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This school closely monitors their regular assessments to guide the formative assessments they conduct throughout the lessons their teachers give.

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Stephanie Bullock
Learning logs are a great tool to use as a formative assessment for ELLs. Students can document their learning process throughout a lesson and then write a reflection once the lesson is completed. This gives them not only practice with writing in English, but also mastering the concepts they are learning by representing them creatively visually through sketches and developing metacognition as they write and think about the learning they are doing as they are doing it. Its a great assessment at the end of a lesson to see what the students took from it as well as at the end of the year for teachers, parents, and students to look back on what the student learned as well as how their writing and thought processes have developed throughout the year!

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Sentence starters/frames are a great way to scaffold ELLs for writing because they provide structure for students who may not know how to best articulate their thoughts onto paper. Frames help students convey a message in a clear way, until they feel comfortable enough to structure writing on their own.

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Using graphic organizers as a reading scaffold helps ELLs organize the information they pull from the text. Directive labels may help them to know key information to look for as well.

From "The GO TO Strategies: Scaffolding Options for Teachers of English Language Learners, K-12"

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"Turn and Talk" is a speaking scaffold in which students will discuss a topic (usually a question posed by the teacher at the start or end of a class) with a partner. This is a great scaffold for speaking because it allows casual, peer learning to occur; in a less formal setting, ELLs can build their confidence speaking in the classroom.

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Teacher Toolkit: Turn and Talk (Secondary)

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Total Physical Response is a scaffold for ELLs that encourages students to engage multiple modes of learning. This video explains the process in depth and shows real life classroom examples at the end!

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ESL Teaching Strategies: #1 TPR or Total Physical Response (VIPKID)

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Using visual aids, such as Key Word Charts, images on slides, picture-books, or time-lines, ELLs will be able to draw connections between what they see and what they hear. The use of visual aids is a great scaffolding technique for listening because it supplements any missing vocabulary or listening gaps a student might have.

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6 Scaffolding Strategies to Use With Your Students

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Support every student by breaking learning up into chunks and providing a concrete structure for each.

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Before kids begin reading and article or story with potentially challenging vocabulary, teachers can introduce more difficult words to students through pictures or with things that are in context their personal experiences or what they are interested in.

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Jigsaw reading allows students to practice speaking in smaller groups which is easier and more comfortable for EL students. In this exercise, students work in a group and each group member is assigned a different part of the reading. Each member becomes an "expert" at their specific topic working with others in the class that were assigned to their topic if needed. Then the group comes back together and each expert shares about their topic and clarifies any questions.

http://www.readwritethink.org/professional-development/strategy-guides/using-jigsaw-cooperative-learning-30599.html

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Emily Krellwitz

Model writing  is a technique that starts with the teaching writing in front of students. This allows for the students to "think aloud" and understand what effective writers do mentally. This can help students visualize the writing process. We can include different structures and specific vocabulary before they go and write on their own.

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This would be an after the reading is completed activity. The students will record content information/vocabulary on a T Chart. The chart has a long horizontal like in the middle and the top of the paper a vertical line 1/3 of the way from the left side of the paper. Students will put main idea or big concept in the left-hand side column and supporting facts/details in the right-had column. This activity will help ELLs who have a hard time with the difference in main ideas and supporting facts on their own.

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The idea behind this strategy is to help student's understand content by relating it to experiences they have likely had. For example, if you are teaching about Columbus' voyages, your students might have a hard time understanding this concept because they have probably not sailed across two countries. Before teaching this lesson, you can encourage your students to think about an adventure they have embarked on, even something just in their backyard. They can share their ideas with peers or you could create an activity out of this. Thinking of these experiences may help students understand new concepts.

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When giving a child the task to read something that may be long or difficult for them, there needs to be regular check-ins to make sure that they are comprehending what they are reading. For example, the teacher presents a new idea from the reading and takes time to allow for pondering and reflection from the students. As they are thinking, the teacher presents them with guided, open-ended questions to get them thinking more critically and specifically. Once the question(s) have been answered, the teacher should allow more time for thinking and discussion with peers.

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Early learners, especially ELLs and SIFE students, need ample time to process new ideas. They also need opportunities to practice expressing this knowledge to their learning community. Giving students time to talk to their peers through strategies like "think-pair-share" and "turn and talk", allows them to reflect on their understanding, learn from others' experiences, and improve!

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6 Scaffolding Strategies to Use With Your Students

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Support every student by breaking learning up into chunks and providing a concrete structure for each.

