Teacher Discussion Forums

I am part of a group that is creating leveled-readers for ESL students. I wanted to get some ESL Teacher feedback on the use of rebuses in these little books. Would it be helpful for a newly arriving ESL student in grade 2 to see rebuses instead of text? For example, if a non-fiction book is about whales, and whale is repeated over and over in the book, do you think it would be helpful, or not, to see less text by replacing the word whale with the rebus?

Another example in a fiction book: One stormy day, the (rebus of sun) disappeared. Thunder boomed.(rebus of lightning) cracked. It hit a (rebus of tree).

The words that have rebuses will be labeled in the illustrations/photos.

I'll just put this out there to see what I get back. Thanks for any feedback you can give.

I understand you thinking about the rubus books. Have you considered using worldless picturebooks like "Tuesday" or "Trip to the Metropolitian". These books tell a rich store totally in in illustrations. You can have the students write or tell the story in English. You can also introduce vocabulary words with these sort of books.

You may find that simplistic rubus stories could lose the attention of 2nd graders. Wordless picture books would hold their attention longer and help bridge the language barrier by creating teachable moments.

Hope that helps. I never encoutered the use of rubus books in my American elementery education classes, perhaps that is becouse all of the children's literature was geared toward native english speakers.

Perhaps having a word wall with both the english word and a rubus might be helpful. I am have slowly become a huge fan of word walls. It wouldn't be that much more work to combine a picture with the word on the word wall. Students may find this helpfull in both thier reading and writing.

Sorry for asking this, but aren't rebuses pictures that are borrowed for their sound (rather than for the literal meaning that the original picture possesses)? For example, pictures for an eyeball, tin can, the sea, and a ewe/female sheep would allow us to read/say 'I can see you'.* Or am I being too technical with the term?

What you seem to be doing is just replacing the words in the text with pictures that mean (and obviously sound and "spell") exactly the same as those words. I'd've thought that as the goal is to get ESL students reading/decoding English, then it would be more helpful to give them every last opportunity to see the printed form (yes, even when the word is very frequent in a particular given text LOL) - I mean, it's not like authentic texts have pictures in them substituting for the second appearance onwards of a word. If the students need help with genuinely difficult words, probably a key that supplies translations into their L1 (if the class if largely or wholly monolingual), or simplified English-English glosses written with a controlled defining vocabulary, would be in order.

On the other hand, if you are wanting to get the students producing language (spoken or in their own written words), then picture stories are a good stimulus, as billjordan points out.

*This of course assumes that the person reading is very familar with the spoken language, capable of understanding puns etc, and that the state/stage of the written language such as it is (or rather, only appears to be in this childrens' game) "does not" possess visually distinct forms for the homonyms i.e. there "aren't" any pictures and certainly no written words "yet" for 'I' as opposed to 'eye', 'see' as opposed to 'sea' etc.

ah..oh yeah...your right about a rubus....I guess we are talking about pictographs...

a true rubus is pretty tricky...usually they are used as puzzels..I hate those silly things..I can never get them...