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.
Have you found yourself wondering what your ELL students should be able to do in writing, based on their proficiency levels? The following resource has graphics that show expectations for newcomers, beginners, intermediate, and advanced ELLs for writing a persuasive, descriptive, chronological, or compare/contrast paragraph.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yvaQ8pyjo_u9HubEV41iKC6AyR70w4Ua/view?usp=sharing
Having a student centered classroom where students are working cooperatively isn’t only engaging, it is purposeful. It gives students opportunities to interact with one another and practice the critical skills of communication and problem solving, which is essential for our ELLs. Kagan cooperative learning structures are a wonderful way to facilitate the teaching and learning of any content. The link below highlights the steps for a few of my favorite Kagan structures to use in my classroom.
There are many ways that ESL teachers and classroom teachers can work together to better meet the needs of their English Language Learners. The following article offers realistic ideas of what collaboration can look like and why it is important.
Do you want to know specific tasks, signal words, graphic organizers, and questions that go along with different language functions such as seeking information, classifying, and analyzing? Then this is a chart you will definitely want to print out and keep handy!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W_7j1q1XoEC71pfs6Ce2WHPD6TKy7C2M/view?usp=sharing
Being able to engage in academic conversations and write using academic language can be challenging for our ESL students. This resources gives easy to use suggestions and strategies to improve academic discussions in the classroom. It includes communicative language strategies and sentence frames.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SZjKJnuV7bdURaMFFlKigR11fSvfr2rj/view?usp=sharing
Academic language, often referred to as the “language of school” is something that has to be explicitly taught, modeled, and practiced on a regular basis in order for our students to be able to succeed in today’s classroom and leave high school college and career ready. But did you know that academic language is far more complex than simply teaching the vocabulary that students need to know in order to be successful? It involves three dimensions-discourse, sentence, and word/phrase-all of which vary based upon the topic, genre, and task.
WIDA has put together a helpful chart that explains the features of academic language for all three of the above mentioned dimensions.
Check out this quick video from Dr. Broady’s blog on how to use ACCESS results and WIDA’s Can Do Descriptors to modify assessments and learning targets for your ESL students.
Click on the link below for an LEP Infinite Campus Cheatsheet.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GHWPrpiCbeJcoKEtU5EGMxuiCSpdF0VR/view?usp=sharing
The UN Refugee Agency has created the UNHCR Teachers’ Toolkit. It has free-of-charge and adaptable UNHCR teaching materials on refugees, asylum, migration and statelessness, and a section dedicated to professional development and guidance for primary and secondary school teachers on including refugee children in their classes.
https://www.unhcr.org/teaching-about-refugees.html
Credit is due to Dr. Broady’s Blog, which is where I found this incredible resource.
The article below, written by the UN Refugee Agency, explores the education crisis faced by millions of refugee children around the world. It shares inspirational stories of aspiring refugee youth and the many challenges they face.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BuY7xX1qZq38UiOSqWnAM3ieRuwTMpI9/view?usp=sharing
Buchanan's Blog-Tips for Teachers of ESL Students 