ELL Reflection

After teaching French for the last four years of my career, this is my first year going back to teach English to English Language Learners (ELL) at Kaleidoscope Academy. For a semester, I worked mostly with seventh and eighth graders with English Proficiency Levels ( ELP) between three and five. The ELPs tell that these students have great social English communication skills, but their academic language is not proficient yet; that is why many of them still need ELL instruction. My goal for this year was to increase my ELL students vocabulary so they can be better readers and writers. I want my students to be able to read and understand different types of texts and books and to write with a variety of vocabulary for different purposes.
Marzano
I was able to assess them twice so far without announcing it. I think my students were doing very well when we were solely focusing on learning Tier two vocabulary words. I’ve noticed after giving them for the second time the assessment that several of my students’ scores dropped significantly. I assumed that it was because we stopped practicing those twenty words and transitioned to learning about word roots. I wish I could have done a better job at keeping up with the twenty words while adding the study of prefixes. I certainly could have selected from our Tier 2 words, terms that my students could practice identifying prefixes. Even though we moved to learn about word roots, I could have added a short activity weekly to have students review those twenty words in addition to the new prefixes we learned, just like what Marzano (2004) describe the sixth step for teaching vocabulary: “Apply in Learning Games--Involve students periodically in games that allow them to play with terms.” (p. 28) I am wondering if I should limit myself to the twenty words all year long or if I can start a new list of Tier two words once all my students have scored proficient on