As educators, we are always striving for creative ways to meet the needs of all of our students, including our culturally and linguistically diverse students. The purpose of this site is to provide resources for lesson planning and assessment, as well as the latest research for teachers of ESL students.
What I love about this academic language resource is that for each of the six key strategies, it gives examples of how to use the strategies to teach content knowledge AND academic language, then gives sample activities and assessments for each strategy. The first three pages discuss the background behind the creation of the six key strategies, while the last two pages focus on the six key strategies and what they would look like in a classroom.
If you want to learn more ways to build academic language, this link takes you to ten tools to get your ELLs talking in the classroom while building their academic language.
This guide created by the TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) International Association consists of two parts. The first part of the guide helps school leaders design professional development for all teachers. This resource is an outline of what a day of professional development on meeting the needs of English language learners (ELLs) could look like. The second part of the guide is written for teachers. It lists ways that classroom teachers who are not trained in TESOL can create an optimal language and content learning environment for ELLs, , including the “why” and the “how” behind each suggestion.
“Educators today hear a lot about gaps in education – achievement gaps, funding gaps, school-readiness gaps. Still, there’s another gap that often goes unexamined: the cultural gap between students and teachers.”
This article on the Teaching Tolerance website explores three issues related to building a culturally and linguistically responsive classroom : overcoming stereotypes, culturally relevant curriculum, and honoring home languages. For each topic, there is an accompanying video as well as various links to resources.
In order for our language-learners to be successful, they have to be willing to take risks and encouraged to do so. When we only encourage “correct” answers, pronounciation, or grammar, our ELLs often become silenced and they are the ones who need speaking practice the most. In addition, risk taking is cultural by nature. Some societies view being incorrect as shameful. So, how do we encourage our ELLs to take risks in the classroom? The article, A Classroom Full of Risk Takers offers some great advice for making your classroom a place where mistakes aren’t only accepted; they are encouraged.
If you are interested into going more in -depth about risk-taking, specific to people who are speakers of languages other than English, I highly recommend Risk Taking as a Contributing Factor to Making Learning English a Success. This article elaborates the characteristics of risk-taking learners on learning English, the learners’ personal learning problems on learning English, and the methods of increasing risk-taking ability.
Veteran teachers Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Hull Sypnieski offer tips on differentiating instruction for English-language learners. By using techniques such as pairing up students and enhancing background knowledge, teachers can make a lesson accessible to every student in the class, regardless of language proficiency. “Not everybody will get the same exact text or use the same strategy,” Hull Sypnieski explains, “but it’s fair because you’re meeting every student where they are.”
In addition to this video, Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Hull Sypnieski wrote a book entitled The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide, and this article “Do’s and Don’ts for Teaching English Language Learners” is a short excerpt from the book.
Our students who speak languages other than English have a huge advantage. They are on their way to being multilingual! Often times, our students are completely immersed in English and don’t have opportunities to tap into one of their most valuable resources: their first language. This short video offers insight into how we can use the native language as a valuable resources, and why this is important even when a student may not be proficient in their native language.
It is likely that you have heard both of these claims before: “Children learn language easier and more quickly than adults” or “The more time children spend in a second or foreign language context, the quicker they learn the language. ” If we are going to effectively teach our students who speak languages other than English, it is important that we are knowledgeable about second language acquisition and realize how some of our assumptions may be inaccurate. The article, Myths and Misconceptions about Second Language Learning: What Every Teacher Needs to Unlearn, does a good job of clarifying some important issues in the area of second language learning.
It can be overwhelming knowing where to begin when you are given information about the different language levels of your ELL students. I love this video because Beth Vaucher does a good job explaining the characteristics of students at different levels of language in a simplistic way. She then gives tips on strategies that can be used with the students at each level to make them successful in the regular classroom. This video is one small step towards ensuring all teachers are equipped with the skills and knowledge to teach ELLs.
As our schools become more and more culturally and linguistically diverse, it is essential that schools embrace multiple cultures and seek to understand more than the very obvious parts of culture. The flower model below uses the flower itself to symbolize the most obvious parts of culture-food, music, language, and dress- and these are the parts of culture that change the quickest as individuals try to acculturate to a new environment. The customs and practices on the leaves are also visible but can be more subtle. As you get below the surface, to the roots of the flower, you find the less visible and less changeable parts of culture: beliefs, values, and history. In her book What School Leaders Need to Know About English Learners, Jan Edwards Dormer offers a bit of advice. She says. “It is important to understand and accept the diverse ways in which people around the world interact and learn, with our first response always being, “I wonder if this behavior reflects culture?” rather than the gut reaction that the student is not trying to adapt, or worse-actively defying a school value or rule.”
The Flower Model of Culture
Creating a classroom where diversity is celebrated and students are encouraged to share their cultures and use their multilingualism as an asset is one step you can take to create a rich, global, welcoming environment. I found the video below a great place to start when teaching students what culture is, and how it is more than the more obvious parts that we often focus on in schools.
I LOVE using songs to teach my students, especially my English Learners. I can still recite Fifty Nifty United States and other songs I learned in Elementary school (and that was a LONG time ago)! This website has wonderful lesson plans for different songs, a category that describes activities that can be used to target different skills using songs, and perhaps my favorite category, Grammar + Songs. Using popular songs to teach grammar makes learning more authentic and engaging for our students, making it more likely that they will apply these grammar rules in their own writing. This is a website you will want to add to your favorites bar!
Buchanan's Blog-Tips for Teachers of ESL Students 