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Upon arriving at University, I have been grappling with my purpose as a future educator. The things that I value, the goals for my students, and even the goals for myself often appear cloudy. I can now state what I believe my goals to be as an ELA teacher, especially those pointed toward creating an equitable environment for MLLs.

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One thing that I strive to do as an educator of MLLs is to provide my students with plenty of opportunities to show their work. Because of the language barrier, MLLs will often face difficulties fully explaining fluently how they solve problems. Because of this barrier, I will “provide students lots of different ways to ‘show what they know’” (“Tips for Educators of ELLs: Reading in Grades 7-12,” 2015). I will work to make sure that students in my classes have opportunities to show their learning and intellect. In my content area, which is high school English, I will do this by giving students options for showing their work, like drawings, writing stories, making posters, and other mediums.

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Another thing that I see as crucial as an educator of MLLs is providing students with opportunities to work in groups. This will be very useful to MLLs because it will give them low-stakes opportunities to talk and ask questions. Things like what words mean and what the teacher is asking are questions that can be easily answered through small-group learning. Small groups are important because “each student has more time to talk than” in a large group discussion (Fenner & Snyder, 2019). I will do this in my content area by placing students in small groups to discuss the books and stories that we will read. This will help clarify anything that students, and especially MLLs, didn’t quite fully understand or comprehend from the readings.

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A third position that I see as valuable as an English teacher when addressing MLLs is to acknowledge that not all MLLs will have proficient background knowledge of the English language. Vocabulary, academic terms, and general English may prove difficult for many MLLs. To help combat this, I will “make instruction understandable to students” to help with both content and academic language proficiency (Perogy & Boyle, 2017, p. 53). I will make sure that vocabulary is presented in a way that clearly explains what it is the word means. I will give definitions, functions, pictures, etc. to help MLLs comprehend and excel during instruction.

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Colorín Colorado. (2015, December 1). Tips for educators of ells: Reading in grades 7-12. Colorín Colorado. https://www.colorincolorado.org/article/tips-educators-ells-reading-grades-7-12

Fenner, D., & Snyder, S. (2019, December 13). Using pair and group work to develop ells’ oral language skills. Colorín Colorado. https://www.colorincolorado.org/blog/using-pair-and-group-work-develop-ells%E2%80%99-oral-language-skills

Peregoy, S. F., & Boyle, O. (2017). Reading, writing, and learning in ESL: A resource book for K-12 teachers. Pearson.

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Approaching Teaching and Content and Language with MLLs. 

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Approaching Teaching and Content and Language with MLLs. 

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My approach to teaching content and language with MLLs will be one that is nuanced and accounts for differences in language and knowledge of English. One particular aspect of content and language that is especially apparent in English instruction is vocabulary. The mini-lesson that I have created here is an inventive approach to the instruction of vocabulary. In it, I provide a fun activity for upper-level high school English figurative language terms to be instructed. There is a word bank, a list of definitions, and slides that detail the terms in fun ways. I include pictures, sentences, and videos to capitalize on diverse ways of representing language. This will be a useful assignment for MLLs because of the different ways that the language is represented. Instead of just definition matching, MLLs will be able to make deeper connections with the terms because the examples extend beyond only the definitions. My teaching style will be indicative of this approach, and I will ensure that the instruction that I give accounts for these deeper connections that strong learning requires.