Backbone Communications

5. e-Lective

“e-Lective is a powerful tool in helping schools demonstrate adequate yearly progress for the simple reason that it gives ELL students access to the language of academic success.”

Dr. Jim Cummins, University of Toronto

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This powerful teaching tool focuses on reading and writing development and is an excellent complement to all DynEd courses. It helps students develop their reading and writing skills, build vocabulary, and gain access to authentic materials for school and vocation.

Watch e-Lective Video – Student & Teacher Perspectives

Overview

e-Lective provides ESL students with the individualized support they require to gain quicker access to grade-equivalent curriculum or professional support materials. Students learn how to read between the lines rather than just skim across the surface of the text. e-Lective was designed and developed by Sotirios Chascas and Jim Cummins, a leading expert on literacy and bilingual education. It creates an electronic environment that supports learners in reading texts that previously they could not have understood. Any text in electronic form can easily be imported into the e-Lective environment. It then provides the support that students need to understand the text and the vocabulary within the text. Difficult text is transformed into comprehensible input.

Major Features

• Any text in electronic form can be imported into the program. Thus, teachers have the opportunity to choose stories and expository texts that match their students’ interests and cultural backgrounds rather than relying on one-size-fits-all texts and strategies.
• Using digitized speech, the computer will “read” any text (or part of any text) to the student so that students get practice in listening comprehension and also an initial sense of what the text is about. Users can adjust various aspects of the digitized speech (e.g. speed, pitch, volume, etc.).
• The program automatically calculates a text difficulty (“readability”) index for each text entered into the program.
• Depending on the electronic dictionaries used, students can get one-click access to L1 and English dictionary support to facilitate understanding of the meaning of individual words and sentences.
• The program “remembers” the words that a student has clicked and generates individualized practice exercises to help learn this vocabulary. These practice exercises employ several varieties of cloze procedure and can be set at five levels of difficulty.
• Students can demonstrate that they have learned previously unknown words by passing a “test” at difficulty level 3 or above (on the five-point scale). The tests employ the same cloze procedures used in Practice Mode but provide feedback only after completion of the entire test. The system tracks student progress in transforming previously unknown words into “learned words.” In this way, students can expand their academic vocabulary at their own pace and within context of reading texts that are either relevant or intrinsically interesting to them.
• At the press of a button, students can identify high frequency words, low frequency words, and academic words in the text. Academic words are the most common words that occur across different academic disciplines. Thus, different kinds of words can be targeted by the student (or teacher). If there are high frequency words that students don’t know, it is particularly important to acquire these words because their general utility value is greater than that of low frequency words.
• Within the Writing Mode, an environment is created to support students’ creative writing in response to texts they have read. Students are encouraged to develop not just a literal comprehension of the text but to examine the text from a critical perspective.
  The Writing Mode also permits students to carry out writing activities focused on the words that they originally did not know. These activities include writing sentences with each of the target words and unscrambling sentences that contain the target words.

Lesson Type

In this Practice Exercise, the student fills in the blank words from the individualized list of vocabulary words generated by the student when reading the text.

Here the student has completed a test, again based on the individualized list of vocabulary words for that student.

When reading a text, the student has dictionary support for every word. In addition to the definition, the student may listen to the word by itself or in the sentence or in any selected portion of the entire text.