Teacher Discussion Forums

[mdavis@tkcs.org]

I am planning on changing my curricuculum next year in order to support my ELLs' in their regular ed. college prep English classes. These classes are rigorous with a lot of reading of and writing about classic literature. I have found that my students really struggle to comprehend Western literature (they are Korean and Chinese) as well as the academic language involved therein.
I have read about strategies for teaching ELL's reading and writing, and I've been fascinated by Kaplan's (1966) theory on Contrastive Rhetoric. I have definitely noticed that my Asian students have distinctive styles of writing, and I imagine that Chinese and Korean literature, too, have characteristic styles.
I am wondering if anyone has any tried and true methods of supporting their ELL's as they learn to read and write about Western literature. Thanks so much!

[mdavis@tkcs.org]

Just found a method that I think I'll try out as I support my ELL's in their content area reading classes this coming year. I will be supporting their reading of works such as: Frankenstein, An Iliad, A Separate Peace, and The Wave right at the beginning of the year, and I read (in H.D. Brown's Teaching by Principles, 2007, p. 368) about "semantic mapping" or "clustering" which can be used to help students deal with "a long string of ideas or events" (I'm hoping myriad characters, too!). Has anyone used this technique? I would like to hear how about how you implemented it and what the result was? Also, any other ideas for making literature accessible to ELL's would be appreciated.