Remediation Plan: An American Studies Unit

for Farsi Speakers

Marvyn A. MahleTSL 660

May 4, 2010

سلمFarsi/Arabic Script: “Salam” (“Peace” or “Hello”)

The Setting

Remediate selected portions of the months-long What Is an American? Unit for Farsi speaker..

This unit is huge and covers many topics, all centered around the concept of “Americanness”.

Unit can present problems even for native English speakers.

Student Profile: Hossain, mid-beginner level ELL, 15 years old, 10th grade, in America 6 months.

Typical Language Transfer Issues Encountered by Farsi Speakers

Difficulties writing Roman alphabet Mis-spellings common, especially with vowels,

because Farsi uses diacritical marks, not individual letters, for vowels

Word order sometimes scrambled: Farsi uses SOV sentence structure; English SVO

Positive and comparative adjectives placed after nouns; English places adjectives before nouns

Selected Activities & Remediation Strategies - A.

Activity 1. Initial Paragraph defining What Is an American?

Remediation Strategy: Vocabulary & Language Development

Sample activities:● Provide a vocabulary list of terms to use in

paragraph, with English and Farsi equivalents● Provide exemplar paragraph for comparison

Vocabulary Table

Term English Definition Farsi Equivalent

Immigrant Person who comes to America from another country

Freedom Legal right to do whatever a person wants to do, within the law

Free speech Legal right to say whatever a person wants to say

Religion Belief in a supreme being and worship of that being, for example, Judaism, Islam, Christianity

Exemplar ParagraphA n A m e r i c a n i s s o m e o n e w h o l i v e s i n A m e r i c a . A n A m e r i c a n m a y b e b o r n i n A m e r i c a o r

m i g h t c o m e t o A m e r i c a a s a n i m m i g r a n t o r r e f u g e e . A m e r i c a n s h a v e m a n y f r e e d o m s . T h e y c a n

s a y a l m o s t a n y t h i n g a n d n o t g o t o j a i l . T h i s i s c a l l e d f r e e s p e e c h . A l s o , A m e r i c a n s c a n h a v e a n y

r e l i g i o n t h e y w a n t . T h e A m e r i c a n g o v e r n m e n t d o e s n o t f o r c e p e r s o n s t o h a v e a r e l i g i o n .

A m e r i c a n s c a n w o r k f o r m a n y b u s i n e s s e s o r s t a r t t h e i r o w n b u s i n e s s . A m e r i c a n s h a v e a

d e m o c r a c y . T h i s m e a n s t h a t A m e r i c a n s e l e c t t h e i r l e a d e r s f r o m d i f f e r e n t p a r t i e s .

Assessment Approach

Assessment will concentrate on inclusion of the main ideas as developed from the vocabulary table and identifying any errors introduced by the key Farsi/English obstacles mentioned above.

I will have Hossain correct such errors before I give a grade.

Selected Activities & Remediation Strategies - B.

Activity 3. Life Histories as Historical Sources Remediation Strategy: Metacognition &

Authentic Assessment Sample activities:

● Provide short lecture/explanation of oral histories.

● Navigate to Federal Writer's Project website and show examples.

● Have Hossain explain in his own words what an oral history is.

Select a photo from the Federal Writer's project website

Assume the role of one of the subjects in photo

Hossain writes a 7-sentence paragraph about his day as the subject in photo

Writing About an Authentic Photo

Assessment Approach Assessment will concentrate on inclusion of the

main ideas as developed from questions on the photo:

● What are the workers doing?● Where are the workers?● Are the workers happy? Sad?● What kind of equipment/tools do the workers

use?

...and identifying any errors introduced by the key Farsi/English obstacles mentioned above.

Selected Activities & Remediation Strategies - C.

Activity 4. Finding a Life History Remediation Strategy: Explicit Instruction Sample activities:

● Use Smartboard to navigate to What Is an American? website

● Demonstrate how to:● Search using key words● Select images and copy to local computer● Insert images into a Word document

● Have Hossain replicate steps while observe/assist.

Assessment Approach

Assessment will consist of observing and verifying that Hossain understands the procedures needed to search efficiently and to insert an image into a document.

Possible extra credit could be given if Hossain creates and posts a Word document with text and image(s) for my perusal.

Sample Graphic Organizers

Source: edhelper.com