Inquiry promotes language skill development and science content development. But is inquiry only a western pedagogy of teaching? The publication Teaching Mathematics and Science to English-Language Learners by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory addresses some benefits to teaching ELL's through inquiry, yet the article also addresses some considerations when teaching ELL's through inquiry-based teaching.
Teaching Mathematics and Science to English-Language Learners addresses the idea that I constantly struggle with when working with ELL's. Do I teach them the language and then provide them with the experience or do I provide them with the experience and then teach them the language? As I read more and work more with ELL's, I have made the conclusion that students learn best when they are first provided the experience and then given the content language. The Northwest Regional Education Laboratory reinforces that teaching through inquiry provides ELL's the opportunity to:
"ask questions for repetition and meaning, tell others what and how to do
something, verifiy and compare information, participate in discussion and
provide feedback, report findings or results, express their opinions and
explain their reasoning, and to summarize or draw conclusions."
Inquiry encourages students to not only learn the vocabulary of science, but additionally provides ELL's opportunities to justify their thinking. Providing a justification for an opinion or thought in my opinion requires much more thinking and language use than solely using science content language.
The consideration that the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory gives is to be aware that some students who come from other cultures may not be familiar with inquiry-based learning and may need scaffolding and support to learn how to participate in class. In cultures where people are not to question authority and where people are to approach ideas with consensus, inquiry-based approaches may not be utilized because of their leanings towards critical analysis, questioning, and argumentation. The cultural conflict of differences in pedagogical teaching are present in our classrooms. Do we then always teach the western way? I'm not sure . . .
Interesting article and blog. I agree that you need to be respectful when a student is coming over from another culture and allow them to slowly integrate into your learning environment. When you have a student that has been raised in a culture where they should not question authority and may not feel comfortable in an inquiry based classroom, you can slowly integrate them into the culture of the classroom. Inquiry based classroom are not counter intuitive to having respect for authority, rather they demonstrate respect by their behavior in the classroom and staying on task. I agree that the students may not feel comfortable because it is different from their upbringing, but inquiry based is different for students with a traditional, lecture based background. From the research that I have read, the best way to move your classroom towards inquiry is to slowly integrate inquiry practices in so the students and the teacher are comfortable.
ReplyDeleteI really like the quote in the middle of your post. It makes you think about about how to teach things. Inquiry is very important in an effective classroom.
ReplyDeleteI agree that ELL students should be provided with an experience before learning the vocabulary that goes with it. This allows them to have something to connect the actual word to.
ReplyDeleteNot only do I think that this is a good model for ELL's, but for all students. I can't think of anyone that wouldn't benefit from this. I know some students can just memorize information, but that doesn't mean they completely understand what it is or the how and why.
This was such an interesting article. I, personally, don't have a lot of experience working with ELL's. I learned a lot about the process that goes into teaching these students. I believe that teaching is already such a challenge. When you start adding extra challenges on top of that, like language barriers, teaching only becomes more difficult. This article gives a lot of really great information about how to make these barriers less of a challenge.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of inquiry learning is something that I've read a little bit about during this blogging process. I have not really looked at it from an ELL perspective so this is really interesting to read about. I never thought about the fact that in some cultures teachers are highly respected and kids are taught not to question their teachers. Inquiry learning would be completely opposite from anything that they had every experienced before.
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