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Making Connections:
Maximizing the Impact of Classroom Volunteers
on the Literacy of English Language Learners
Volunteers in the Classroom
Teachers are always grateful to parents who are able to carve time out of their busy schedules to come and help in the classroom. In fact this is not just a value held by teachers: research on effective schools has consistently pointed to active parental and/or community involvement as a key correlate to successful schools (for more information visit the Effective Schools Association website at http://www.mes.org). Parents and other helpers in the classroom not only reinforce to students that school is important; they also provide an opportunity to provide students with additional, individualized attention. Unfortunately we teachers do not always have the time to properly prepare our helpers to work with our students-- especially those with special needs such as English language learners. In this article, I will provide examples from an episode that occurred at a local elementary school between a college age tutor and an English as a Second Language (ESL) student. By looking critically at missed opportunities for learning we can discover the importance of adequately preparing classroom volunteers to work with our diverse students.Learning Partnerships
Vygotsky identified a metaphorical space where children and more proficient adults (or children) could work together to push the less proficient child's knowledge beyond what the child is capable of doing by him or herself. He called the difference between the child's actual level (what the child is able to do independently) and potential level (with help from a more proficient partner) the zone of proximal development (ZPD) (Tudge, 1990.) Conceptualizing the process of learning by way of the ZPD serves to make students as active participants who "become more consciously aware of the meaning (not simply the sense) of concepts that earlier had been used in a nonconscious way" (Tudge & Scrimsher, 2003, p. 214). Volunteers working with students can provide the necessary scaffolding to deepen a student's understanding of different content knowledge.To take on this very important role, there needs to be explicit instruction given to volunteers. Volunteers need to have a conscious knowledge about the goal of the various activities they are asked to participate in. They also have to be oriented to the idea that students are active sense-makers. Students bring many resources with them to new learning experiences. Prior experience, skills and knowledge help them to make sense of new content knowledge. Part of that orientation has to do with the volunteer's role in helping the student bridge what they already know with the new knowledge in an explicit or conscious way.
Opportunities for Learning
This episode centers around a phonics lesson in which a college age tutor worked with an ESL student on word families. The activity is very familiar to many of us teachers, but new to both the student and the tutor. The activity involves using letter tiles to create rhymes like "ack" or "ight" word segments that are consistently pronounced the same, then changing the first letter or onset to make a new word. The purpose of this activity is to provide an opportunity for students to develop "rules" of pronunciation for particular word families.Lesson Opening
The ESL class is just beginning. Second grade students come in chatting from their regular classrooms. A small group of tutors is waiting for them. The ESL teacher quickly assigns a student to each of the tutors while describing briefly what each pair will be doing. He waits to talk to Silvia's tutor last, showing the tutor the tiles and explaining briefly what he wants her to do. He then leaves to monitor the other pairs.
T: Okay, do you want to do this one? Okay. You put, like, a letter in front of it. "A" "I" "R" Do you know what sound that makes?
S: long pause
T: do you know a word that has "a" "r" "e" in it? I mean "a" "i" "r"?
S: 2 second pauseBoth tutor and student are unfamiliar with the game. Yet the tutor assumes that Sylvia will "catch on." This orients Sylvia's attention away from the deeper, underlying purpose of the activity: to make connections between different letter combinations and sounds. Sylvia's first task is now to figure out what the tutor wants her to do. Brief instructions at the beginning of the activity would have been helpful. This sequence demonstrates the importance of focusing on learning goals rather than procedural matters when giving instructions to volunteers in the classroom. Teachers need to clearly define the role of the activity. What is underlying purpose of the activity? This message then needs to be made explicit to the student.
Metalinguistic Transfer
The lesson continues from the last section. The tutor arranges the tiles: "h" "a" "i" "r" to form the word "hair".
T: How about this one? What does that make?
S: hire
T: ha::ir*
S: hair
T: yeah because "a" "i" "r" make the a::ir sound
S: air
T: and if we put a "p" in front of it, it'd be pair. Okay. Hmmm. What else could we do? How about (3 seconds)… Oh. Oh yeah, that's a good idea. How about this one?
