A common dilemma for content teachers is that they are unfamiliar with how to adapt their materials for their EAL students or how to selectively adapt their materials for differentiation. Here is a current method and that Kent Dwyer, Jonathan Sceerey and myself came up with for 6th grade social studies. With limited training, content teachers can then adapt their class materials, without requiring support from EAL faculty. Caveat: At the start of this project the social studies content teacher has already create MS Word docs with text and images. Here is a quick overview of the process. More details to follow.
- Social studies booklets that are MS Word docs were uploaded and converted to Google docs. Images are lost in this process, however we replaced old images with better resolution ones or more authentic images while also text wrapping the images so that each image corresponded to the correct topic area in the text. Some sides benefits were, text wrapping reduced the total page number of the booklets and resizing images with high resolution images, facilitated cleaner breaks between topics and their corresponding booklet pages. Update: Inserting a drawing in the Google Doc. was better. Captions can be added around the image and spacing is easier to control with caption placement.
- Both the content teacher and the EAL teacher would rewrite the text. Complex sentences were separated into multiple sentences. Expressions that were distracting (Example: Over the course of many years) were removed from the text. When possible content specific words had synonyms or examples placed in the same sentence (Example: old buildings or ruins).
- Each booklet was divided into sub topics. Subtopics became a mini-unit and were the grist for the vocabulary vetting.
- After the first rewrite, text was copied and pasted into the LexTutor Vocabulary Profiler using the British National Corpus and the COCA Core 4 as the selected vocabulary lists to compare the target text with. Output lists were copied and pasted into a Google Sheet .
- B content, C content and Off-list words were then highlighted using the Chrome Extension, Google Read&Write. Then a first draft of a vocabulary list was created in a Google Document via Google Read&Write.
- Word, meanings, and symbol images were all checked. Usually this meant deleting multiple word definitions or finding a more suitable image for the word.
- Finally, the polished vocabulary list was copied and pasted back into the original Google document that was the Archaeology booklet. Therefore, in the end, the students had a vocabulary list first, then the actually booklet text after with the highlighted words embedded in the text.
This method was extremely beneficial for the following reasons.
- Vocabulary could be introduce via class activities before the social studies unit was introduced.
- Having a research based methodology mitigated human error, such as arbitrarily removing words to be vetted because we ‘felt’ that the students already ‘knew’ the words.
- Digitizing the documents via Google with vocabulary lists in Google Sheets opened up a slew of other activities (clozes, matching) and facilitated Quizlet and physical flashcard creation.
- Students that needed support via EAL or Learning Support had the digital social studies booklet to utilized. This was aided when we purchased Google Read&Write for all students. For example, the text to speech and the embedded dictionary tools were useful for students.
- Polishing and differentiation. Different versions (version history in Google) of the booklets can be used for different groups of students. We can easily add or remove lists and highlighted words to increase or decrease the lexical complexity of a booklet. The same is true for tests.
Next post: More detailed video or slideshow of the process that could be used to train other content teachers with.
