Chapter 4 of the Herrera book was interesting to me. I have been working on the alphabet with students in Kristi's 1c class. I am surprised at how many of them know the entire alphabet. I could definitely see how they struggled to match the graphemes to the phonemes. For example, I think "x" is a different phoneme in their language. Kristi said that she notices that they don't know how to pronounce x correctly. They say something that sounds like a z or "see". Maybe that is the phoneme for that grapheme in their language. I would be interested in learning a little more about some of the Asian languages. I know nothing about them. Again, I think it is important for teachers to know the background of their students, including a little bit of background of their native language. Even if students dont know all the background you know about them, it will help to inform instruction and creating a framework for a unit.

I find cognates to be very fascinating. I like that Herrera suggests that teachers should use cognates as much as possible to help students makes phonetic links between their primary language and English. In my lesson plan, I tried to use cognates in my teaching think aloud mode. (I can't remember what that is called- maybe "teacher think"?) Anyway, I thought out loud that "memorable" looks like the word "memory" and is related. Cognates were my best friend when I learned french. (I use learned very loosely in this context.) I can definitely understand how they would be helpful for students. Again, it just helps to create a context or framework for the students.

I am realizing how much ELL instruction is about the framework that you create. I see this over and over again in the literature that I read. I may sound like a broken record in saying that framework is important, but I see it so much in the literature too. I even have seen it in the laws that I read. As I look at the WIDA standards, I noticed that students don't need to make their own frameworks until Level 5. In Level 5, "students apply information to new contexts". Thus in the previous 4 levels, it is the responsibility of the teacher to make explain the contexts for them and to apply information to different contexts. It does certainly make more work for a teacher. It would be easier for the teacher if they just taught the new information without building various areas of connection. (This must be why so many of my teachers in high school taught material without contextual support.) As I've seen in the literature, it is absolutely vital that a teacher makes various connections, regardless of the extra work, otherwise the students are not going to retain the information.