EDU 643 week 3 Discussion 1

Week 3 - Discussion 1

Your initial discussion thread is due on Day 3 (Thursday) and you have until Day 7 (Monday) to respond to your classmates. Your grade will reflect both the quality of your initial post and the depth of your responses.

Eight-year-old Giorgos Baros has moved to the United States from Greece while his father completes a five-year residency at the Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore Maryland.  The Baros family lives in an affluent part of Maryland and attends a public school that has an 11% ELL population.

While in Greece, Giorgos earned superior grades in a private school, was very outgoing, and had many friends. His teachers note that he is now very quiet when his Greek-speaking friends are not around; however, he will always join a sports game in progress during recess.  Giorgos’ current education environment is in the general education classroom for the majority of classes with pull-out English practice and academic enrichment from the ELL instructor.

The general educator and you, the ELL teacher, have decided to focus on speaking fluency so that Giorgos can be the extrovert he once was.  His current level of fluency as determined by the informal observation and the ELL teacher’s assessment is that has strong receptive language comprehension, uses BICS appropriately, does not use past or present tense verbs, tends to misuses pronouns, makes few pronunciation errors, and will only reply in English using the minimum number of words with you.

You now have to work with the general educator to help Giorgos prepare a speech in front of his classmates as they are concluding the “cultures” unit in social studies.  Using Chapter 6 in your textbook as a starting point and conducting your own research, write a brief plan that will prepare Giorgos over the next two weeks to give a three-minute speech to his social studies class on an aspect of Greek culture.  In addition, how will you assess his language fluency during his speech to determine his level of oral language mastery?  

Guided Response: Respond to at least two of your peers taking the role of the general educator.  How will you reinforce and integrate what the ELL teacher is doing, to practice fluency during small group instruction, into your general education class?  How might this type of activity benefit all other students in the classroom?

Carefully review the Discussion Forum Grading Rubric for the criteria that will be used to evaluate this Discussion Thread.