“Maximizing Choices” Subject-based Experience Sharing Primary Level English Language: S.T.F.A. Lee Kam Primary School

By QSIP CUHK | Practical Experience Sharing on Differentiated Instruction: Primary Level English Language | Comments are Closed | 7 August, 2020 | 3

Background and objectives

Students are found to be engaging in classroom activities in junior primary levels, i.e., Primary 1 to 3. It has come to teachers’ attention that there is an obvious drop in students’ level of engagement since the start of Primary 4. One of the reasons observed is the change in the use of course materials. Storybooks are used in junior primary levels and there is a switch to textbooks in the senior primary levels. The lessened richness in the content of the materials has gradually led to students’ declining interest in the subject.

With regard to the above observation, the goal of the current collaboration between School Development Officer (SDO) of QSIP and school is to enrich learning and teaching contents. This is done through diversity management (DM) and a trial on the adaptation of the teaching strategies of differentiated instructions (DI).

Lesson design for differentiated instruction

Level: Primary 4

Topic: Favourite TV Programme

Strategies:

Profiling diversity
Enhance learning interest and prior knowledge
Multi-sensory pedagogical designs
Tiered questioning
Contingent scaffolding

Application of strategies

1. Profiling diversity

Use the task “Vocabulary Inventory” as needs analysis to assess students’ prior knowledge and then adjust teaching content.
Students put different symbols next to a list of words to indicate whether they ‘know the word’, ‘the word looks familiar to them’ or leave blank if they ‘don’t know the word’.
Teachers based on students’ answers and decided what vocabulary items need to be taught and what items could be skipped.

2. Enhance learning interest and prior knowledge

2.1 Use picture reading to elicit topic related prior knowledge and develop visual literacy of students

To arouse students’ interest by making them look at pictures instead of words at the beginning.

2.2 Provide different activities for students of various levels of readiness

For students who are more active
- Design activities like poem reading and tongue twisters to call for the attention and arousing the interests.

For students who enjoy learning English
- Give additional learning materials like word cards to work on, e.g. matching and categorization.

2.3 Use Think-Pair-Share as a pre-reading task to describe feelings/ thoughts about different TV programmes

- From teacher’s scaffolding to more self-directed learning of the learners by varying the task design for learners of different learning abilities.

Think:

1) Write on the notebook or circle information on TV Guide while noting down the reason.

2) List of adjectives describing feelings about the programme provided to students.

Pair:

Students work in pairs, sharing their favourite TV programmes.
- Eg. I like watching xx, xx, and xx. / xx is exiting (a brief description of the programme, the reason why you like it).

For less able students
- A note card with guiding questions or key words could be provided.

Share:

1) Get every students to name one word from their conversations and put it on the blackboard.

2) Get them to write the word cards and play card games.

3. Multi-sensory pedagogical designs

3.1 Storytelling

For less able students
- To ensure they follow the story right from the beginning, teachers could be a narrator, providing the background of the play. When talking about the background, do it as if a story is being told, with good voice and facial expression, so as to engage students.

For more able students
- Invite students to do the background and storytelling.

For the most able students
- Get the students to read the pictures and talk about what the play is about.

3.2 Constructing graphic organizer and serves as a mental picture to help students visualize how the text is structured

From heavily guided to self-directed.
For less able students
- Teacher builds up the graphic organizer step by step while explaining the text.

For more able students
- Teacher builds up the graphic organizer, leaving the headings blank.
For the most able students
- Get them to read the passage and construct the graphic organizer, then compare notes with their partners, after which teacher gives them the necessary feedback.

4. Tiered Questioning

Use of guiding questions to elicit high-order thinking to scaffold meaning of the text and guide students to read between the lines.
For less able students
- Use step by step questioning.

For experiential learners
- Get students to make the sounds the character makes and explain what the sounds mean.

5. Contingent scaffolding

Invite students to do presentation about TV programmes.
- To allow students of different abilities to showcase their learning.
- Use graphic organizer to help students organize their ideas visually.
For less able students
- Use guiding questions and/or relevant sentences for students to start off the script for the presentation, for example:

Conclusion

Students were found to be attentive in the lesson. During the pre-reading tasks, they were eager to describe their feelings and thoughts about different TV programmes when asked. Visual support of pictures of the current TV shows on the Powerpoint slides teachers prepared served as visual support, especially for the less able students.

The graphic organizer is an effective tool to help students visualize the structure of the text, hence the development of the story. Students were asked to fill in different parts of the graphic organizer according to their abilities. They enjoyed being invited to complete the graphic organizer. A sense of achievement was built upon completion.

By targeting questions of various levels of difficulties to different students, the strategy of tiered questioning enabled students across abilities to participate in the lesson. Guiding students to think about the different sounds which animals made at different times got the high ability students to think more than just understanding the story with the words they knew. With support provided for less able students, they were able to talk about the TV programmes they liked or didn’t like with the target language e.g. ‘both’, ‘or’, ‘too’ and ‘either’.

All in all, students were more engaged and willing to stay focus in the lessons with DM and DI strategies in place. How to keep the high ability students on task in a meaningful way while teachers are busy helping with low ability students and keep their interest in the lesson is what we need to explore more in teachers’ future teaching.