Writing Workshop for ELLs: Movie Scenes as Mentor Texts - Lesson 1

In a previous post, I argued that Language Sensitive mini lessons pose the most difficulty for ELLs in a writing workshop. While that may still be true, over the last few months, I have come to understand what now appears to be glaringly obvious. Craft lessons can cause significant difficulty to ELLs even if they are language agnostic.

What I overlooked earlier was the fact that ELLs are expected to get a mentor text and be affected by it enough to want to try the same technique in their writing, even in language-agnostic lessons. And getting a mentor text cannot be taken for granted as long as the mentor text is not in a language they are reasonably proficient at.

I have, in my ignorance, delivered many language agnostic mini lessons to ELLs with the assumption that the principle of writing being taught applies to all languages. While that is certainly true, it didn't occur to me that if the language of the mentor text is a barrier, the fact that the lesson is language agnostic no longer holds water.

To illustrate my point, consider the ubiquitous craft lesson, Show, Don't Tell. Many of my ELLs with vocabulary sizes often below 6000 word families struggle with Chekov's oft-quoted line, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass." That's just 16 words, but 20 out of 25 students in my 8th-grade class did not know the meaning of glint.

One might argue that the meaning of glint can be pre-taught or that students can guess it from context. Pre-teaching vocabulary certainly works with a short mentor text like this one. More often than not, writing workshop at the middle school level requires students to engage with much longer mentor texts. And enough has been written about how unreliable context clues are (1). In fact, I have found that context clues work only for students with already reasonable proficiency in English. But that's a story for another day.

Once again, I turned to movies for a solution and used movie scenes and songs to illustrate the principles of writing I wanted to teach. Here's what guided this decision: