Promoting Language Development in the Mainstream Classroom

Another Hat

Zipping in and out of different buildings makes it challenging for me to find time to meaningfully connect with the classroom teachers of students in our English Language Development program. 

I plan to share a weekly post featuring a handful of ideas for increasing our students' opportunities to engage in reading, writing, listening, or speaking. Not all of the ideas shared in this post will be designed for your grade level or content area and some of these ideas may not be new to you. It is my hope that the suggestions will inspire you to try new approaches that will enrich your instruction and promote language development in your classroom.

Classroom teachers wear many hats: content specialist, nurse, coach, referee, nutritionist, reading teacher, counselor, cheerleader, surrogate parent, and several other roles that are too many in number to list here. Even though you're already balancing so many identities, I hope you have a little more room on your head to wear one of my favorite hats. Not only are you a teacher, but you are also an academic language acquisition specialist!

An Idea to Teach Listening

Listenwise!

Listenwise is a website that contains listening passages from podcasts and public radio stories. These passages and questions are designed for students in middle school through high school. Watch the videos below for a brief review of Listenwise and follow this link to create a free account.

An Idea to Teach Reading

Non-fiction Strategy: Rewriting an Author's Words

Cleverly written headings and titles are a great way to grab the attention of your audience. The practice of manipulating the English language for literary effect, however, leaves ELs scratching their heads (see what I did there?). Teaching students to rewrite titles, headings, and subheadings so that they truly reflect the content of the passage will increase their inferencing skills and also clarify their understanding of the text.  

• Discuss how some titles/headings/ subheadings are written very clearly to state exactly what is written in the section whereas others are written less clearly.
• Show examples of both, emphasizing how you must make inferences to make meaning from the cleverly written text.
• Provide students with an informal text that contains titles/subtitles/headings that do not explicitly state the meaning of the passage.
• Model filling in the chart. 
• Take time to discuss the nuances of English that allow the author to use the chosen terms to catch your attention.
• Allow the students to work in partners or small groups to complete the chart.

Follow this link to make a copy of the chart and use it with your own lesson!

This idea was modified from Serravallo, J. (2015). The reading strategies book: Your everything guide to developing skilled readers with 300 strategies. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

An Idea to Teach Speaking

Hippo Video

My current favorite tool for providing opportunities for our students to record themselves speaking is Flipgrid.  Flipgrid is a simple tool used by several teachers across the district.  There is an excellent tutorial on Canvas on how to use Flipgrid if you are interested in learning more.

Another tool for teaching speaking is the website and Chrome Extension Hippo Video.  There are several uses for Hippo Video from flipped lessons to screen recordings and sharing.  What the video below created by my friend Katy for a brief review of Hippo Video and follow this link to create a free account.

An Idea to Teach Writing

Old Fashioned Word Banks

For our students still developing their writing proficiencies, I cannot emphasize enough how helpful they find an old-fashioned word bank. Whether you expect your students to write one-word answers, brief phrases, complete sentences, or multiple paragraphs, the word bank provides a scaffold to support ELs and other struggling writers.

The immediate benefit of offering a word bank is that having the words on hand reduces the anxiety they harbor regarding their ability to write academic text. The long-term benefit is that by having repeated exposure to the printed term, they make stronger connections to the term when used orally and begin to use the term independently.

Word banks can be created by you, developed by the individual student, or even created collaboratively as a class. Word banks don't take a lot of time to develop but will pay out heftily in terms of providing students an opportunity to create more robust academic writing. Here is an article about working with students to create a class word bank. If you want your students to use more academic vocabulary in their writing, an easy way to achieve that is by offering word banks.

Care to Collaborate?

Are you interesting in collaborating to integrate more language development strategies into your instruction? Post a comment below.

Thank you to my friend Katy Booher for sharing her videos and ideas.