Instructional design philosophies for teaching ESL students
To help students to learn and immerse them English:
Help ESL students to be better listeners
Maximize student talk time
Some of the most successful strategies for maximizing student talk time are:
- Develop a classroom environment that values, utilizes and extends the rich language and cultural resources all children bring to school
- Ensure that ESL learners feel safe to make errors without being forced to ‘parrot back’ connected forms – teacher attitude is important in this regard
- Accept that learning a new language is not easy
- Identify English language ability of students in both writing and language tasks
- Provide support in academic and abstract learning such as hypothesizing, evaluating, inferring, generalizing, predicting and classifying to succeed in school
- Focus on conversational fluency and grade-appropriate academic proficiency in English
- Accept that ESL children need explicit demonstrations of how English texts are constructed, the functions of these texts and their particular linguistic structures and features
- Accept that ESL students need more time, more teacher direction and more explicit teaching
- Ensure that learning experiences encompass learning ‘how to use the language’ rather than ‘learning about a language’
- Ensue there is an emphasis on meaning over form
- Keep up with the recent trends in the theory and practice of ESL learning and teaching
To help students to learn and immerse them English:
- Incorporate student-centered philosophies by starting from where the students are, and building on their needs and skills
- Provide appropriate input
- Use language in authentic ways
- Provide context
- Design activities with a purpose
- Use task-based activities
- Encourage collaboration
- Ensure that there is a high degree of peer-to-peer and/or peer-to-teacher interaction
- Facilitate oral language development through whole call activities, small group activities and one-to-one interaction
- Give students thinking time and wait longer for answers
- Be comfortable with silence
- Use an integrated approach
- Give clear, concise instructions. Check and model these instructions.
- Build in more thinking time and pair-work exploration
- Provide many demonstrations of reading writing
- Pre-teach vocabulary and using sticky notes with the necessary words on them
- Address grammar consciously
- Adjust feedback/error correction to the situation
- Include awareness of cultural aspects of language use
Help ESL students to be better listeners
- Always provide lots of practice
- Talk to the students about things that interest them. In the mainstream classroom, content will be taught in the second language, so it needs to be interesting, meaningful and motivating for the students.
- Speak at normal speed, but with long pauses for catch-up processing
- Use visual aids – objects, charts, diagrams and gestures
- Do communicative listening practice using information gap activities, such as barrier games
- Include response formats where ESL students can show their understanding of the content without having to produce large amounts of English – for example, have the students fill in boxes, label diagrams or maps, sort jumbled information or fill in listening cloze activities.
Maximize student talk time
Some of the most successful strategies for maximizing student talk time are:
- Pair work (choose a sympathetic conversation partner)
- Role plays
- Problem-solving talks/projects
- Information gap activities
- Debates/thinking activities
- Jigsaw activities
- Grammar games