‘Beyond SIOP’

BY CHING-CHING LIN
REPRINTED FROM EDUCATION WEEK, OCTOBER 06, 2022

ESL teachers tend to see our job in social studies or other content area classrooms as providing language support, building fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills in content areas. We help learners develop the skills necessary for academic success and expand their access to the general education curriculum.

Essentially, the above-mentioned classroom practices imply that students cannot meaningfully interact with the text until they have understood the distinctive text features of what they read or hear. Such views not only treat reading and writing as context-independent skills, but also reflect an oversimplified, linear view of language acquisition that often leads to missed opportunities to engage multilingual learners’ complex literacy practices and agency.

In contrast, an asset-based lens would look at students positively, assessing what they bring with them as strengths and embracing these strengths. What if, instead of approaching students based upon our perceptions of their weaknesses, we purposefully position ourselves as a co-learner, questing, connecting, probing, deeply curious, focusing on students’ strengths and empowering them as creators of knowledge?

Here are a few suggestions to infuse asset-based approaches into a fifth grade SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) lesson for English-language learners about the Dust Bowl to move our goals beyond providing language support in the social studies classroom.

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By connecting students to their local community, teachers can use their power of understanding, curiosity, and empathy to drive inquiry-based learning in the social studies classroom that aims to affirm students’ cultural and linguistic identities.