Teaching+Secondary+English+Learners

Olson, C., Land, R, Anselmi, T. and AuBchon, C. (2010) "Teaching Secondary English Learners to Understand, Analyze, and Write Imperative Essays about Theme" Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 54(4), 245-256.

With the nation moving toward more high stake testing, educators need to develop high order reading and writing skills in all over their students, especially amongst English language learners. The authors of “Teaching Secondary English Learners to Understand, Analyze, and Write Interpretive Essays About Theme” illustrate perceived problems and effective strategies about just that. Carol Booth Olson, et. al. beliefs we should move away from the old “skill and drill” teaching to a model that provides more instruction and guided practice. The authors discuss a longitudinal research study called the “Pathway Project” conducted by the US Irvine site of California Writing Project (UCIWP). The goal of the study was to “provide teachers with pedagogical strategies to explicitly teach, model, and provide practice in the cognitive strategies that research suggests experienced readers and writers use to construct meaning from and with texts….” (p. 246). Two ideas that the study explored was teaching theme and how get students to answer the writing prompt affectively. Olson et. al. administered a pre-test and post-test to this group of students. They scaffolded reading and writing activities to revise the pretest responses; this served as preparation for the posttest. The results of the pretest were that sixth graders showed little improvement, but seventh through twelfth graders showed significant gains. The authors content that these results show that exposure to these reading and writing strategies overtime result in higher order reading and writing ability.