Page 48 - The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 9-12: English As a Second Language and English Literacy Development, 2007

THEONTARIOCURRICULUM,GRADES9–12 | ESLandELD
Sentence Frames. A sentence frame is an open-ended model of a particular sentence pattern into which students can insert various words to complete the sentence. Sentence frames help beginning English language learners to develop vocabulary as well as an awareness of English sentence structure. Teachers can introduce sentence frames to focus on various sentence structures such as questions: Where is the ___________ ?; or repeated actions: Every day at 9:00, I ___________ ; every day at 10:00 I ___________ .
Students can compile their frame sentences into individual illustrated books; construct a class pattern book on a shared theme such as favourite school subjects or sports; or create class poems using sentence frames that can be read in rhythm (e.g., I like___________ , but I don’t like ___________ ).
Strategic Use of First Language. Strategic use of students’ first languages in the classroom allows students the opportunity to build bridges between concepts they already know in their home language and the English words for those concepts.
There are many ways to integrate the strategic use of students’ first languages into class- room activities. The following are some examples:
A small group of speakers of the same language can brainstorm ideas and informa- tion on a new topic in their first language before the whole class brainstorms in English.
Students can write a first draft of a composition in their first language before moving on to a draft version in English.
Students can collect articles from multilingual media sources on a common topic before reading about the topic in English.
Students can write bilingual stories, folk tales, and autobiographies and then record them on tape in English and the first language.
Students can create multilingual websites with multilingual captions and articles.
A class can develop school or community information and orientation materials in a variety of community languages.
Surveys and Interviews. English language learners can engage in meaningful oral commu- nication with each other and with others outside the classroom through the completion of surveys and interviews. Students can collect information on many topics and issues: for example, how classmates spend their time during an average day; languages and countries of origin represented in the school; favourites from the world of music, movies, or television; health and wellness lifestyle choices; steps that classmates and friends are taking to decrease energy consumption; and cultural studies such as current popular Canadian names for babies or new slang terms popular with peers.
Students need to prepare for, conduct, and follow up on surveys and interviews by
formulating questions; using oral interaction to collect data; and organizing, displaying, and interpreting the results.
Interviews and surveys provide opportunities for authentic interaction with a wide variety of speakers, as well as occasions for students to investigate behaviours and opinions in order to increase their cultural knowledge of Canadian society.
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