Article Critique - Teacher Learning and ELL Reading Achievement in Sheltered Instruction Classrooms: Linking Professional Development to Student Development

Article Critique - Teacher Learning and ELL Reading Achievement in Sheltered Instruction Classrooms: Linking Professional Development to Student Development

Introduction

This paper critically reviews the article written by Ellen McIntyre, Diane Kyle and Cheng-Ting Chen and Marco Munoz and Scott Beldon. This review briefly analyzes the effectiveness of the structure of the article, examining how the information is presented and investigate the reader may efficiently access the information. Moreover, critically analyzes the article by evaluating the article clarity, objectivity, relevance, accuracy.



Discussion

The authors began with an abstract that concisely sketched the article's purpose, its key points, methodology, results and conclusion. The article has headings and sub-headings with good structure and flow of paragraphs that make the information easily accessible.

The introduction of the article offers the rationale and background information behind the article. In this article, the research problem was clearly stated. The key aim of the article was to assess the reading achievement of elementary English Language Learners in the classroom where teachers used a renowned model of sheltered instruction - SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol). Moreover, the introduction of the article also provided the justification of conducting research. For example, there is a rapid increase in language minority learners in the US; however, reported low level of achievement. The section of introduction offered a relevant background information and purpose of the study which allowed the reader to gain the understanding and importance of the context and study.

Later section of the article presented a theoretical framework for this research. The authors employed a socio-cultural theory of teaching and learning on which the study is grounded. The perspective of socio-cultural proposed that learning refers to an appropriating process “means for thinking,” which are made accessible by social representatives who in beginning act as analysts and directs in the cultural apprenticeship of individual (McIntyre, Kyle and Chen & Munoz and Beldon, 2010). It is not merely that children learn from the external environment and via social exchange, which means that the concrete of interaction in the social context, such as gesture or language are fit the individual learning style to create the intramental tools for remembering, problem-solving and thinking. The socio-cultural theory of teaching and learning is appropriate and in line with research questions as the research assessed the learning of both children and adults.

The article had adopted mixed research methodology that engaged both qualitative and quantitative study. The mixed methodology is turned out to be effected as it creates a link between student achievement, teacher learning and professional development, which helped the investigators to determine the considerable differences in classrooms where SIOP model was put into practice. The key objective of this article was to evaluate ELL's reading achievement growth in the classroom of trained teachers in the SIOP model implementation in comparison to learners of unskilled teachers in the SIOP model implementation.

Researchers used SIOP model that comprised of eight components, namely, building ...