Week 2. Background.

Who are the learners?

I am going to research a class of 8 students with learning disabilities (LD). It is the 11th grade, so they are 16-17 years old and enrolled in the TEFL (teaching English as a Foreign Language) program of the Ministry of Education of Israel. There are three girls and five boys in the class. One boy is a new immigrant from Russia, so his native language is Russian, two other kids were born in Israel but their parents immigrated from the former Soviet Union, so they are bilingual and speak Russian as fluently as Hebrew. There is also a boy whose parents come from the USA, so English is his mother tongue, and the rest of the kids have the Israeli background.

Most of them started studying in regular schools but due to LD they were sent to the school for kids with special needs. It is a regional school which is situated in the rural area where the kids come by school buses from towns and cities in the central part of Israel. They are happy to study here thanks to beautiful surroundings - the windows of the school face the Mediterranean Sea.

The class seems to get along quite well. In spite of a slight difference in the level of their knowledge there is harmony and collaboration between them. They enjoy pair work and those kids who study better are eager to help those who are not very successful in studies. Some pupils do 5 points of Matriculation (the highest level) and the rest of the class do 4 points. (In our country the lowest level of Matriculation is 1 point). In terms of language, they have good oral skills, while many of them make a lot of spelling mistakes, misunderstand texts for reading and listening comprehension and hate grammar because it seem to them very difficult. So I have to work a lot on their writing skills and give them a lot of grammar exercises.

jigsaw activities