How do you support English language learners?

- I play cheerful music in the background, during which they complete tasks I also have music during breaks. - Friends can seat together, not always you should separate them. - I try to get rid of the tables. This is a small protective wall from the teacher and the students themselves. No tables, no obstacles. Not always, but mostly we work without tables. - I hand out candies. Each person gets two or three candies. For any word not in English, they return the candy to me; if they quickly correct themselves and say the word in English, the candy goes back to them. Motivation to speak English. - When I work with teenagers I always make sure we share during the lessons how their week has been. - Games / fun learning is a quick learning.

A lot of times we tend to overthink the strategies to help ELLs in the classroom. Some of the best strategies are great strategies across the board that will help all students. 1. Incorporating visual aids and real-life examples: Use visual aids, such as pictures, charts, and videos, to help illustrate new vocabulary and concepts. Incorporate real-life examples and contexts to make the language more meaningful and relevant to learners. 2. Encourage reading and listening: Encourage English language learners to read books, articles, and short stories in English. Listening to English podcasts, songs, and watching English movies or TV shows can also be beneficial for improving listening skills.

This is very risky. No matter what you say, many people will disagree with you. That's why we had/have the Reading Wars. There is, I believe, a best way to do this but there is also a well organized opposition to the best way. The jargon changes all the time but the essential dilemma is, do you teach English with phonics or sight-words? The Education Establishment forced public schools to use sight-words starting in 1931. Everything started to fail very quickly. In 1955 Rudolf Flesch wrote his famous best seller "Why Johnny Can't Read." Everyone in education should read this book or at least Chapter One. Sadly, most teachers don't understand why sight-words cause illiteracy. I have written many articles explaining this issue.

One thing that has always helped me, is to have fun with my students and really enjoy their presence. The rest just comes easily. Another thing that goes a really long way is praise, a LOT of praise. That way no matter how many times they make a mistake they know that they will always be ready to try again, and that will ALWAYS give them the confidence and motivation to keep trying and thus learning along the way.

A lot of great instruction for EL students is great instruction for ALL students. Including reading, writing, listening and speaking in all instruction helps to grow language and interpersonal relationships.

The most important thing after knowing your students is setting a learning environment that has high expectations, is culturally responsive, provides a safe space to make and learn from mistakes. This is a positive safe space for learning that values multiple points of views and values each language and culture. It takes modeling from the teacher and buy in from the students.

The learner is always a combination of diffidence and doubt. Hence, it becomes imperative for the trainer or the tutor to instill confidence and a spirit of involvement. Thus, a light and cheerful environment, inclusive of an amalgamation of music, folklore, discussions and exchange of ideas can really be a good way.

The best thing you can do for the students is to teach English as quickly as possible. Step one, they must know, with instant recall, the names of the letters. Step two, they must know the sounds represented by each letter. Third, they must know the blends of those sounds. Now they can read. Twenty years ago I was reading books by the foremost phonics experts. They all amazed me by using the word "easy" over and over. The public schools said that reading is very very difficult. They said we shouldn't be surprised if millions of children fall by the wayside. Some kids are dyslexic, that's all there is to it...Please note how dyslexia becomes the all- purpose excuse for schools that refuse to do things intelligently.

Learning English is of course important. However, learning a new language is also an opportunity to strengthen their home language. This can be done in many ways, such as researching in their home language or having a home language library in the classroom.

In Australia, we call it English as an Additional Language/Dialect (EAL/D). Most of our EAL students are refugees or migrants and our D students are our First Nation students. All of them have some form of trauma. Most are usually in a fight/flight mode. So, making them feel safe and welcome is crucial before we can start any teaching.

Remember what is necessary for one is helpful to all. Provide all students access to tools that allow them to customize the learning experience, such as immersive reader. ChatGPT and other generative AI chatbots are amazing for translating and summarizing text.

Using the Explicit Instruction Model (EIM) helps with planning scaffolds. Also using Cooperative Learning Strategies is a good way to provide opportunities for using and sharing the language with peers during the "we do" phase in the teaching and learning cycle.

