Geography - Unit
4 Flood Disaster
Focus pupils and school:
An 11 - 19 Catholic boys school, with an intake of approximately
1000 students, approximately 18% of which are bilingual. The
EAL department works with around 30 targeted students across
Key Stages 3-5. Recent arrivals have included pupils from Iran,
Venezuela and Eastern Europe. The most recent arrivals are two
twins from Poland. Both pupils are literate in Polish but spoke
virtually no English when they joined the school.
Context
The class have been given the task of researching the Water
Cycle in preparation for their next geography lesson, and they
have been encouraged to use the Internet as part of their research.
The two EAL pupils from Poland have brought this task to the
EAL Homework Club, which takes place after-school.
The Lesson
A small group of students are attending EAL homework club. The
EAL teacher is working with two early stage learners of English
whose task is to research the Water Cycle on the Internet. Their
geography teacher is revising the Water Cycle with the whole
class prior to looking at the topic of Flooding, and then moving
on to examine a country case study and the topic of flood disaster.
The aim of the EAL teacher in homework club is to develop appropriate
information retrieval and study skills in the learners to ensure
that they actively and critically engage with the mass of information
which potentially may confront them during their research on
the Internet. Both pupils have had experience of ICT in their
country of origin and of using the Internet in their last school
term in Poland.
The teacher begins by giving the pupils two initial guides –
one is a task note card and the other is a key visual. The note
card is to help focus the research and the visual requires appropriate
labelling:
Task Note Card
TASK:
Find out information on the Water Cycle to help you write
a detailed description of what happens.
Key visual
The visual is a modified diagram from a standard school textbook.
The teacher has blanked out the key labels (e.g. evaporation,
condensation etc,) and added an ‘explanation’ box
next to each label which requires filling-in.
The teacher begins by telling the pupils that they will be given
three web pages they are to go to:
www.bbc.co.uk/education
www.epa.gov/OGWDW/kids/cycle.html
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycle.html
Before they begin their search, the teacher gives the pupils
the possible steps written out on individual pieces of card
for one of the sites, and asks the pupils to sequence these
in the way they think the sequence will develop:
www.bbc.co.uk/education
The water cycle
precipitation
Geography
Geography sections
Physical geography
Weather basics
This activity lasts for approximately two minutes and forms
the basis of a useful and informal discussion between both pupils
and the teacher. The pupils then start looking at the three
sites, locating and reading the relevant information by using
the task note card and labeling the key visual. They are encouraged
to write in the labels first, and then to write notes in the
‘explanation’ boxes in support of each label.
The pupils bring the completed visual to the teacher for checking
the next day. Once this has been checked, the pupils write the
sentences in their exercise books. The teacher provides them
with the following prompts for the recording of the information
for their Geography teacher:
Evaporation is the …….
Transpiration is the ……
Condensation is when ….
Precipitation is the water that falls ….
Surface run-off is when most water returns to …..
As a follow-up activity, the pupils are directed back to the
website http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycle.html
which has detailed descriptions of the Water Cycle in Polish
(and other languages). Both pupils are then encouraged to write
down the matching key terms and definitions into Polish and
to bring these to the next homework club. The pupils are asked
to make a judgement as to the detail or complexity of the description
in Polish, judging whether it is easier or more difficult than
the key visual they have labeled in English.
Strategies for teaching/learning EAL
used in the lesson and how ICT supported/ enabled these.
The procedure outlined above is premised on the idea that thoughtful
reading and thoughtful writing based on Internet research needs
to be scaffolded. The aim is to help EAL learners organize Internet
information, express knowledge in their own terms and avoid
both plagiarism of material and the printing off in bulk of
large volumes of material related to the task the teacher has
set.
The approach is based on extensive work carried out in ESL programmes
in Vancouver, Canada, where there is a key focus is on the use
of graphic organizers, or ‘key visuals’, used to
show and help learners engage with the underlying knowledge
structures of the content they are studying. By introducing
a task note card, visual organizer and pre-selecting the sites
to visit, learners are helped to produce less copied sentences
and more reformulated and original sentences.
The procedure outlined in the original work from Vancouver is
as follows:
Student Task Process Model
1. Read task note card and graphic expectations
2. Locate and read Internet information (provide the sites)
3. Select and record key notes into notebook
4. Translate and transform notes onto graphic
5. Write sentences with reference to note card and graphic.
activating
prior knowledge: sequencing the possible steps through
one site
rich contextual background for comprehensible input:
Use of mother tongue (L1) in academic settings
comprehensible output: Use of a key visual
which supports both comprehension and production
relationship between form and function: Sentence
prompts to support the grammatical structure of the written
work
Contributed by Manny Vazquez
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