The Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol - Essay Example

Each student will be conveyed the same message in a varied form. Moreover, SIOP should be made adaptable to classes and topics where learners will be able to easily make a relevant association with real-life concepts.However, Freeman & Freeman (1998) indicate a number of shortcomings with SI: teachers often sacrifice academic content to meet the language needs of their students, teachers lack training in implementing sheltered instruction, students who do well in sheltered classes often flounder when mainstreamed, and students of differing ability levels are often relegated to the same sheltered class (pp. 39-40). It is to be understood that if the levels of the learners are varied that is a mixed ability class configuration the strategies should be hybrid in nature and SIOP may not be valid.

Students will undeniably have varied levels though in the same class. Thus, the use of SIOP can be a source of frustration and vanishing away from higher aptitude students and thus their regression."Meaningful activities integrate lesson concepts with language practice opportunities in listening, speaking, reading, and writing" (Haynes, 2004). For ELLs, this should be particularly emphasized, as the main difficulty resides in the understanding of the language, as a result of which concepts remains vague.

Students should be guided step by step to the final process of understanding. Thus, the presentational pace and level of explanation should be made adapted to student background both in terms of vocabulary but also the level of technicality.