Meeting #3 with Dr Jannie Van Hees: Putting the lens on language

At the beginning of each week, my year 9 social studies class usually look at current events that are local, national and global.  We start with a socrative activity, where students have to answer 20 questions about events from the past week and then I get the kids to find an article on one of the events that they found interesting and summarise what happened, when and where etc.  Unfortunately I have found this exercise a bit of a waste of time, because many of the students still leave the classroom not knowing what they had read and some do not complete their summaries.

When I reflect on why this is, I find that they may not understand the language that has been written in the text and this becomes a barrier to their learning.  This then leads to a lack of engagement and a lack of motivation to complete the tasks set.

After discussing this with Dr Jannie, we focussed on designing reading tasks for the students in my year 9 social studies class that could focus on unpacking the language of current event article.  I have recorded our discussion and have written the key points below.  To understand the context, click on the link to the article below, then listen to our discussion video.

The article we discussed was "Man petitions to make 'Aotearoa' official, alongside 'NZ'".

My key takeouts:

• Get the kids to answer 'What's the point ' which is also important to hold conversation.  
• Support students to recognise complex word groups helps to build language capacity.
• In the end we want to lift up language.  If we don't put the lens on complex language, they'll never produce it.
• Although it might seem tiresome at first to slowing down the language, we can work together to inform each other. 
• Don't get too fancy with doing a whole lot with it, but what we do know is that they need re-encounters.   It may just be having students' in groups and at the end, they complete a table with labels such as 'the main was' and 'my opinion was'. 

My next steps:

• Design the lesson and do the lesson with the class.
• Put language on my walls
• Adjust my pedagogy in expecting the kids to have to write a proper summary of what they have learnt in class.