ELL Teaching Strategies
Published by: Fany Martinez
These strategies not only help students develop English as a second language, they also help native speakers learn words that are not part of everyday English.
Using these ideas, beginning teachers, their mentors, and administrators plan, reflect, and observe classroom instruction with students’language development and content learning in mind. - Vocabulary and language development, through which teachers introduce new concepts by discussing vocabulary words key to that concept. Exploring specific academic terms like algorithm starts a sequence of lessons on larger math concepts and builds the student’s background knowledge. - Guided interaction. With this method, teachers structure lessons so students work together to understand what they read—by listening, speaking, reading, and writing collaboratively about the academic concepts in the text. Group work is vital in helping ELL students. - Metacognition and authentic assessment. Rather than having students simply memorize information, teachers model and explicitly teach thinking skills (metacognition) crucial to learning new concepts. Research shows that metacognition is a critical skill for learning a second language and a skill used by highly proficient readers of any language. With authentic assessments, teachers use a variety of activities to check students’ understanding, acknowledging that students learning a second language need a variety of ways to demonstrate their understanding of concepts. - Explicit instruction, or direct teaching of concepts, academic language, and reading comprehension strategies needed to complete classroom tasks. - Use of meaning-based context and universal themes, referring to taking something meaningful from the students’ everyday lives and using it as a springboard to interest them in academic concepts. Research shows that when students are interested in something and can connect it to their lives or cultural backgrounds they are more highly motivated and learn at a better rate. - Use of modeling, graphic organizers, and visuals. The use of a variety of visual aids, including pictures, diagrams, and charts, helps all students—and especially ELL students—easily recognize essential information and its relationship to supporting ideas. Visuals make both the language and the content more accessible to students. - Employ gestures for added emphasis - Adjust your speech: Speak slowly; enunciate; use longer natural pauses; repeat words or phrases; include shorter sentences, fewer pronouns, and simpler syntax. - Exaggerate intonations at times. - Stress high-frequency vocabulary words. - Use fewer idioms and clarify the meaning of words or phrases in context. - Stress participatory learning. - Maintain a low anxiety level and be enthusiastic. |