To Define Is to Know

Abstract

Educators are immediately aware of the linguistic, literacy, and workplace or course material challenges that LESLLA learners face. Less readily apparent are the challenges such learners face when encountering school-based tasks and their associated ways of thinking. Because familiarity with such tasks and ways of thinking are built from an early age in formal education, teachers frequently do not realize that the tasks themselves, as well as the ways of thinking, are bewildering to LESLLA learners. To take an example, when a teacher or standardized test question asks in one form or another, "What is X?", learners are expected to provide salient characteristics, functions, and categories appropriate to the given term or concept. However, questions that ask for explicit definitions are not common in informal settings. LESLLA learners come from backgrounds of informal learning and often struggle to engage in age-appropriate formal education. Thus, school-based tasks and ways of thinking, such as defining, are largely unfamiliar to them and must be explicitly taught, just like langauge and emergent literacy skills. In this paper, we explore how to do so, using teaching of defining as an extended example. Once LESLLA learners have developed this skill, they can apply it across classroom, workplace training and, licensing preparation settings, all of which require them to define terms and concepts specific to their training or course work.