Secondary Grades and Writing with Multilingual Learners

702 West Kalamazoo Street,Lansing MI 48911

29 November, 2022

Description

Audience: This workshop is designed for secondary grade educators - Social Studies, Science, ELA, English language development specialists, and instructional coaches. Description: Secondary educators will join this two-day workshop to focus on writing instruction that supports the use of the Teaching & Learning Cycle as a way to empower multilingual writers, not only to produce successful academic writing, but more importantly, to communicate effectively for a variety of purposes and audiences. We want students to know how to leverage writing as a powerful tool to understand the world, express themselves effectively, learn from one another, and argue for things they believe in. This vision requires intentional language focused instruction and is strengthened when it occurs through authentic writing tasks in the content areas. In this interactive workshop, we will explore a pedagogical approach that apprentices multilingual learners into writing in various academic genres. Specifically, we will look at examples of this in social studies and consider how this approach develops multilingual learners’ writing skills and their awareness of how language works in written form. This will allow them to become effective and informed writers. Notes: We have centered this workshop around secondary social studies but have provided connections to secondary ELA and Science. We are not focusing in on teaching SIFEs/SLIFEs basic foundational literacy skills Together, we will learn how secondary educators: Build content area background knowledge with the whole class so that students are equipped to write knowledgably about the topic Explore the language of mentor texts with students in order to unpack highly valued ways of using language in a specific genre Jointly write a text with students based on what was learned from various mentor texts Support students as they apply their learning about language choices in a target genre to their independent writing Engage students in a cycle of review, reflection and revision to increase the effectiveness of their own writing