Knowing from the research in 2016 that when we learn a language, our brain is going to the native grammar structures first to try and reuse the characteristics, (Kirsten Weber, Morten H. Christiansen, Karl Magnus Petersson, Peter Indefrey, and Peter Hagoort. University of Nijmegen fMRI Syntactic and Lexical Repetition Effects Reveal the Initial Stages of Learning a New Language. Journal of Neuroscience, June 2016) we need to be constantly asking the right questions to help them scaffold and connect - for example "how is this in your native language" and get them to think it through and then to see either the similarities or the differences ....

ELL students should be given the opportunity to learn the content in whichever language is easier for them to access it. There could be an expectation to write one paragraph in English and then slowly develop this over time.

The brain loves "real and personal" so the more we can offer this through the content and then they relate it to their "real and personal" sphere, the more impacting the learning and also adding the positive emotions into the mix will really help both content and language learning.

I encourage my viewers to read up on the content themes in their own language, as well as read and hear input in English. The more they know about the content, the greater the comprehensible input - which is a major component to reaching higher proficiency. At LetzCreate.org, the content is all in English, so it opens doors to intermediate-level ELLs, but is not really helpful to beginners. Every classroom would have a unique blend of students, so it's up to the teacher to obtain the right balance. Teaching ELLs is definitely a balancing act.

Generative AI tools can help reduce cognitive load. Have students use an AI tool to translate and summarize information into a format that works for them. This reduces cognitive load and allows them to retain the content!

Agree that the thematic or genre based approach has so far been the most successful one for EAL students. It allows the recycling of vocabulary and cross curricular inserts.

May I suggest that from a coaching perspective we also need learners to be "self-assessing" and maybe at the start of the topic, they themselves scale their ability and that at the end they scale their learning so they start to take responsilibity and ownership of their learning process and most importantly we ask them how they will celebrate their small "successes" to help them recognise their progress.

I intended to write the shortest possible answer but I did not reach the most important point. I'm more and more appalled by this development. The Education Establishment by a paralyzing combo of jargon, false theories, ever-changing theories, and inept instruction basically teaches children to hate reading. How else can you explain the fact that a great majority of middle school and high school students say: I never read, I hate books. Reading as something you do easily for pleasure is almost obsolete. This is the great sad victory of our progressive educators.

Yes, differentiation should happen at every level including assessment. Unfortunately national exams don't take this into consideration although we expect this to happen in the classrooms.

After experimenting a bit, I've opted to have my students determine their preferred assessment methods. I suppose, it's crucial to acknowledge that each learner enters the classroom with their own unique goals. Therefore, allowing them to choose how to assess their progress in alignment with their objectives seems only equitable. If necessary, I suggest providing them with a set of assessment criteria and allowing them to incorporate it into their tasks.

When assigning work to students, there should be an element of choice whereby they can research topics that connect with their home country. This will allow for interviews at home and a connection between home and the classroom.

Remember that the adults at home are most likely English language learners as well. Therefore, provide caregivers the the same supports that students have access to at school.

One thing that I found helpful was to focus on creating a multilingual learning environment. In fact we don't use the phrase English, Language or Literacy in the classroom. Instead we use Multilinguish which a class of students voted on about five years ago and it stuck. Thereby, creating the notion that all languages are of equal value.

In my experience, using mind maps and descriptive images helps them retain and conceptualise information better. I teach science to many ELL students and use flowcharts, fish charts, spider maps, etc., to lay out key terms and concepts.

My experience learning a second language (Spanish) makes me aware of the risks that are necessary to produce the target language; especially orally. Students are going to make mistakes, and those who are sensitive to being embarrassed need a very safe space to risk the mistakes that are a surely going to happen. If students are encouraged to laugh with rather than laugh at, the learning will follow. In terms of content integration, the Content-based ESL model is shown to have a high success rate. As a retired ESL teacher, I produce a support program using a content-based approach. The 114 TV episodes are available without cost from LetzCreate.org. The program is Ramping Up your English. It's content-based, high interest, and fun.

Here are a few ways my schools have helped support ELL students: 1. Explicitly teach vocabulary and provide numerous opportunities for students to use it in authentic contexts. 2. Give students opportunities to read, write, speak, and listen in every class, every day. 3. Create safe and supportive class cultures where students can make mistakes.

One of my big themes these days is, if we don't save the public schools, we won't save much else. So I thought you might ask the question, how do we save the public schools?