BP5_1182009_Flickr Shines in ELL

In classrooms across the disciplines, students explore ideas, discover meaning, and draw conclusions from experiments and other experiences.  English students break into groups to apply lessons from centuries' old literature to today's cultural, economic, and social realities.  Chemistry students observe reactions and draw conclusions about what's happening at the chemical level.  Math students attempt to discover the principles that underlie formulas.  The concept of encouraging students to discover for themselves, to create meaning for themselves, and to apply their learning to their own world is familiar enough.

What would this kind of learning look like in an English Language Learners (ELL) classroom, and how could this be supported with technology resources?  Is there a way to encourage students to use technology in a kind of discovery method?


In a lesson uploaded to Scribd, Ekaterina Tolstova describes a process for teaching new verbs for English language learners.  The lesson plan presupposes that the students can recognize the English alphabet on a keyboard.  Students are instructed to enter verbs like "run" or "swim" into a Flickr search, and then to try to determine the meaning of the verb from the images that are collected.  The screenshot below shows a selection of the images that are returned searching "run."

The images returned for this term include both animals and people engaged in some form of running.  Other images are included that do not feature running per se, but one image (not shown here) showed all the gear needed to run a marathon, including shoes, watch, iPod, heart-rate monitor, t-shirt, and more.

The strength of the lesson plan is in both the visual nature of vocabulary acquisition, and the mediation of meaning.  "To run" can mean everything from "jog" to "sprint," and the variety of images returned from a Flickr search offers enough ways of meaning to allow the learner enough context to interact with meaning, and to arrive at a conclusion contextually, instead of merely textually.

References

[Untitled Screenshot].  Captured Nov. 8, 2009 from http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=run&w=all