Chapter 10 - How do I minimize communication conflicts in a multilingual classroom?

In the final chapter, Cary talks about a teacher who encounters conflict among students of different cultures. He takes several unsuccessful approaches until he decides to assign a group project. The students have to work together to discover the artist of a particular piece of art, then decide on the techniques he uses. Finally, students each paint their own portrait in that same style. This assignment required good communication among the students in the group. By the end of the project, "students...were giving each other some slack and some consideration as they all wrestled with the tricky business of communicating in a multilingual and 'multicustomed' setting."
If you are in this situation, the best strategy is to brainstorm with a colleague or someone knowledgeable about the situation. Putting your heads together will help determine a solution to the problem.

Chapter 9 - How do I support a student's first language when I don't speak the language?

This chapter had my favorite idea of the whole book! The teacher that Cary describes gives each student in her class a week to be the language teacher. The student would use resources such as family members and research to find several phrases that he or she could teach the class for the week. For example, once the language teacher taught the words yes, no, please, and thank you, students would use those words throughout the week instead of the English. The students loved this practice and looked forward to their week.
Cary is an advocate for bilingual education, but understands that this is not a possibility everywhere. So he suggests ways to support first languages when it cannot be developed.
~Use the language teacher role. With this practice, students' first languages are valued and used.
~Use the students' parents who speak other languages for help translating and also to teach the class about their language and culture.
~Finally, when available, use bilingual volunteers from other areas of the school, parents, or universities and other organizations to help during instructional times.

Chapter 8 - How do I help students build learning strategies?

In this chapter, Cary describes a teacher who used her passion to encourage students to learn. In order to make students independent learners, she introduced several different learning strategies to them. "She worried about the plateau kids, students who reached an intermediate fluency stage and stayed there, spinning their learning wheels, never rising to native-level English proficiency, never achieving full academic competence." Some strategies she used were:
~Use a content-to-strategy approach. Instead of targeting a certain skill and finding ways to teach that, use what you are teaching to target skills to make learning more authentic in the process.
~Name learning strategies. This helps make them explicit and memorable.
~Post the names of the strategies in the front of the room for easy reference.
Ultimately, use subjects you are passionate about and that interest the students. "With relevant topics in place," you can "decide on how best to make the topics workable for English learners...but, again, the beginning point [is] content, not skills, not strategies."

Here are some resources for learning strategies:
http://www.studygs.net/

Chapter 7 - How do I teach grade-level content to English beginners?

This was my favorite chapter so far! The teacher is teaching history to her students and she creates an archaeological dig for them to uncover artifacts. Once the students uncovered their artifact, the students then researched to find out what the object was and how it fit into their study of American history. By being able to put their hands on an object instead of just reading about it in a book, the teacher has made history real.
Cary lists some tips for teaching content to English beginners:
~Use small, collaborative work groups
~When available, use bilingual peer bridges
~Use objects, drawings, maps, and graphs
~Use video clips to build background knowledge
~Use graphic organizers to record notes and reduce text note-taking
~Use authentic texts supported by multi-reading-level resource material
~Use show and tell modeling
When modeling, be sure to use show and tell modeling and not just tell. When listening to an unfamiliar language, it is much more understandable when gestures are involved.

Chapter 6 - How do I help students improve their English writing?

The main idea from this chapter is that teachers need to give students a reason to write. For example, when a person learns to dance, they don't spend an hour learning what the left foot does, then an hour on the right foot. Students should learn to write in the context of content areas, or something that is important to them.

For example, in this chapter, the teacher used an issue of traffic around the school. The students felt so strongly that something should be done about traffic that they wrote a letter to the mayor. For the letter, the students talked about ideas and the teacher wrote them on the board. He then guided them through the process of writing a letter while modeling it himself.

When the mayor responded saying she would pass their request on to another committee, the students wrote letters to to members of that committee. The teacher let each student write in a way that was appropriate for his amount of English proficiency. Some drew pictures with labels while others wrote professional letters.

So when helping students with writing, model first! Then, allow students writing to look different at different stages. Finally, have students write about something relevant whether it is some issue close to the students or concerning the content they are learning. Make it relevant.

Chapter 5 - How do I make a difficult textbook more readable?

A textbook can be a daunting aspect of a classroom for an English Language Learner as well as for native English speakers.
According to Cary, the most important strategy for helping students with difficult texts is modeling. Modeling the way you would "attack" a difficult text will show your student, one, that he or she is not the only one that struggles with content reading, and, two, ways to make it easier.
Providing students with graphic organizers while reading will help students keep track of what they have read.
One strategy that might not be glaringly obvious, is to make room for laughter and jokes. When a classroom is free for these experiences, it translates to the freedom to take risks with language.

Here is a resource for graphic organizers:
http://www.thinkport.org/technology/template.tp

Chapter 4 - How do I get my reluctant speakers to speak English?

According to Cary, there are two essentials for increasing language:

~Time to Talk - Arrange your classroom in a way that encourages conversation. A constructivist classroom provides many opportunities to speak and to listen.

~Reason to Talk - Cary says that a reason to talk means choosing and structuring activities in ways that make talk meaningful, activities where students feel a need to talk, can't help but talk. This in turn requires curriculum content that engages kids and reflects personal interests.

Find out what students enjoy, what they're passionate about. Sometimes this will bring them out of their shell. Other times, finding an activity they like, such as drama or music, will encourage more conversation.