Instructional modifications for an English language learner using baseball content

Instructional Modifications for an English-As-Second-Language 10th Grade Student

Teaching for Exceptionalities

The student is a 15-year-old bilingual male in enrolled in 10th grade. He presents as having difficulties in his school work primarily due to his current inability to speak, read, and write English fluently. He is currently reading at approximately a 2nd-grade level, and all of his assignments are modified. Examples of the instructional modifications he experiences are as follows: Material is read aloud to him, writing assistance is provided to help him translate from his native language to English, and all story format math problems are converted to conventional number format to sidestep reading and translation difficulties. When a high level of academic support is provided, the student does not exhibit problem behaviors. However, he reports feeling overwhelmed and stressed, and these underlying emotions do contribute to occasional bouts of problem behavior.

Instructional example. I took a content-focused approach to reading and writing instruction with this student. My rationale for this choice was based predominantly on the student's continued frustration and embarrassment about his difficulties with making progress in fluency in English. My goal was to embed specific language development strategies into content that the student would find engaging and respectful (i.e., content that most 10th-grade boys would find of interest).

Content-focused approach. We chose baseball as the content area and based the student's reading, writing, and math goals on that topic. Many highly successful baseball players speak English as a second language, which the student found intriguing and empowering. As a sport, baseball highlights the individual personalities, characteristics, career and game statistics, and history of the game. In other words, this is a content-rich area that lends itself well to reading about players and teams, and writing opinions about player's skills and attributes -- basically those characteristics that make them valuable players -- and why players get traded. In addition, the promise of interesting math problems about baseball players is very rich. Because the student already had an understanding of the sport of baseball, fundamental background knowledge was not a difficulty. Further, by using interesting and age appropriate content, I was able to avoid the pitfall of simplifying the content instead of the language.

Assessment. The student's levels of proficiency were assessed by using the ACCESS for ELLs (Assessing Comprehension and Communication in English State-to-State for English Language Learners). This tool is a secure large-scale English language proficiency assessment given to Kindergarten through 12th graders who have been identified as English language learners (ELLs). A primary strength of the ACCESS for ELLSs is its capacity to help determine "when ELLs have attained the language proficiency needed to participate meaningfully in content area classrooms without program support and on state academic content tests without accommodations" ("ACCESS," 2012). The assessment also helps teachers and school districts to evaluate the success of their programs and to enhance instruction and learning for ELLs.

Which accommodations and modifications were successful?

I used graphic organizers and visual representations to help the student with the concepts presented in the content. The graphic organizers were particularly well-received by the student because information could be provided in both his native language and in English, in a parallel fashion, which helped him engage with the task. The theoretical foundation for this approach is that it is equally important to use the student's native language (L1) for instruction as it is to use English (L2). In this approach, L1 can be used to support instruction in L2. Further, it is important that the student be permitted to share what is learned in both their first and second languages.

If you taught this lesson again, would you do it the same/different? Explain.

If I taught this lesson again, I would incorporate more multimedia approaches. For example, I would show videos of baseball games in which the sportscaster could be heard. I would repeat what the sportscaster said, and ask the student to do the same. I would use the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis as a text, unpacking the critical components of the story in order to use them as instructional units (the potential, here, for making math exciting and meaningful to a 10th-grade baseball fan are enormous). I would use the movie on DVD as an adjunct component of the instructional units. Ideally, the DVD could be shown with subtitles in the student's native language as some of the dialogue is difficult to understand since it is true to life -- just the way that people talk -- with talk-overs, staccato and abbreviated sentences, and considerable use of jargon. The jargon will be an important sub-unit of the instructional unit due to its social currency in the sports world, whether in the high school arena or at actual ballgames.

What other accommodations/modifications might the student's regular education classroom teacher make?

Regular education teachers at 10th-grade level are not going to include many accommodations and modifications in their instruction, unless they are provided for the teacher and easy to use. I believe one of the most useful strategies for this student is to use a learning log. Essentially this requires the student to write down what he is thinking about a lesson, or what he wants to contribute to the discussion, or questions that he has -- but all in his first language. Then with that support -- that he has created -- he has something to which he can refer that does not become unavailable because of temporal qualities, in the manner of speech.