Vignette 7.3. Reading, Analyzing, and Discussing
Complex Texts in American Literature
Integrated ELA/Literacy, ELD, and History in Grade Eleven (cont.)Previously, the class read other texts and addressed text-dependent questions using a similar
procedure, so they are familiar with the task. Additionally, Ms. Robertson previewed the content
of the present text, as well as the meanings of the text-dependent questions, with the EL
students at the Emerging level to ensure that they would be able to fully engage in the task.
Before students read the text independently, Ms. Robertson briefly explains the meaning
of several terms that she anticipates may be unfamiliar to students (i.e., decade, blotted out,
gradual stages, clamor, remnants). She does not spend much time explaining these terms, nor
does she tell students the meaning of all of the words that may be unfamiliar. Her students
know that in complex texts, much of the language will be challenging, and they are accustomed
to identifying words that are unclear to them, looking at the text surrounding unfamiliar words
to determine the words’ meanings, using their dictionaries and/or thesauruses, and asking one
another for clarification about word meanings during conversations.
Ms. Robertson uses a strategy called “1–2–4,” where students first write down their
responses to the questions (“1”), then take turns asking the questions and sharing their
responses with a partner (“2”), and finally discuss the same questions in a group of four (“4”).
Each table has four students. (Later in the year, once all students are able to fully participate
in extended conversations, she will decrease the level of scaffolding and skip step “2.”) The
students’ handout follows.Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – Excerpt (p. 7) and Focus QuestionsThe decade following the establishment of the “permanent Indian frontier” was a bad
time for the eastern tribes. The great Cherokee nation had survived more than a hundred
years of the white man’s wars, diseases, and whiskey, but now it was to be blotted
out. Because the Cherokees numbered several thousands, their removal to the West
was planned to be in gradual stages, but the discovery of Appalachian gold within their
territory brought on a clamor for their immediate wholesale exodus. During the autumn
of 1838, General Winfield Scott’s soldiers rounded them up and concentrated them into
camps. (A few hundred escaped to the Smoky Mountains and many years later were
given a small reservation in North Carolina.) From the prison camps they were started
westward to Indian Territory. On the long winter trek, one of every four Cherokees died
from cold, hunger, or disease. They called the march their “trail of tears.” The Chocktaws,
Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles also gave up their homelands in the South. In the
North, surviving remnants of the Shawnees, Miamis, Ottowas, Hurons, Delawares, and
many other once mighty tribes walked or traveled by horseback and wagon beyond the
Mississippi, carrying their shabby goods, their rusty farming tools, and bags of seed
corn. All of them arrived as refugees, poor relations, in the country of the proud and free
Plains Indians (Brown, 1970, p. 7).
Guiding Questions:
How is the experience of the Native Americans during this period of history depicted in
the text?
What is happening in this section, and who or what is involved?
What was the “permanent Indian frontier”?
Who was being removed to the West and why?796 | Chapter 7 Grades 11 and 12