Teaching Strategies
Provide differentiated assessment — varying the type and complexity of the product that the students create to demonstrate their learning. Journals & logs can be an example of a great opportunity to differentiate assessment. ELL students in this case can be allowed to record their ideas in their first language, short English words or sentences, or illustrations. It also gives them the opportunity to access their background knowledge, make connections to old and new learning, as well as reflect on what they have learned.
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Use ongoing assessments with frequent feedbacks to guide instruction — Ongoing, informal assessment is vitally important to matching instruction to students' changing needs. With ELL students, teacher can have ongoing formative assessment throughout the semester to record and keep track of their learning progression, identify their strength and weaknesses, as well as any learning needs. With the collected data, the teacher is able to come up with more effective strategies to help them improve and maximize their learning. Throughout these formative assessments, make sure to provide timely, relevant, and corrective feedbacks to the students because it can be an important way to help ELL students move to the next stage of language development.
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Use flexible grouping — Small group instruction is a very effective way of making sure that all students can access important content, and keeping groups flexible allows teachers to match students with different peers for different types of activities. For example, when grouping students, organizing group containing both ELL students, and native English speakers to increase the opportunity for peer tutoring. The teacher can also consider grouping ELL students who have the same first language as one group when it is necessary to clarify content and discuss concepts at a deeper level.
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Make content comprehensible for all students —matching learning contents to students' learning profiles and language proficiency ensures that every student has an opportunity to demonstrate what he/she knows. For example, providing resources at varying reading levels. Providing ELL students with content-specific material at a level they are able to read successfully allows them to gain information and key vocabulary that may provide scaffolding necessary for them to read more challenging texts. These resources can include a variety of text types, such as news articles, picture books, journal entries and web pages. If possible, provide books in the first language of the ELL students to further support learning and making connections to the English content.
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Build a respectful and helpful classroom atmosphere — creating a classroom atmosphere where all students have respect for and responsiveness to cultural and personal diversity. It is important to teach all students about culture diversity, and to respect all kinds of cultural diversity. Teachers can incorporate students’ experiences into writing and language arts activities, as well as linking content to students’ lives and experiences to enhance understanding. The teacher can also set up useful resources around the classroom such as bilingual dictionaries, posting word banks around the classroom with frequently used or subject-specific vocabulary to provide ELL students with an easy-to-access reference.
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