In the next lesson in the Building Field stage, students read a text entitled “The Advantages of Amnesty” (http://www.ehow.com/info_8260083_advantages-amnesty.html) (see Appendix J).
To prepare students to read, I explained that this text was written by a lawyer and began with an introductory paragraph asserting that entering the United States illegally is considered a crime that can be punished by sending the illegal person back to his or her country, which is called deportation. I further explained that illegal entry into the United States can also be punished by being sent to jail or by both being imprisoned and then deported. I further
summarized that in the introduction, this author informed readers that granting amnesty is one idea that has been proposed for dealing with the millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States and then went on to outline five advantages, or good things, about this idea or proposal.
I read the brief introduction while students read along silently, and we discussed the final sentence, “Although this is a politically contentious issue, proponents of granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants argue that there are several advantages to granting amnesty” (www.eHow.com). I asked students to recall whether the word proponents referred to people who are for or against an idea. The response was, “For.” I then asked which word, which had appeared in the previous lesson’s text, meant the opposite of the word proponents, that is people who are “against” a certain idea. One student recalled the word opponents.
I focused students by asking them to find a synonym for the phrase political hot potato in the sentence, “Although this is a politically contentious issue, proponents of granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants argue there are several advantages to granting amnesty.” Several students responded, “Politically contentious issue,” and I affirmed that political hot potato issues can be defined as “contentious or controversial issues.”
To elaborate, I wrote contentious = controversial at the Elmo for students to see and restated that contentious or controversial issues are ones that people generally have strong feelings about one way or the other. I further elaborated that these strong feelings generally divide people into proponents, or people who support an idea, and opponents, or people who are against an idea. I emphasized that contentious issues generate a lot of controversy, or debate, on TV, on the radio, on the Web, and in newspapers.
I also invited students to pronounce the words contentious and controversial after me a few times. We also spent a few moments studying the two different spelling patterns for the sound /sh/ in these two adjectives, thereby connecting spelling to students’ understanding of meanings in context, a strategy that Rose and Martin (2012) recommended as particularly useful for ELLs.
Students then worked with partners to read the five brief paragraphs with subheadings (e.g., The United States is a Nation of Immigrants, Immigrants Increase Diversity, Immigrants Take Undesirable Jobs, Amnesty Would Boost the Economy, and Amnesty encourages Legal Immigration) that outlined the advantages to granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants. Students were asked to annotate any unfamiliar words and phrases or confusing sentences. In response to students’ annotations, I explained the terms abject poverty, perpetuates, increases transparency, boost the economy, and more completely integrate by employing combinations of the Focus, Identify, Affirm, and Elaborate sequence.
In addition to these words and phrases, two sentences required a commonsense explanation: (1) “Under this theory, once undocumented workers become documented through the amnesty process, they will be better protected and the industries they work in will be more accountable,” and (2) “Amnesty would also allow undocumented workers to bargain collectively and assert their rights to employers without fear of deportation” (www.eHow.com). I explained the meaning of these sentences in commonsense terms that all students could understand.
In keeping with my central purpose to build background about the amnesty issue in these Building Field lessons, I chose not to provide a lengthy explanation of the way that the author used language as a tool to create meanings in sentences such as these two example sentences. In other words, at this point, I chose not to explain that, in the second sentence above, the author
began with a nominal structure (e.g., amnesty) and used a modal and causal link (e.g., would allow workers to bargain and assert) as well as evaluative language (e.g., assert, rights, without fear) in order to convey her stance in an authoritative way by naming a thing, linking it to a result, and judging this result (Schleppegrell, 2006).
This instructional decision was also made based on the plan to include explicit attention to these linguistic resources and build a metalanguage for teaching and learning about these language tools in the lessons designed to guide students to read and write academically-valued persuasive argument essays through following the entire Reading to Learn cycle. These lessons are described in Chapters 5 through 8.
After discussing the unfamiliar words, phrases, and sentences in “The Advantages of Amnesty” text, students worked in pairs to complete the task (see Appendix K) of identifying which of the claims about the advantages of amnesty they considered to be the most powerful and explaining their thinking. In addition, as a connection to prior learning in the standard curricular materials about evaluating sources, this task asked students to consider the reliability of these claims and to explain whether the arguments were trustworthy.
In a whole-class share-out near the end of the lesson, a few pairs of students shared their responses. For example, Asha, a ninth grade female focal student from Somalia, and her partner explained that the argument that granting amnesty was advantageous to the United States due to the success of the historical trend for welcoming immigrants was the most powerful. Asha had written, “I think the first claim is the most powerful because the most important reason for undocumented immigrants to come to the U.S. is to start a better life.” In evaluation of the trustworthiness of the arguments, Asha had written, “I think these five arguments for amnesty are
reliable because it (meaning the examples offered to support each argument) is happening in reality.”
To end the lesson, I asked the students if reading this text had persuaded them that amnesty would be a good response to the concern about the millions of undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. Several students replied that they weren’t sure given that they had only learned “what is good” about amnesty thus far and that they didn’t yet know “the other side.” I replied that, in fact, the homework was to complete the last part of the day’s worksheet by writing a list of potential reasons why many people are opponents of granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants.