For my real-life reading inquiry, I observed a second-grade classroom’s reading and writing lessons. These lessons started at the beginning of the school day and went on until lunch. During this observation I was particularly interested in learning about phonemic awareness in English Language Learner (ELL) students.

There were 18 students in the class, ten of whom did not have English as a first language, but only three who had special lessons (other students had graduated out of the program). The students were seated in groups of mixed achievement levels, so when working in small groups as happened several times in the lesson, they could help each other. The lower-level English speakers occasionally would look to a friend in class who would explain things if there was a misunderstanding-- sometimes in Spanish but sometimes not. This seemed to benefit all the students and create stronger peer relationships while also improving understanding.

There were some things in the classroom I really appreciated, and that seemed to jibe with the best practices illustrated in the readings, and some things that did not. I liked the seating arrangement of the class, in concentric horseshoes, the word wall (which children actually referred to several times during the lesson to check their spelling), and the way the lesson was structured. There was whole-group review and instruction, but then the children broke into small groups to complete activities at different stations around the room. The kids in the class seemed excited, upbeat, and consistently on task. The groups allowed the teacher to help students at one station (a writing response station), while the others worked independently. I loved this idea and would like to implement this stations idea in my classroom, because not only did it break the quite long lesson up into many separate, small tasks that better kept the students attention, but it gave the teacher a chance to work one-on-four with students and provide much more individualized assistance.

Unfortunately, the text they were working with was one of the main things I didn’t like. I doubt it was the teacher’s individual choice, but all the same it was pretty lacking. The basal reader they were using seemed appropriately challenging vocabulary-wise, and included good tasks for them, but the subject matter was dry and not relatable.

Right before lunch, the special teacher for the ELL students arrived. The three students (all girls) with the lowest language mastery joined her at a group of desks. Two of the girls spoke and understood some English.  They seemed to be doing well and their progress was comparable to each other. One of the girls, though, had just arrived in America and spoke absolutely no English. Given that, it was absolutely incredible how she could sight read new words. She picked up on new vowel and consonant patterns so fast. This made me feel not only in awe of her, but made me appreciate more how checking to see “if someone can read” is a way more complicated process than having them read aloud.

The three girls and their ESL instructor used their short lesson to learn a new phoneme— “oo”. They were introduced to the sound, then combined it with single consonants (“boo”, “zoo”, “too”) then in the middle of words (“moon”) and then with consonant blends (“bloom”).  It was really cool to see the girls be able to manipulate sounds so adeptly, and once they had a new pattern to recognize, they did really well with the reading aloud portion. I think this approach makes sense somewhat—in focusing on phonemic awareness for the ESL students rather than vocabulary (especially given the short time they had with the specialized instructor), it gives those students the tools they will need to learn vocabulary independently and incidentally. The only thing that I didn’t love about this portion was that the instructor used linguistic jargon with the kids. For instance, when one mistakenly voiced a “silent e,” she corrected by saying “remember, consonant e!” which was the kind of thing that, in my TESL class, we were strongly encouraged to avoid.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience and I’m even more excited to get into a classroom now.