During the last meeting of the Language Acquisition PLC we discussed our concern with checking the level of comprehension of ELL students at Wyandotte High School. We tossed around ideas such as polling/surveying students as to their level of comprehension in any given class.  We believe that our focal point must be that of comprehension.
The questions that flow from that are:

Does the student understand? How do we check for understanding?
How do we know whether they do or do not understand?
What can we do to help a student understand better?

Comments about the other presentations during the PLC Showcase:

41% of the projects focused on technology.
We saw great potential in the bilingual project done by Ms. Holst.
We thought the presentations that focused on effective teaching were very useful.


Reflections about our PLC work this semester:

Language is acquired when we hear and read language that we understand.
Language acquisition is an unconscious process.


How do the above affect our professional work?

Our focal point must be comprehension.

The above comments are the joint efforts of:
Dr. Judy Lofflin
Al Vacanti
David Young

The Language Acquisition group has had many intense discussions about the most basic things that must happen for language acquisition to take place. We have studied the following texts:

From Input to Output:  A Teacher's Guide to Second Language Acquisition  by Bill Van Patten
Understanding Reading by Frank Smith
How Languages are Learned by Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada

My favorite quote:

"We don't acquire language by studying grammar, memorizing lists of vocabulary words, or saying things and getting corrected. We acquire language, or gradually absorb it, when we understand what people tell us and when we understand what we read. Our ability to speak comes gradually, after we hear and read a lot."

            -- Stephen Krashen

In this spirit the Comprehensibilty Project project has been launched.  Videos are being made of staff throughout the building in which captions are added that correspond to the words they say. This can be of great value to beginning ESL students.  Our presentation will consist of videos with captions.

PLC Showcase

At the end of our semester of work, all PLCs will be showcasing their work at the Wyandotte High School PLC Showcase on Wednesday, December 12th in the Social Hall.  The showcase will be a public demonstration of our learning, collaboration, and results.  Each PLC will showcase work that reflects how your learning and collaboration has impacted student learning.  Each PLC is encouraged to be creative and innovative in their demonstration (student examples would be highly encouraged); however, please be sure the following are addressed through your presentation -
    PLC Focus

Collaborative Actions   

Summary of PLC Learning

Impact on Student Learning

Connections to Future Teaching and Learning

In addition, all staff will have an opportunity to visit each demonstration during the Showcase.  Many outside guests will also be in attendance.  

If your PLC requires any kind of additional resources, please submit any requests for those materials via the comment section to this blog entry by NOVEMBER 9th. You will receive these materials by or before your November 28th meeting, so you will have AT LEAST two weeks to work on organizing your demonstration.

Today we discussed the Introduction of the book "From Input to Output:  A Teacher's Guide to Second Language Acquisition" by Bill VanPatten.

Photocopies are available of this section of the book to whoever at Wyandotte would want it.