Increasing ELL Achievement Through Technology

1. Increasing ELL Achievement Through Technology

2. Talking Points • The use of technology for ELL students can: • Use of ebooks, texting, blogging, wikis can increase fluency and comprehension in a nonjudgmental safe place • Helps students maintain and improve upon their native language. • Allows students to create a PLN to support and enhance cultural identity

3. Talking Points • promotes student engagement through high interest activities (fan fiction example animie) • uses academic skills (creative writing, communication, research, artistic desgin ) in a student directed environment

4. Reading Literacy • Use of ebooks to increase fluency. • Koskinen et al. (1999) study proved extensive benefits from school-home reading connections. • Use of technology to scaffold instruction by introducing culturally relevant information for textbooks. • Vocabulary slides in L1 and L2

5. Social Networking • Helps students maintain and improve upon their native language. • By texting, emailing, and chatting with friends in their native language, students focused on the written form which they otherwise do not use. • Encourages students to maintain cultural connections by keeping them up to date with youthful colloquialisms.

6. Social Networks • Helps to sustain and cultivate social and cultural relationships across geographical boundaries. • Students seamlessly communicate in English and their first language.

7. Use of online conversations in English • Text to text chatting affords students more composing time to carry on conversations in the new language. • Allows for time to reflect on both language and form as well as meaning . • Increase the number of student to student discussions in a classroom, versus teacher directed whole class discussion.

8. Building Online Cultural Social Groups • Fan fiction sites • Students create new material based on existing genre. • Much of the activity is aligned with school sanctioned literacy and language development practices such as collaborative composition, peer to peer reviews, and mentoring (Black, 2007)

9. How the internet helps ELL students: • Builds confidence in English by actively participating in online spaces. (Choi, 2009) • Helps connect to peers in the United States. • ELL students may feel more comfortable participating in the written form due to limited vocabulary skills orally. • Creates a small group format for students to share thoughts and feelings.