tailieunhanh - A Cognitive Strategies Approach to Reading and Writing Instruction for English Language Learners in Secondary School

First errors of learning are usually gigantic. Then, and gradually, they diminish as one benefits of his/her errors. In a later stage of learning foreign or second language, learners are expected to reach a native speaker’s competence or, at least, near that competence where errors are either eliminated or minimized to the extent that their impact on the learners' communication disappears, or they go unnoticed. But, unfortunately, the case with most of second language learners’ errors is not so. Errors, mistakes, slips and attempts, as Edge (1989) has classified and termed them, insist on staining foreign. | A Cognitive Strategies Approach to Reading and Writing Instruction for English Language Learners in Secondary School Carol Booth Olson University of California Irvine Robert Land California State University Los Angeles This study was conducted by members of a site of the California Writing Project in partnership with a large urban low-SES school district where 93 of the students speak English as a second language and 69 are designated Limited English Proficient. Over an eight-yearperiod a relatively stable group of 55 secondary teachers engaged in ongoing professional development implemented a cognitive strategies approach to reading and writing instruction making visible for approximately 2000 students per year the thinking tools experienced readers and writers access in the process of meaning construction. The purpose of the study was to assess the impact of this approach on the reading and writing abilities of English language learners ELLs in all 13 secondary schools in the district. Students receiving cognitive strategies instruction significantly out-gained peers on holistically scored assessments of academic writing for seven consecutive years. Treatment-group students also performed significantly better than control-group students on GPA standardized tests and high-stakes writing assessments. Findings reinforce the importance of having high expectations for ELLs exposing them to a rigorous language arts curriculum explicitly teaching modeling and providing guided practice in a variety of strategies to help students read and write about challenging texts and involving students as partners in a community of learners. What distinguishes the project is its integrity with respect to its fidelity to three core dimensions Teachers and students were exposed to an extensive set of cognitive strategies and a wide array of curricular approaches to strategy use comprehensiveness in a manner designed to cultivate deep knowledge and application of those strategies in .