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"Supporting English language learners: A practical guide for Ontario educators Grades 1 to 8 Supporting English language learners: A practical guide for Ontario educators Grades 1 to 8, 2008, is designed to support and help teachers, principals, and other education professionals in elementary schools work effectively with English language learners. This resource guide provides a rich source of practical techniques, research findings, and strategies that can be put to immediate use in the classroom and in the school. It also contains valuable information on working with families and communities, and as a whole school, to enable English language learners achieve curriculum expectations while they learn English."

| 1. What is Poetry? | 2. Reading the Poem | 3. Denotation and Connotation | 4. Imagery | 5. Figurative Language 1: Metaphor, Personification, and Metonymy | 6. Figurative Language 2: Symbol and Allegory | 7. Figurative Language 3: Paradox, Overstatement, understatement, Irony and Allusion | 8. Tone and Musical Devices | 9. Rhythm and Meter | 10. Patterns of Traditional Poems | MLA Style Citation of this Web Page |

Figurative language is a tool that an author employs (or uses) to help the reader visualize (or see) what is happening in a story or poem. Some common types of figurative language are: simile, metaphor, alliteration, onomatopoeia, idiom, puns, and sensory language. Below are some ways to introduce these concepts to your class and some activities. There are also links to other sites for more help.

Many Roots, Many Voices is designed to support teachers, principals, and other education professionals at the elementary and secondary levels in working effectively with English language learners. In it, you will find a rich source of practices and strategies that can be put to immediate use in the school and the classroom. You will also find an in-depth exploration of the English language learner, and an annotated list of references and resources for further reading and study.

Teaching English Language Learners to Read Featuring Diane August, Margarita Calderón, and Fred Genesee discussing best practices for teaching English language learners."

Experiencing the language of great poets provides a rich learning context for students, giving them access to the best examples of how words can be arranged in unique ways. By studying the works of renowned poets across cultures and histories, students extract knowledge about figurative language and poetic devices from masters of the craft. In this lesson, students learn about personification by reading and discussing poems by Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and Langston Hughes. Then they use the poems as a guide to brainstorm lists of nouns and verbs that they randomly arrange to create personification in their own poems.

The Ontario Language Standards and Benchmarks

"FVR: Second Language Readers FVR is a way to achieve advanced second language proficiency. (Cho & Krashen, 1994) Reading books from one series, or of one type, not only allows the reader to stay with material he finds interesting, but also allows the reader to take advantage of background information to make the text more comprehensible. (Cho & Krashen, 1994)"

In this lesson, students analyze a writer's use of sensory details and descriptive language in a New York Times article reviewing the Apple iPhone. Then, students are asked to write original product reviews which incorporate some of the descriptive writing techniques identified and evaluated in class.

LANGUAGE ARTS Articles, E-Mail and Web Links about Language Arts

GRADES 6-8, "Spice Up Your Poetry with Figurative Language"

poetry unit

What is media literacy? "Media literacy refers to composing, comprehending, interpreting, analyzing, and appreciating the language and texts of...both print and nonprint. The use of media presupposes an expanded definition of 'text'...print media texts include books, magazines, and newspapers. Nonprint media include photography, recordings, radio, film, television, videotape, video games, computers, the performing arts, and virtual reality...constantly interact...(and) all (are) to be experienced, appreciated, and analyzed and created by students.

The project is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920. The full text of each volume of poetry is being converted into digital form and coded in Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML) using the TEI Guidelines, with various forms of access provided through the WWW.

Great Poems to Teach Compiled by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, this list contains 341 poems submitted by teachers who participated in a workshop organized by TWC. Selected for participation by C. K. Williams, teachers applying to the workshop were asked to supply a list of poems which they had successfully taught in high school English and Language Arts classrooms.

Reading and writing workshops are instructional strategies as well as organizational frameworks for language arts instruction.

Reading and Writing Workshop webpage

"Elizabeth Birr Moje, professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture in Educational Studies at the University of Michigan, and Sunil Iyengar, director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts discuss the new literacy issues presented by computers and the internet."

Poetry Unit

"Poets.org has partnered with TextTelevision to offer TextFlows, an alternative approach to reading and experiencing poetry. By converting text dynamically into Flash animation, poems are revealed phrase by phrase through motion and light, and at a pace controlled by the reader. The simplified words and crisp motion fixes one's attention on the subtleties of language, increasing involvement, engagement, and understanding"