Literature-based ESL for secondary school students, Custodio & Sutton, 1998.

Keven Doyon-Lacasse / 908-186-900

Response journal guidelines for students

Strategy: Make connections with your own experience. What does the reading make you think of? Does it remind you of anything or anyone?

Discussion:

Reading about literature-based instruction as well as content-based instruction and historical fiction made me think back to my high school days. When I was in grade 10, I was introduced to a more literature-based type of instruction. Before that year, I had been taught by three teachers who were giving ESL classes in order to fill their schedule, that is to say that they were not language professionals, but rather music and fine arts teachers. During that school year, my new ESL teacher had decided to push me harder and to introduce me to some novels that were actually mentioned in the Custudio’s article. She had also introduced me after Christmas to some famous fiction-writers’ novels, such has David Gemmel’s “Waylander” and others. I recall improving significantly during that school year, both in terms of advanced reading comprehension and vocabulary acquirement. Whereas others read penguin books, reading historical fiction has helped me acquire vocabulary related to several school and non-school subjects: geography, science, language arts, martial arts, medieval era, etc. To me, it is obvious that literacy promotes development and acquisition of life skills and that content-based instruction is much more efficient that a more traditional approach. That teacher was differentiating her ESL content for me because she knew that I was much stronger than the rest of students from the ESL class. When I saw her again during my 3^rd practicum in Beauce, I made sure to thank her for that.

Example of prompts and guiding questions for the response process (p.46)

Strategy: Guiding question: What did you find interesting/important/surprising?

            In this text, what I found the most surprising is the interesting description of using theme-based units in high school. As a student, I used to hate unit-based classrooms because I quickly get tired of talking about a topic. I hate going over and over again over a topic. As a student teacher, I tended so far to avoid using a theme-unit based approach with my high school students because I, myself, am not comfortable with that teaching method. I rather cover several topics with a main common idea in a more socio-constructivist type of classroom. Reading about it, though, made me think about several units which I could prepare while using multicultural novels. I think that this part of Custodio and Sutton’s article is one of the most important parts. As they describe how multicultural novels can be used in order to cover historical elements as well as religious and culture differences, the authors opened a door to various other types of units which could be built using these same novels. I find it interesting as well that they discuss the difficulties that we, as language teachers, have to acquire novels to work with in our classrooms. It is true that these books are expensive and that they must be replaced regularly. I plan on working with my students to find a way to acquire some novels that will really interest them as well as buy some that will help me cover specific topics such has homosexuality and segregation.