Lesson Plan Prep, Part II: Analysis of Student Language and Needs

In Week 1, you learned about the diversity of ELLs in the United States and how varied their language needs might be. You’ve been able to practice identifying and responding to the most common types of grammar errors. In order to plan effective instruction, you also need to analyze your students’ current oral and written language. As you learned from this week’s readings on scaffolding, by identifying what kinds of language they can produce independently, you’ll be able to determine how to scaffold learning activities to help your students produce more complex language forms—first with your help, then independently.

For this Assessment, you will analyze written and oral samples of your students’ language to further assist you in preparing a lesson plan that is tailored to their needs.

Instructions:

• Using the Collecting Language Samples handout, decide what kinds of language you want to sample from your students.
• Transcribe into a Word document and analyze 2 minutes of spoken language recorded from a student (or students) in your classroom and 1–2 pages of written language from one or more students. You may choose the same students whose written language you analyzed, or different students. See the handout for further details on what to do if your learners are at the emergent literacy stage. 
• Using the track changes and comments features, identify and comment on the most salient grammar issues in the transcribed language samples. In other words, determine which parts of the samples give you the most important information about what they can do independently now and what they can be guided to do with your help. Refer to the Gibbons readings for support.
• Add to your document a 1-page reflection on how you might address these language learning issues in ways that are meaningful and relevant to your particular learners. Explain how these language samples will inform your lesson plan. 
• Save this Assessment as “LessonPrep2_firstinitiallastname” and submit it to the Gradebook by the end of Week 4.