Essential Tips for Mainstream Teachers with ELLs (Part 3)

This is the third part in my series on essential tips for mainstream teachers who find themselves working with English language learners. 

In case you missed them, you can read them here:

Essential Tips for Mainstream Teachers with ELLs (Part 1) Classroom Environment
Essential Tips for Mainstream Teachers with ELLs (Part 2) Comprehensible Input/Output

In this section, I'm going to focus on ways to help students interact with your content. 

Interaction

1. Vocabulary - When it comes to English language learners, the problem is truly one of a vocabulary gap. The older the students the more noticeable this is. 

We hear a lot about 3 tiers of vocabulary, but I find many people do not have a clear idea about which words are which, and which ones to teach. It's such a confusing task that I talk about it in almost every workshop that I do.

Tier 1: (words they already know) basic sight words, early reading words, common use/ everyday language. Even if the students don't know these words, their ESL teacher is likely working with them on these.

Tier 2: (words they NEED to know) testing words and phrases like evaluate, describe, draw a conclusion, things like polysemous, multi-meaning, words, prepositional phrases, and words used in multiple contexts and content areas. 

A 6th grade ELA/SS teacher shared with us in my SIOP cohort last week about giving students state test type questions, and on one that said draw a conclusion about... 2 students actually drew pictures. One of them was not even an English language learner.

It is estimated that 40% of the English language is polysemous, it can cause confusion for an English language learner that may or may not be able to decipher a meaning from context. These Tier 2 words also carry a lot of meaning in content areas, but are often not explicitly taught anywhere.

Tier 3: (words they SHOULD know) academic vocabulary, content specific vocabulary

These are the words we want to expose all of our learners to, they are often bolded in textbooks, and the words up on your word wall (if you have one). They are the content area words you are already teaching. 

My next series is going to be all about vocabulary, so if you are looking for more information in that area, stay tuned!

2. Focusing questions - English language learners, especially lower levels spend a lot of mental energy just trying to decipher basic meaning. Often times, it is challenging to determine what is important and what is not. There are a lot of things you can do to adjust your own practices such as slowing your rate of speech, avoiding asides while presenting information, and simplifying speech. Sometimes, this is not enough, so providing focusing questions can help give students clues about what is important and what to listen for. Going over objectives and having them written out has a similar impact.

3. Teach/model how to take notes - The truth is all students need this. But just as I was saying in the last tip, it can be hard to pick out important information, so explicit instruction in how to take notes, and modeling is important.

For beginners, copying is writing. One thing that you can do if you are seeing that your students are struggling with taking notes is to provide them with notes ahead of time, or notes to copy so that they can focus on listening, and worrying less about what to write at the same time.

I had a student two years ago who was an incredibly hard worker and because of that, despite language difficulties made excellent grades in most of her classes. She came to me because she wanted help in her government class. The entire class was lecture, and they didn't use a book. She told me that she took plenty of notes, and studied. So one day, I looked through her notebook, and I realized that her notes were nonsensical. There were words and phrases written down, many misspellings, notes on what appeared to be teachers anecdotes, it was hard for me to follow to help her. We went to the teacher and just asked kindly if he could provide her with an outline of the lecture and key words. She was able to work with that and focus in on details about the key words and wasn't trying to copy down every single thing that he said. 

4. Listening stations - If you have ever learned a new language and tried to communicate with a native speaker, you probably wanted them to slow down and repeat what they said a few times. When it comes to reading assignments, an English learner's listening skills are usually better than their reading skills. This is something that worked great in my classroom and technology makes it pretty easy to accomplish. Whenever possible I would look for audio versions of texts that we were reading so that students could listen and read at the same time. This can be expensive, you can record yourself reading and share it with students too. This way they can go back and listen to it multiple times and at their own pace too.

I also used this with major project descriptions and directions. I would post the directions and the audio on Edmodo or Google Classroom which ever I was using that year.

5. Use manipulatives - When you talk about something, it can be very abstract and you are relying on the English language learner having a good grasp on whatever vocabulary you are using. Manipulatives help to make the abstract concrete. Post-its and index cards with words that could be moved around, categorized, matched, etc. can make as great manipulatives it does not have to be expensive "toys." When working with manipulatives with groups not only are they seeing the information in a new way, they might be hearing it in a new way too.

6. Get them talking - If they can verbalize it they can internalize it. Talking about content is a great way to process information and get it moving from short term to long term memory. For English language learners, it is practice with language and content. Let's look at it another way, speaking a foreign language is mentally exhausting. So when your student is talking to friends who speak the same language and their family who might only speak their first language, what language are they speaking? You guessed it, not English. That means your classroom is the only place they are practicing academic English, if they aren't getting it there, they aren't getting it anywhere.

Along these same lines, no opt-out. Don't accept "I don't know," teach them other ways to respond or how to find the information.  

7. Higher Order Thinking - Just like all students English language learners need to be engaged in high order thinking activities. A lot of times with English language learners, the types of questions they are asked are literal and basic recall. However, you can ask questions that have a low linguistic demand but are still higher order thinking questions. Things like charts, diagrams, and drawings are great for students to show their reasoning skills in non-verbal ways.

Combine this is visuals, word banks, and sentence stems for responses and your English language learner can soar.