t have much to do with me, I still found some of its tips and strategies helpful, especially when teaching students the whole new “language” of science.