A helpful article on EL’s from the Middle School Journal

Summary of Key Concepts:

“We can help our ELLs by providing extra support in developing not only the content specific vocabulary, but also the academic sentence structures. We can analyze our lessons and use word walls and word sorts, among other techniques, to help ELLs practice and acquire the vocabulary they need to understand the main points of the lesson. We can also determine the kind of sentence structures needed to talk and write about concepts in the lesson (e.g., It’s likely that …; When I added __, I got ___). We can model these sentence structures, post them in the classroom, and encourage our students to use them. ”

“It is easy for ELLs to get discouraged with their apparent lack of progress when they compare themselves to their native English-speaking peers. Helping students keep portfolios of their work over the school year, and helping them assess their progress at regular intervals is especially effective with ELLs”

“We can also support our ELLs by recognizing that they will not always be able to understand and retain everything that their native English-speaking peers do. However, creating lessons for ELLs with low-level, ostensibly “easy” concepts and language or simple worksheets results in watered-down content and denies them access to the grade level curriculum.”

“Rather than simplifying the curriculum content for ELLs, we can focus our efforts instead on determining the major concepts and processes in the curriculum that students must know and sharing this information with their ESL teacher. These concepts, along with their associated academic language, can then become the main focus for our ELLs, supported by their ESL teacher.”

“We have to present content in ways that are less dependent on language… the use of manipulatives, realia, pictures, videos, demonstrations, movement, gestures, drama, graphic organizers, multimedia, and activities that are experiential and hands-on. These techniques do not rely so heavily on language to convey information and, thus, are extremely helpful to ELLs.”