The teacher leads a sentence building activity to help students improve their understanding of English grammar. She begins with the simple sentence "A kit fox has ears" and shows how to make it more complex by adding adjectives. She translates the basic and complex sentences into Russian and Japanese, languages spoken by emergent bilingual students. By comparing the versions in different languages, students see that adjectives are placed in the same part of the sentence across languages. This helps emergent bilinguals feel proud of their home languages and makes the English grammar lesson more meaningful, while developing all students' metalinguistic awareness.

1. Maria Albella Cubedo
Irene Medina Soriano
Laura Viciano Soriano

2. Teacher give a
students a basic
sentence and show
them how they can
add a particular
grammatical structure
make it more
complex.

3. EBL (Emergent bilinguals)


Create more elaborate
sentences when speaking and
writing in English.
improve their comprehension
of the meaning of each
grammatical component in
the English sentences
Students who only speak
English.

develop their awareness of
other languages.
Sentence Bulding

4. 1.Teacher decides what grammatical component want to teach.
Analyze what kind of grammatical components, students use correctly
and which need improve. Then, indentify ONE of these grammatical
components to focus on for the sentence building activity
2.Create a bilingual or multilingual model sentence.
So, you will have to model sentence.The basic, one you show students
first, and then the more elaborate one you build with students.
3. Start whit a basic version of the sentence:
We started writing the most basic of prayer. We must show our students
the phrase in English and in their native language to see what it means. We
will tell the students that use this simple sentence to create a longer and
more elaborate.

5. 4. Model how to build a more complex sentence:

We write the basic sentence on paper, cut it where we want to change it
and add the words we want to make it more complex.

In this way the student sees physically change.
5. Compare and contrast the English and home language sentences:

Have your emergent bilinguals and your students who speak English
compare and contrast the languages.

What do they notice about how each of the languages incorporates the
new grammatical component?

Is it placed in the same part of sentence?

Does it have different position?

Does is use the same number of words as in English?

6. 6. Provide guided practice:
Model after the way to build a prayer especially grammatical structure,
students will practice with teacher assistance using similar basic phrases.
7. Provide independent practice:
It is essential that students see how they can apply the sentence structure
more complex its structure, becoming a part of the use of their language.

7. 
Leveraging the animal unit, in which students must
identify, describe and compare the physical structures of
animals, as well as add adjectives to the parts of these
animals, the teacher decided to do a sentence building
activity with the class.

8. 


First, teacher takes one sentence: "A kit fox has
large, pointed ears“.
Secondly, she creates a basic version of the sentence by
taking out the adjectives: “A kit fox has ears”.
Then, she translate both sentences into Russian and
Japanese, the languages spoken by emergent bilinguals in
her classroom.
A kit fox has ears
 лиса есть уши


キツネ 耳を持っている

9. 
She highlight each characters in blue and green, and she tell students
what they mean.

The teacher realizes that Japanese and Russian adjectives are among fox
and ears.


A kit fox has large, pointed ears.


A kit fox has large ears.
Лиса имеет большие уши
Лиса имеет большие, заостренные уши


キツネは大きな耳を持っている
キツネは大きな尖った耳を持っている

10. 
By comparing different languages, the first grades also see that
Russian, Japanese, and English all put the describing words before the
thing they describe.

Even though the emergent bilinguals in this class weren't literate in their
home languages, they were proud to see their languages next to
English, and to have them be a part of the lesson.

Making connections between languages made the English sentence
building more meaningful for them.

English speakers in the class enjoy the challenge of looking at different
symbols and trying to find patterns.

This activity develop all students’ metalinguistic awareness.

11. THANK YOU SO MUCH!