EDEL433-Melissa's blog

Today I worked with an ELL student on his accelerated math. His English isn't the greatest and what he can read most of the time he can not understand. One particular problem was a JCU. The problem was about goldfish and guppies.

So and so had 3 goldfish and some guppies. They had 7 fish altogether. How many guppies did they have?

We talked about problems similar to this one that would be difficult for an ELL. Sometimes ELL students are unaware of parts that belong to a whole. For example, with the problem about the student counted out the 3 fish. He didn't realize that a guppy was a type of fish so he had trouble solving the problem. Once I explained to him that guppies were fish also, he solved the problem with the direct model using paper clips as fish. He counted out 3, then he added paper clips until he arrived at 7 . After he went back and counted the number of fish he added to the original 3. It is so cool to see the students solve problems in real life. We watch them on video, but there's something about seeing it in person. I feel bad for ELL students. How many of them could actually solve word problems with little difficulty if they did not have a language barrier. The student I observed had no trouble at all once he knew that a guppy was a type of fish. These are things teachers sometimes aren't aware of. Certain accommodations should be considered when writing word problems, especially for ELLs.