Language Variation and Technology

The students in both of the classes I observe all speak fluent English and are capable of speaking and writing in SAE. There is a lot of dialect speaking in the hallways of course, and the students just seem to know that in the classroom, the SAE hat goes on. West Anchorage is a very diverse part of town, so I know that many students at the school speak a different language at home, or a different dialect of the English language. I don't know about Romig, which is attached to West, but when I attended West back years ago, we boasted of 26 languages spoken in the homes of students in our school. In my particular classrooms however, I haven't seen so much exciting dialect things going on.

Technology is pretty basic in the classroom that I've been sitting in on. A television and a projector have been used as applicable to the curriculum. A movie summed up the Holocaust unit and projector pages are used to put daily quizzes up on the board for all to see. The only computer in the classroom is for the teacher's use to perform her necessary communications and to hold her documents. The school has a Mac computer lab, however, and I assume that each classroom signs up for time as needed. We were there for two days with the classes I have been observing, working on five paragraph essays. The MyAccess system, which is relatively new, has helped the students organize their ideas and revise drafts of their essays before presenting the product they are satisfied with to their teacher for "human" grading and feedback. The teacher I worked with explained to me the importance of continuing to give human feedback to her students about their essays, because the MyAccess program can make it all to easy to have your grading done for you, and students deserve some real attention to be paid to their hard work.

Discourse in Classroom

In my classroom, generally, unless the teacher is lecturing, she is actively encouraging students to participate in the conversational floor. Questions are often followed up by a short length of silence while the students get up their nerve to participate. Upon recieveing an answer, the teacher will often encourage other students to add on to the first reply, or give another idea. turn taking sometimes does not go super well in the classroom when multiple students are really excited about getting their answers or discussion contributions out. A lot of the questions being asked now are reading comprehension sort of questions, as we are reading Macbeth aloud. It is important for the students to be aware of what the intent behind the Old English, because they are taking a quiz after each act of the play. The more outgoing kids tend to be the ones who also have a higher social status, and as the children come into the room and choose ther own seating, they are often grouped together. The girls seem to be more prone to tittering while the teacher or a classmate has the conversational floor, and a couple times the teacher has had a student move or sent a student out for having their own chats during other people's talking time.

Blog Entry Two: My Students' Writing

The one writing project that I have been able to observe during my Fridays with the seventh graders is the 5 paragraph essay. I watched the teacher reiterate the form and process for writing the essay, which the students had already received a lesson on and taken notes on. They were off to work ahead on the weekend if they chose, or to work in the computer lab the following week. While I was there in the computer lab with them the following week, some students had made a lot of progress and had some writing to work with, while others hadn’t been getting much done at home and were basically starting out. So I was able to see the students using the My Access program at different levels of their project, which was interesting.

Three essays were assigned to the students to culminate their holocaust unit, and their teacher laid out the expectations for their work. They didn’t really need a rubric, because of the interactive my access program, which allows them to submit an essay, get a computerized score based on different areas of their writing, then improve their writing to the expectations of the computer program, and submit again. Yes, some children had done 19 submissions before I made it to them. Their teacher encouraged them to shoot for a computer grade of 5.5 out of six, and most students were working diligently with editing to reach that mark.

What I did notice about the program, however, was that students seemed to be tiring of resubmitting many times, because of spelling and grammatical errors. I suspect that some of the students may have avoided exploring the use of bigger words and longer sentence forms because of the fear of having to go back and resubmit again. I didn’t notice any students having significant issues with morphemes or spelling, more of them were struggling with rhetorical and stylistic issues. The students I have been observing are proficient and some are gifted students, so they are really exploring with ways that make their writing more impactful, coming up with catchy titles, and learning to research and cite sources.

Day One

Physical Environment:

The physical environment in the classroom consisted of groups of tables facing the blackboard or perpendicular to the blackboard. The projector sat in the middle of the room, and quiz questions were put up in the beginning of class so the students could easily see them and complete them. There was a special location for the dividers that provided confidentiality for the quiz, an also for assignments to be turned in. There are a lot of posters adorning the walls and blackboard, which contain information vital for composition, and to hold information about some of the books they have been working on.

Curricular Environment:

The students were presenting week in a portfolio that they have been completing over the duration of their Holocaust unit. It was clear that they have received instruction in some of the elements of poetry, what makes a political cartoon funny, and they shared their work aloud. I didn't see any English textbooks, but as the class went over the structure of a 5 paragraph essay, they pulled out notes that they had taken in an earlier class. Next Friday, we will be in the computer lab, working on the first of three essays that will culminate the Holocaust Unit.

Human Environment:

Several students looked to be from diverse cultural backgrounds, but did not display any signs that they may be struggling with any linguistic issues. Some students seemed chatty with their seating buddies, and the group in general seemed lively and willing to participate.