Planning for English Language Learners

Planning for English Language Learners

By Fatima Lemus-Gupta

-----

I moved from El Salvador to the United States when I was twenty-five years old.  Soon after my arrival I went to an ESL adult program.  Most of my classmates were from Japan, and a few were from France and Eastern Europe.  All of a sudden, there were not even a handful of people I could communicate with.  Even though I was eager to learn, I felt completely isolated in my new environment.  My teachers helped me to get integrated in the classroom.  After much work, practice and many mistakes I developed a good sense of English and was ready to move on to my next step.  Despite my knowledge of English now, there is always so much to learn in a second language, so much that it never ends.

-------

In my next unit I would teach Life Cycle to my fourth graders. My goal for this unit is for my students to  explore, recognize and predict that living things have contact changes throughout their life.  I have four ELL students.  I am planning to address their unique states of language acquisition with the strategies and steps below.  During my instruction, I need to make a conscious effort to speak slowly and clearly, wait for ELL response, provide positive feedback and encouragement, write down key terms, and provide students with the outline of the class. 

Student 1 comes from Germany.  He is in stage 1 - Pre-Production Stage.

As expected, student 1 has very limited vocabulary and is not yet speaking.  However, he is highly motivated.  There is another student in class who is bilingual as his mother is from Germany and his father is from England.  This student will be a great asset to Student 1’s learning process.

Strategies and steps:

• ·      Introduce new vocabulary by showing pictures and diagrams. 
•         Take students for a nature walk to collect items that may be useful to display in the classroom. Show student 1 the name of the items being collected. 
• ·      Ask students to keep a vocabulary journal and picture glossary of new words.
• ·    Assign small groups to work on a poster that reflects life cycles of specific living things.
•      Partner Student 1 with Bilingual Student to provide clarification of knowledge and in his own language.

Student 2 comes from Mexico and is in stage 2 - Early Production.  Student 2 is communicating by using short simple sentences.  Even though her writing skills are improving still she is hesitant to write short sentences.

            Strategies and steps:

•     Emphasize visual literacy by using pictorial maps of life cycles.
• Foster writing in English by labeling pictures with short sentences.
•  Pair students to have a short discussion of life-process.
•  While introducing new vocabulary, model how to use it in a short sentence.
•  Provide relevant simple books that reinforce existing vocabulary to review at home.

Student 3 is from France.  He is in stage 3 - Speech Emergence.  His vocabulary has improved and he is starting to participate more in the classroom and with his classmates.  

            Strategies and steps:

•  Foster writing by asking student 3 to keep a science journal, which includes new terms, relevant events to life cycles, and questions to the teacher.
•  Ask Student 3 to inform when he recognizes a term that is also used in French, as often science vocabulary has Latin roots (e.g. vertebrate in English is vertébrés in French).
•  In pairs, ask students to compose a written story based on an experiment or an observation to be presented in class with the help of visual aids.
•  Show a captioned video related to the life cycle of living things.

Student 4 is from Japan. She is in stage 4 – Intermediate Fluency. She seems to be comfortable with her classmates and with expressing her opinions in the classroom.  However, her academic language is still challenging.   Her writing skills seem to be improving as well, but need corrections.

            Strategies and Steps:

•  Ask student to express their opinion and re-phrase incorrect statements in correct English.
•  In small groups, ask students to prepare a presentation of a life cycle of their choice to be presented in class by each student.  Encourage practice of presentation within the group.
•  Provide homework where students synthesize concepts and analyze similarities and differences between life cycles.
•  Expose student to assignments done by other classmates that have the proper use of grammar and new vocabulary.