Using Students’ “Daily News” Stories in Primary-Grade ELL Classes

In this article in The Reading Teacher, University of Wyoming/Laramie researcher Patrick Manyak describes “Daily News”, a literacy activity he observed in two California English-immersion grade 1 and 2 classrooms. This was one of a number of balanced literacy strategies used by these two teachers. Here’s how this 15-minute activity works:

• Every morning, while students are sitting in front of their teacher on a rug, the teacher asks if students want to share news of events from their home or school lives – “things we’ve done, important or exciting things.” Typically, one or two students volunteer.

• For each student, the teacher prompts him or her to tell the story, adding detail to their narratives by asking who, when, where, and what questions, and encouraging other students to ask questions. For example, one student told about how his father had incurred a serious eye injury while trimming trees in his job as a landscaper. 

• The teacher then scribes the story onto a large sheet of lined paper. If the student tells the story in Spanish, the teacher asks for students’ help translating it into English, and writes it in English on the sheet. This allows even the most limited-English students to participate fully.

• While writing, the teacher draws attention to particular spelling patterns and punctuation, asks students to stretch out words, and asks for spelling suggestions. Students increasingly take part in prompting their peers on letter sounds, spelling, and punctuation. The goal here is to model the thought processes that occur while writing – editing, details, translating spoken words into written words, punctuation, etc.

• The class then reads each narrative chorally, with the teacher making sure that everyone is reading aloud.

• All the daily news sheets are saved and, at the end of each month, bound into a book and added to the class library.

• In the second semester, the teachers gradually releases responsibility, turning the task of writing these stories over to students. Two student reporters scribe stories without the teacher’s intervention. At the end of the literacy block, the class reconvenes on the rug and the teacher leads the class in editing the day’s stories. The authors then recopy the revised version for inclusion in the monthly volume.

Manyak believes that Daily News serves as a valuable bridge between children’s experiences outside school and their literacy learning. “As a consequence of the union between the formal school curriculum and familiar world of the children,” he writes, “the activity prompted the children to weave reading and writing into the fabric of their daily lives… Furthermore, the activity was characterized by a particularly comfortable and lively atmosphere. The teachers clearly enjoyed and contributed to this atmosphere.” This continued after students began to write their news stories independently.

Manyak sums up the advantages and caveats of this literacy activity for English language learners:

• Daily News is a far richer activity for building English proficiency than drill and worksheets.
• It provides a “robust context for second-language acquisition that simultaneously provides ELL students a comfortable, familiar environment to try out English and allows them to work carefully with the teacher to elaborate on their utterances and see their words set down in print.”
• The peer translation that takes place almost every day is an “intriguing instructional tool,” says Manyak, because it boosts the participation of students with limited English in a low-risk activity.
• Daily News gives students practice collaborating in a literacy activity, honing their social and language skills simultaneously.
• It is an excellent way for teachers to incorporate students’ out-of-school experiences with classroom instruction.
• For this activity to work best, the teacher should be bilingual and able to translate and interpret peer suggestions.

“What’s Your News? Portraits of a Rich Language and Literacy Activity for English-Language Learners” by Patrick Manyak in The Reading Teacher, March 2008 (Vol. 61, #6, p. 450-458), no e-link available, but the author can be contacted at pmanyak@uwyo.edu. 

From the Marshall Memo #230