- English Language Arts and Reading
- Grade 4
- Developing and sustaining foundational language skills
Introduce a project in which students will be assigned shared responsibilities to produce a final product. This project can include writing a speech, creating a visual representation of a text, identifying appropriate quotations, or creating a graphic organizer. Ask students to work together to divide up responsibilities.
Behaviors to observe:
Notes:
This SE requires students to work collaboratively with others to determine how work will be shared among group members. Students must understand the importance of individual contributions in a group situation. Students also need to understand what collaboration entails such as active listening and sharing of ideas. Observe as group members discuss the responsibilities and note whether they work collaboratively during the planning of individual responsibilities.
1. Carrison, C., & Ernst-Slavis, G.(2005). From silence to a whisper to active participation: Using literature circles with ELL students. Reading Horizons, 46(2). Retrieved from https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1137&context=reading_horizons
Summary: The article promotes the use of literature circles to support literacy, especially for English learners. Literature circles allow student to interact through sharing ideas, opinions, and personal responses to literature. Students become active participants and learn to manage their literature circle activities, negotiating the structure of their timelines. The study participants were a fourth-grade class in which 5 of the 24 students had varying levels of language acquisition. The use of literature circles led to decreased anxiety about reading and participation and increased reading accuracy and comprehension.
2. Batson, J. (2014). Postmodernity and oral language learning. Practically Primary, 19(1), 39+. Retrieved from https://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A361713108/PROF?u=tea&sid=PROF&xid=0dc50066
Summary: The article argues for the increasing need for schools to support conversational skills in the digital age and provides ways to build opportunities for social communication in the classroom.
3. Peterson, S. S., & Rajendram, S. (2019). Teacher-child and peer talk in collaborative writing and writing-mediated play: Primary classrooms in Northern Canada. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 42(1), 28+. Retrieved from https://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A571514310/PROF?u=tea&sid=PROF&xid=7dbe79ee
Summary: This research examines teacher-child and peer interactions during collaborative writing and writing-mediated play in 10 northern Canadian primary classrooms. In the collaborative writing contexts involving teacher-assigned texts, children more frequently talked about the letters and sounds of words, or the details of drawings in their texts. In both contexts, children used language for affiliative purposes, as the demands of the collaborative settings required that they find ways to get along with each other.