Effects of Increased Wait-Time on the Quantity of Correct Responses Essay

Effects of Increased Wait-Time on the Quantity of Correct Responses from Elementary ELL - Essay Example There has been an increase in the number of culturally and linguistically diverse students prompting education professionals to upgrade their skills and knowledge to ensure effective teaching in ELL classrooms. This has resulted in researchers and educational scholars seeking the appropriate wait-time teachers should give to ELL students. As such, ELL students pose a challenge to teachers because of their language-learning disability.The response that an ELL student gives to a question is determined by the level of his or her understanding of concepts and subject ideas, systematic ideas reflection, critical thinking, and content comprehension. However, effective learning for ELL learners does not solely contribute to a response given by ELL students. Wait time has a substantial positive effect on the response that an ELL student gives to a classroom question. Existing research classifies silence time in a classroom into eight categories including student-pause time, within-teacher pr esentation pause time, within-student’s response pause-time, post-teacher question time, student pause-time, post-student responsive wait time, teacher pause-time, student task-completion work-time and impact pause time. Despite the detailed wait-time classification, there has been no concrete conclusion regarding the specific wait-time required for elementary ELL students to respond to questions. ... elementary ELL students include long answers responses to questions by students, improved student participation through volunteering more answers that are appropriate, increase in the analysis and synthesis of the context which results to students giving evidence-inference responses that are more speculative (Cooper & Irizarry, 2013). Increased wait-time contributes to improved students’ self-confidence in responding to questions, increased rate of student asking questions regarding clarity as well as higher students’ achievement. Simply by increasing wait time, especially to students who have to translate the question into their mother tongue and then critically evaluate the questions to give a response, teachers may influence the quantity of correct responses to questions (Cooper & Irizarry, 2013). According to Mohr and Mohr (2007), a teacher should allow sufficient wait time to support ELL students to switch from hearing in a foreign language into reasoning and think ing in their first language, and then giving the response to the question. Additionally, increased wait time has proved to enhance the cognitive techniques applied by a student to give responses (Bluck & Gilbertson, 2006). Relationship between Increased Wait-Time and Critical Thinking Several studies such as those conducted by Beyondpenguins.ehe.osu.edu (2013) and FEAweb (2003) indicate that teacher’s wait time is often associated with the thoughtfulness and comprehension of a student’s answer to classroom questions. Notably, teachers do not give sufficient time for students to internalize, think critically, and seek comprehensive knowledge to respond to classroom questions. Teachers who give elementary ELL students a few seconds to respond to classroom questions evoke student recall on a subject