Monday 22 October 2018

Inquiry Term 4 - 2018



The start of this term is focused on testing and preparing the students to be capable, independent learners to transition to Year 3 in 2019.

By introducing the Word Tree it was my intention for children to accumulate new words to add to their vocabulary. So far, I feel that this has worked with the children whose language was already at a moderate - high base level.

However, with the 4 Priority Learners whose language was low from the start of this year they have not shown significant shift in their accumulation.

One of the PL students has left to go to another school, so I will replace them with another child for the duration of this school term.

So, although these PL children can identify the first letter of a word they are still not able to read the word after a few weeks have lapsed in time.

Even though they had previously recorded 10 words from the letter of the week on their iPads. These Pasifika children who have English as a second language mispronounce letter sounds and struggle with learning phonetics. They are not able to use correct pronouns and mix up plurals with singular grammar. All of the 4 PL students need support with using verbs in their sentence structure and also conjunctions in their conversations. All of these examples are predominantly holding back the ability to use more English words and use a variety of ways to communicate to others effectively. These significant delays may be due to their parents lack of English language proficiency and ability to converse with their children on a daily basis. As most Pasifika families include extended family members; grandparents are most likely to use their first language such as Tongan, Samoan ,Cook Island Maori or Niuean to communicate with their grandchildren at home and may have limited English language themselves. The majority of Pasifika and Maori families that attend PES are from low income families.

In 1995 a landmark study was carried out by Betty Hart and Todd Risley that identified “wealthy children hear 30 million more words than their poor counterparts”.

Ref: https://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/TheEarlyCatastrophe.pdf

The “30 million word gap” highlights major inequalities between high and low income families. They also showed that the number of words children hear before their third birthday is a precursor for future academic success. So the main message is that children need to be talked to alot; constantly in order for language accumulation to be most effective.

So in conclusion, these 4 PL children need a picture to relate the word to a meaning. This proves that their deficit beginning position has resulted in them being behind in their English speaking peers who come from non bi-cultural (Maori/Pasifika) upbringings where preschool children have up to 300,000 words accumulated since learning to speak.



In addition to reading PM readers for homework, children should be sent home with words to learn each week to promote and increase language accumulation.

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