S: fire
T: fa::ir. Yeah because the "a" "r" "e" makes "air". See if you just add an "f" it's fa::re. Remember what this one is?With ESL students there are tools for learning that may not be obvious to volunteers. Most people unfamiliar with the Spanish language may be unsure about why Sylvia is reading or decoding the words the way she does. In the transcript, it is easy to see that there is a certain pattern occurring in this interaction. She is consistently pronouncing the "ai" letter combination as a long "i" sound. This would be a good opportunity to stop and ask Sylvia why she was pronouncing the words the way she is. What hypothesis is she testing?
Bialystok (2001) identifies three entities housed in the term: metalinguistic. These are knowledge, ability and awareness. Sylvia has learned that the vowel combination "ai" is pronounced "i." In Spanish, this is true. She is using this metalinguistic ability to apply what she knows about sound/symbol correspondence in her primary language to decoding words in her second language: English. If the volunteer had been oriented to envision the Sylvia as an active sense-maker, this would have been a good opportunity to explore what caused Sylvia to make these systematic "errors." What was her actual level of understanding and how could the volunteer scaffold the activity to move Sylvia's thinking? This would have also helped give Sylvia the metalinguistic awareness of what she was doing (applying rules of pronunciation from her first to second languages) and why it wasn't successful for the particular task.
Rule Formation
Having an extra person in the room is invaluable, but that person needs to be prepared in order for students to get the full benefit of having an additional and more proficient partner to work with.
S: there
T: the::re That's right
S: instead of hearing the "r", you hear the "e" sound
T: the "e" sound? Okay (uncertain)
S: here
T: ha::re
S: hare
In the last example, Sylvia was applying implicit rules she had generated about the pronunciation of the vowel combination "ai." In this example, Sylvia is making the implicit explicit. She has generated a new rule without prompting from the tutor. When she says the word "there," she hears the "e" sound instead of the "r" sound. From the tutor's response and question, the tutor indicates that she does not understand what Sylvia is saying. Sylvia's comment doesn't match the expected answer. But, instead of stopping and questioning Sylvia about her comment, the tutor chooses to continue with a new word. Again this leads to a missed opportunity to help bridge what Sylvia knows with the new knowledge that it being introduced. By not taking the time to discuss how Sylvia generated her rule, there was no discussion on the relative merits of her reasoning. Do you really hear the "e" rather than the "r"? Sylvia's rule was left unchallenged and may be applied in other instances causing her problems in other areas of the curriculum -- problems that would have been alleviated if Sylvia had a chance to examine critically how she came about forming her rule.
Getting the Maximum Benefit for Our Students
Most of the missed opportunities to learn highlighted in the sample interaction were the result of a lack of proper orientation. While the ESL teacher took the time to talk to the tutor about how she should conduct the activity, he did not explain what the purpose of the activity was. As a result, the tutor's focus tended to be on how the activity was conducted rather than the co-construction of content knowledge. This focus meant that contributions from Sylvia that didn't fit the procedure were not recognized as important to the activity and may have prevented Sylvia from bridging the knowledge and skills she already had with the new content knowledge that the activity was supposed to foster.Sharing a vision of students as active sense-makers with classroom volunteers creates a space for both student and volunteers to contribute. This helps volunteers identify where the child is at and help them to move to the next level. Yes, volunteers need to know how to conduct certain learning activities, but this should not be emphasized over the ultimate goal of fostering deeper understandings.
References
Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tudge, J. (1990). Vygotsky, the zone of proximal development, and peer collaboration: Implications for classroom practice. In L. Moll (Ed.), Vygotsky and Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology (pp. 155-172). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tudge, J., & Scrimsher, S. (2003). In B. Zimmerman & D. H. Schunk (Eds.), Educational Psychology: A Century of Contributions (pp. 207-228). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Kelley Archer was a bilingual teacher for 8 years in California. She is currently a full-time student working on her Ph.D. in Language, Literacy and Culture at the University of Washington. Her focus is on teacher education with an emphasis on English language learners. She can be reached by snail mail at The Washington Center for Teaching and Learning, Box 351413, 3845 15th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA 98105 or by email: kellea1@u.washington.edu.
©March 2005 New Horizons for Learning
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