Literacy Matters - Winter 2020

their home language. To do this, students must consider the context, the audience, and the purpose of their speech and match it to the setting (Hollie, p. 175, 2012; Zwiers, 2008). Zwiers suggests modeling oral academic language by implementing sentence starters, pace and emphasis, and repetition. An example of teacher and student dialogue that includes sentence starters, pace, emphasis, and repetition, similar to the one Zwiers’ illustrates (p. 45) may look like the example in Figure 2.

culture. Additionally, the speakers also expand on the storyline and make visible some of the less obvious nuances of the film.

Tier two vocabulary in the first seven minutes of Harris’ interview include anticipated, cultural, basking, expectations, exceeded, enthusiastic, absorb, fully-realized, vast, conceptual, concrete, provocative, crossover, sterile, franchise, detriment, and indestructible. Similar to Serial, the language used in the podcast is conversational with plenty of opportunities for students to hear context-specific language related to film review and content analysis as well as to hear the social language of speakers from across a number of professions and backgrounds. Other high interest podcasts for middle school and high school students may include fiction podcasts like Becoming Mother Nature (2018), The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel (2016), Six Minutes (2018), and Welcome to Night Vale (2012). Nonfiction podcasts students might enjoy are Stuff You Missed In History Class (2015), The Sporkful (2018); and American Scandal (2018). Like teaching with the novel Return to Sender, teaching with nonfiction and fiction podcasts offer opportunities to draw students in to issues that are complicated and complex, while the podcaster models fluency and academic language. Beyond the reading of contemporary student chosen novels, podcasts are a democratizing digital tool for the 21st century, bringing volume to stories, people, places, professions, and experiences students may not otherwise have known. Additionally, studying and analyzing podcasts can motivate students to create, share, and publish their own original podcasts through streaming platforms. Oral Modeling as Culturally Responsive Practice Hollie (2012) advocates for implementing contrastive analysis or “the practice of comparing the structure of two languages” as one aspect of culturally responsive academic language practice (p. 175). Hollie asserts that contrastive analysis builds students’ abilities to recognize the difference between home languages and standard English, builds proficiency in editing grammar and structure, and expands students’ abilities to express knowledge in written and oral form (p. 175) while also rejecting deficit views of home languages that differ from the language spoken at school. Instead of classifying student language as wrong, slang, or improper, Hollie promotes affirmation with terms like translate, switch, or “say in school language” (p. 174). Sentence switching is an activity that allows students to take a piece of writing (from novels, poetry, songs, or their own writing) and translate it into Standard English. Once students have completed the translation, they compare the sounds of the two examples and identify what rules might account for the differences. Similarly, retellings invite students listen to or read an excerpt of text that uses Standard English and then to retell the same story in their home language. When students retell the story, they audio record it and then listen to and analyze the differences between their recording and the text (Hollie, pp. 174-5).

Reading Matters Teaching Matters

Figure 2. Modeling teaching and student talk about Hamilton (Miranda, 2016) . Adapted from Building academic language: Essential practices for content classrooms (p. 45), by J. Zwiers, 2008, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Copyright 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The teacher sets up the student with academic language sentence starters and then restates responses after the student answers. The teacher places emphasis on particular aspects of the dialogue and also validates the students’ responses while reinforcing academic language. Consequently, the teacher translates the academic language equivalent to some of the students’ responses while the students share their understanding of and evidence from the text. Zwiers (2008) also encourages the use of prompt posters (p. 106) or posters with open-ended questions that may help students develop more robust responses to higher order thinking questions. See figure 3 for an example of prompt posters for use with the play, Hamilton (Miranda, 2016) and the podcast, Serial (Koenig, 2014).

Role-playing invites students to consider particular scenarios or scenes where they might use Standard English or

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