Chapter 3: Nathan ONeill

Teaching ESOL students, it can be hard to know how to balance reading assignments. Some students need a significant amount of time devoted to learning new and relevant vocabulary (even if it is remedial vocabulary and not the vocab new to "regular ed" students); others need time to focus on skills of reading like comprehension, reading aloud, analysis, etc. Many times when we read books or short stories, I don't know how to always best balance the items I focus on. I have tried not to overburden students by giving them too many things that stop them from the enjoyment and flow of a book, but I wonder how I'm supposed to monitor each student's comprehension of the total work if I don't provide lots of assessments/goals along the way.

It seems like a great thing to give students lots of meaningful to text to read on their own and in groups, but I wonder how much I need to be assessing along the way. Often times, students read books that I have never read and I don't have a real way to know whether they really got the gist of the book or not. I like "the one pager" (p 83) provide to gauge student reading, but even this doesn't give me a true idea of whether the student really got what was really in the book into their own minds/lives.

I've always thought of language learning, vocabulary acquisition and education as a process of silt in water slowly settling to the bottom and becoming deeper and deeper. You never know what specks will sink (be learned), where exactly they will land and which ones will continue to float around in the water before they finally sink in. I'm more in the camp of giving them more good content and skills training and hoping that the other details will just fall into place along the way.