IDENTIFYING SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES
Generalizations from Classroom Instruction That Works
Classroom Instruction That Works identifies four generalizations from the research on identifying similarities and differences.
1. Teacher-directed activities deepen understanding for students and increase their ability to use knowledge. In teacher-directed activities, teachers provide a variety of explicit instruction regarding similarities and differences. Doing this allows students to better use the knowledge they are learning, because they will have received the knowledge linguistically and non-linguistically.
During such an activity, you explain the steps and provide the information to be compared. When teaching ELLs how to identify similarities and differences, here are some tips that will facilitate student understanding:
• Represent what you say with visuals
• Use short, simple sentences with clear articulation
• Include gestures and facial expressions
• Use high-frequency vocabulary (and remember that nouns are better than pronouns)
• Reduce idiomatic expressions
The best advice given by mainstream teachers with ELLs in their classrooms is: When you think you have modeled enough, do it one more time!
2. Students should independently identify similarities and differences. Have students begin with a familiar topic, such as comparing school lunches over two days. Then, lead them into more content related comparisons. This will help bridge the gap between teacher-directed and student-directed activities.
Preproduction students in particular will benefit from comparing familiar items because the familiar is here and now; it is laden with context and it forces us to use everyday vocabulary. Jim Cummins (1984) refers to this type of communication as “cognitively undemanding and context embedded” (p. 138). Context-embedded situations provide many clues for ELLs. The more talking opportunities that can take place in a meaningful communicative context (i.e., related to a student’s background), the more successful the student will be.
As students move to unfamiliar contexts, they are pushed into using the vocabulary of academic English. Cummins (1984) calls this type of communication “cognitively demanding and context reduced” (p. 139). When students are asked to identify similarities and differences in order to gain insights, see distinctions, and change perspectives, the task becomes more academic in nature. Cummins notes that the reason many ELLs do not develop strong academic skills is because much of their initial instruction takes place in cognitively demanding, context-reduced situations that are inappropriate for the early stages of language acquisition.
3. When students represent similarities and differences in graphic or symbolic form, it enhances their ability to identify and understand similarities and differences. As we know, accompanying verbal or written information with a visual representation helps ELLs make connections and construct meaning.
Representing similarities and differences in graphic or symbolic form should accompany both teacher-directed and student-directed activities. The advantage of having students use graphics and symbols is that they are required to use language to explain these nonlinguistic representations.
4. There are four different forms of identifying similarities and differences: comparing, classifying, creating analogies, and creating metaphors. Each of these forms is accompanied by language complexities that may need to be addressed and modified depending upon the student’s stage of language acquisition. For example, Preproduction and Early Production students will do well with comparing two items according to various attributes (e.g., color, size, shape, function, composition, parts). Such an activity is appropriate at this level because it can involve pointing and one- or two-word responses. Speech Emergence students will do well with teacher-directed analogies as they fill in the blanks for relationships (e.g., “thermometer is to ______ as odometer is to _________”). Developing metaphors, however, requires sentences that express a student’s ability to identify a general or basic pattern in a specific topic and then find another topic that is different but has the same general pattern. Students will need to be in the two final stages of language development before they can create student-directed metaphors.
