Using art and music to support struggling English language learners

¶ … individual child who is a struggling reader, can help you understand their problems?

Studying about the perception and attitude of a student who struggles to learn the English language is an essential element to help him/her to overcome the problematic disabilities. Learning disabilities actually frustrate such students and their stress can be reduced by working on methods like the song, dance, and other art forms. Learning process with the usage of art/ lyrics is not only a beneficial tool for students with learning disabilities but it also benefits the other students. This case study has taught that disabilities do not define a student as the saying \'the book shouldn\'t be judged by the cover\' suggests.

As a teacher, how will this understanding influence your practices?

The first crucial step that I learned from this experiment is seeking to understand students before we can actually understand their specific needs. As a result, I have decided to seek to understand every student at a personal level even from the very first day. As per Chan, Engel & Ross (2015), we can bridge the challenges faced by disabled students only if we have a deeper understanding of their problems. In the education industry, when we start to analyze the disabilities of a student we actually end up identifying the various capabilities of the same student.

As a teacher, how did the project help you to find and implement new strategies?

As a teacher, I have learned new practical implementation teaching strategies that incorporate songs and other audible verbal material from popular cultures. This method has enhanced the learning process with more relevant and interesting materials and thereby it encourages the active engagement and participation of the students. This highly interactive strategy is used in the Direct Instruction teaching and is also very crucial to reach and impact knowledge to those students (Darling-Hammond et al., 2015). As per Vlachou & Papananou (2015), this fun-filled and interactive strategy appeals to the social-cognitive learning capabilities of those students.

As a teacher of literacy, how did it aid you in finding resources particularly for the students with reading problems?

As a literacy teacher who works in close with those disabled students, we can familiarize with the real and practical problems faced by them. It is such a resourceful experience that can completely change the one\'s perspectives on teaching. It also helps to improve the teaching methods by using flashcards. It was not a part of the original lesson plan, but was incorporated later, and it proved to be useful after conducting a research on those students. In addition, a teacher can get useful teaching tips from the fellow cooperating teachers. These teachers are highly resourceful and can play a crucial role in fine tuning the classroom experiences through priceless mentorship.

Do you think that there is a need for differentiated instruction?

Due to the disadvantages of the fit-to-all teaching method, it is essential that a teacher adopts different instruction methods in the classroom. Also, the fit-to-all teaching does not hold true with every student and better-for-all teaching strategies like songs can bring every student on board during the introductory sessions. However, after the introductory class, it is incumbent that the teacher has to adopt suitable teaching methods.

How did your coursework effectively prepared you to and write up the case study?

The crucial planning and conduction of the case study depend on the college course work and in particular the lesson planning and the theoretical part. Also, the foundation for the case study is the theories learned from the college course work. Out of all the courses, the research methodologies take an important role to implement the case study successfully.

How do you conduct and write the case studies differently and what would the completed work reflect?

Before conducting the case study, one has to first orient the objectives. In this case, the objective is to explore how culture can be used to overcome the learning difficulties. Secondly, we should lower the expectations. By these, we can avoid overloading the students and using unnecessary teaching styles. This could be a beneficial method for both the students and the teacher.