A student biography card is a remarkable way of understanding and tracking the students’ progress. By employing this technique, a tutor can adjust the learning dynamics through techniques such as grouping and scaffolding thus meeting the students’ linguistic, sociocultural, academic, as well as cognitive needs. Essentially, students’ biographies have a basic function in teaching regarding acquiring the necessary information about the students which the instructor can use to determine the appropriate teaching techniques to employ. The sociocultural dimension of a student as documented in the biography revolves around the student’s home, community and previous schools that in a compounded manner form the background of the student.
To this end, as a CLD students’ instructor, understanding each student’s background regarding their origin or nationality is materialistic in determining the best instructional activities to implement towards making connections between the student’s background and the learning activities such as speaking, writing, reading and listening. For instance, for an Arabic student, I could encourage him or her to listen keenly to what is being taught during Arabic classes at the mosque and associate that together with the stories told at home by his or her family with the content being discussed in class. In making accommodations, I would give special attention to each student by asking them to listen to what another student is reading in an instructional activity then ask the student to narrate what he or she heard and subsequently write the summary with emphasis on grammar.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Under the linguistics section of the biographies, I would take a particular interest in every student’s first language mechanics. To this end, I will be able to identify similar aspects to the second language such as communication, comprehension, as well as expression. In a further move to accommodate the CLD students and their diversity, I would arrange learning activities such as reading a short excerpt in their first language then engage them in discussing the similarities pertaining to language mechanics. In essence, when the student realizes the similarities between the languages, he or she gains the confidence to learn the second language through association. As such, the difficulty in understanding English as a second language diminishes resulting in improved engagement through interaction regardless of the poor pronunciation.
The student biographies as well show the learning styles that the students prefer; whereas some are visual learners, some prefer regular practice through speaking or writing, and others learn from listening to the more proficient students thus emulating them. As such, through these techniques, they gradually advance through the language levels in time. Promoting their language development will, therefore, require acknowledging and comprehending every learning technique that each student desires. In turn, I would use the techniques in developing their cognitive abilities. For instance, for the visual students, I would accommodate them through visual representations such as DOTS charts and graphical representations that make connections between the first language and the second language or between the class content and background dimensions such as stories told at home.
The student biographies also divulge information regarding the preferred grouping and partnering. As such, knowing their preferences makes it easier to determine how to group them for instructional activities thereby augmenting their interaction and socialization which ultimately opens them up to the language as well as asking for help from peers when they need it. This is consistent with the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) strategy as discussed previously on the platform. In essence, the CLT concept or approach allows for communication of the ESL and CLD students through content vocabulary regardless of the situation they are faced with. In this regard, not only would the concept be used as a teaching strategy but also as an asset or tool to improve lesson involvement of the introverted students whose biographies demonstrate lack of preferences regarding groupings and partnerships.
Ultimately, while the visual learners will be accommodated in the lessons through charts and the introverted through the CLT, grouping would work best for those who learn through listening and emulation. On the other hand, word-for-word writing and pronunciation practices would enhance language acquisition for those who prefer constant practice. Nevertheless, all these techniques would be compounded, and no one student would be exempted from any of them. This helps cover all the learning dynamics and students’ needs regarding learning English.
