The numbers of English-language learners in schools continue to rise. How can we best support them?
Here are recommendations from educators on X and Facebook:
1) Labeled visuals; 2) Time to verbally process content with peer in home language; 3) Build background with experiences, videos, experiments, etc.
Collaboration with EL professionals, sentence frames, wait time.
1. Visuals 2. Point & talk 3. Gestures
Sentence and paragraph frames, total physical response attached to academic vocabulary, Visuals!
Closed captions helps scaffold both the English Learner and Gen Ed student simultaneously!
Get other students to help them. Make sure they are valued, loved, belong.
Pre-teach critical vocabulary with visual images.
Visuals. Ex: if you are using a word like 鈥渄rought鈥� don鈥檛 try to explain it. Show it.
Pre-teach vocabulary, provide sentence stems, chunk texts.
How about providing a list of cognates?
1. Gestures 2. modeling 3. peer tutoring
Supporting oral instruction with written directions, a buddy, and sentence starters.
1) Stop using worksheets from the early 90s that make bad copies and aren't digital 2) Visuals 3) Avoid idioms or explain them.
Visuals, the 10-2 rule (for every 10 minutes of information, 2 minutes of interaction) , sentence frames.
Thanks to everyone who contributed their thoughts!
This is the final post in a two-part series. You can see Part One here.
The new question of the week is:
What would you say are the three most important, AND most likely to be used, strategies that general education teachers can use to make their content more accessible to ELLS (and everyone else)?
Part One in this series shared somewhat lengthier suggestions.
Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it鈥檚 selected or if you鈥檇 prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.
You can also contact me on Twitter at .
Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It鈥檚 titled .
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