Preparing ELLs for Opinion Writing: Prioritizing Oral Rehearsal

Before we jump into lesson one of our published opinion unit, we prepare our students with a of week of genre immersion. The goal of this immersion is to encourage students to sound like the genre. This simply means students produce oral language that follows the structural and linguistic patterns of the genre. In order for students to successfully write these opinions and justifications, they first need to be able to say them. If they can say it, they can (most likely) write it.  

We created a series of writing workshop lessons to support this language development. Writing workshop includes a mini-lesson, independent practice, and a closure, or share. We decided to prepare our class, which is primarily ELLs, for the specific work of the first bend, or section, of the unit. In this bend, students will evaluate a collection of items brought from home to determine which they think is the best and explain why. They will then evaluate each other's collections and decide if they agree or disagree with their peers' choices. 

Mini-Lesson

Warm-Up

1. Review definitions for "opinion" and "reason" using Whole Brain Teaching (WBT) techniques. If you don't know WBT, definitely click the link!
2. Shared Reading of Opinion poem and shared opinion writing from the previous day.

Here are the charts and poem we used:

Direct Instruction/Active Engagement 

1. Reveal a labeled collection (collection name labeled in purple, each item labeled in green)
2. Think aloud, observing features, and select the best item.
3. Use the "reason cards" to support opinion
4. Use a color-coded cloze to generate an opinion and justification sentence. Purple represents the name of the collection, green the selected item, and blue the reason.
5. Read aloud/echo read sentences together.

For the demonstration, we specifically chose collections that would allow us to utilize language from each reason categories.

Day One: Writing Tools (erasable marker, crayon, marker, pen, pencil)

Day Two: Candy (Swedish Fish, Sour Patch Kids, Life Savor mints, Hershey Kisses)

Day Three: Movies (Jaws, Finding Nemo, Transformers, Coco)

Day Four: Pets (snake, hairless cat, collie, fish, turtle)

Day Five: Shirts (scratchy sweater, fluffy sweatshirt, tank top, t-shirt)

Independent Practice 

Around the room, we set up five different collections. Each collection was labeled in purple and each item was labeled in green. Again, these colors correspond to the cloze chart.  We placed the "reason cards" on a ring at each center. 

Students were heterogeneously grouped for this activity.  Each day, they visited a different collection center. Their task was to choose the best item in the collection. Using the "reason cards" as a guide, they negotiated a justification for their selection.  We met briefly with the groups, coaching and differentiating instruction based on the individual needs of the students.   

After about twenty minutes, the groups were instructed to come to the carpet with the purple collection label and the winning green item label. 

Share

On the carpet, groups quickly shared the winning item and the reasons for their selection during a brief turn and talk. Next, we revisited a Shared Writing piece from the previous day to help students internalize the structure and language of the genre. Finally, we selected one collection to write about as a class. 

Here's what our share time looked like across the week:

Monday 
Topic: Playground Equipment 
Method: Shared Writing using the cloze sentences  

Tuesday 
Topic: Balls 
Method: Shared Writing using the cloze sentences 

Wednesday
Topic: Blocks
Method: Shared Writing (no cloze)

Thursday
Topic: Books
Method: Shared Writing (no cloze)

Friday
Topic: Cars
Method: Shared Writing and Interactive Writing

As the week progressed, we released scaffolding so students took more control of the task. We started the week with a highly scaffolded piece of writing. Using the cloze sentences as a template, the teacher elicited the content from the students, guiding them to clearly see the structure of the sentence as she scribed.  We removed the cloze template mid-week as students became more confident with the syntax and grammar of the sentence.  Students were consistently producing oral language that "sounded like the genre" so we decided to Share the Pen during the lesson.     

Genre immersion activities, like the ones presented here, provide ELLs with a solid foundation for sharing and writing strong opinions. 

With informed teaching and the proper scaffolding, ELLs at any level CAN engage in grade-level writing tasks. It is true that ELLs need time to develop the language of school, but we, as teachers, can maximize that time by designing instruction that is focused, relevant and meaningful. If you missed a post in the Preparing ELLs for Opinion Writing Series, you can find it here:


Preparing ELLs for Opinion Writing: Introduction

Part One: Choosing Language Objectives

Part Two: Teaching Academic Language
Part Three: Developing Reasons

And as always, we'd love to hear from you!