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Word walls are large graphic organizers that can be filled with words from the students vocabulary, readings, etc. They can also use objects on word walls. It is a fun way for the teacher and student to collaborate and make something together to help the students. It is good for the students to be able to see the words and language of what they are learning and can use it in their writings.

https://seidlitzblog.org/2019/04/10/8-ways-to-scaffold-writing-for-english-learners/

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This activity can be used when introducing a new "sound" into the classroom. For example, if you are practicing the /ae/ sound (like in “cat,” “hat,” etc…, you could read the following script. “Yesterday, my cat ate a plastic toy and swallowed it fast.” Whenever students hear this sound for the first time (cat), they should stand. When they hear it again (plastic), sit down. This is beneficial for ELL because something as simple as developing recognition of a sound may be harder for them as they are not native speakers, so spending time on really listening for these sounds will help in all domains. This also encourages movement in the classroom which I believe to always be better than requiring children to sit in a desk all day.

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by abepiusc 654,456 views

Listening is the gateway to understanding and communicating and, therefore, is absolutely critical for language learners of all skills.

If students struggle to listen carefully, they will miss out on important interactions both inside and outside of the classroom.

The problem with listening instruction is that it is commonly thought to be boring and passive; students simply sit and listen. However, teaching listening doesn't have to be dull! There are many ways to create engaging and interactive lessons that focus on listening skills. Here are eight different ways to build students' listening skills:

Try These 8 Activities to Improve Listening Skills

1. Voice blogging

Using a free website (such as Voice Thread) have students record voice journals about their week. Encourage students with semi-personal topics or hypothetical questions (e.g. What would you do if you had one million dollars? Describe your best vacation. etc..) to prompt speaking. This works just like a blog but with student voices rather than writing. Even if your school doesn't have computers with microphones or recording capabilities, with VoiceThread students can use any phone to record their voice blog.

Students can then be assigned to listen to several of their classmates and give each other comments. By listening to each other and giving encouraging comments, you are building a positive classroom environment and cooperation within the classroom all while students build their listening skills.

2. Listen for the hidden phrase

An engaging whole class activity is to pair students up and give each pair a "secret" word or phrase. For easier dialogues, give a simple phrase such as "I love soccer," or "My father works a lot;" etc... To challenge students, give a slightly more obscure phrase, such as "John does yoga every Saturday," or "I saw a UFO in my yard last night."

Students are then tasked with developing a dialogue with their partner that somehow uses this phrase. Students may script the dialogue if they wish, but only give them limited planning time (5-10 minutes). After they have prepared their dialogue, students perform the dialogue in front of the class, and the other students listen carefully to hear which words or phrases seem extra carefully planned to find the secret phase. If you have individual white boards, have the students write down the phrase as they hear it and then show their board after the pair has finished the dialogue. If they found the correct secret phrase, they get a point. If no one finds the pair's secret phrase, the pair that developed the dialogue gets a point.

3. Listen for the word

Using popular culture media is always a good way to practice listening skills. Using songs, watching TV shows, or even listening to podcasts will help build skills. To go an extra step, have an additional task while listening to the song or TV show such as assign students different words to listen for and have them keep track of how often they hear these words. This is particularly helpful with reductions like gonna, wanna, hafta.

Listening to various media is also a good time to practice unfamiliar words. Encourage students to write down words they have never heard before. Without subtitles or lyrics, students will have to rely on the sounds they think they heard to make a guess at how to spell this unfamiliar word. Encourage students to write down other surrounding words to help you decipher what the word might be or to write down the time when they heard the word so you can go back to the spot and listen again. These are important skills for students to master so that they can continue learning even outside of the classroom by hearing new words.

5. Student-designed quizzes

If students are in a computer lab or if they have iPads/iPhones, give each student a dialogue, lecture, or song to listen to. These can be easily found on various free listening websites. Have students listen to the lecture multiple times and then create a quiz for another student to take. Students will be excited to "play teacher" by creating quiz questions, and they will have to rely on their listening skills to write accurate questions.

6. Describe the...

Place students into pairs and have them sit back to back. Give one student in the pair a unique picture with a lot of simple shapes drawn on it. I prefer to draw my own pictures with some randomly placed like:

Hearts

Flowers

Stars

Houses

Stick Figures

1. Put these shapes in different places, angles, and with extra features as desired. Give the second student in the pair a blank piece of paper. The student with the picture must dictate to his/her partner how to draw the picture. Make sure to emphasize no cheating or peeking! When finished, change the pictures around the groups and have the partners switch roles. When everyone has drawn once, the team with the most similar pictures win!

2. Put the celebrity in the right place

Similar to the picture describing game, this game has a similar setup but without the drawing. Give students a chart with many different celebrities in the boxes/grid. This can be easily done by creating a table in a word processing program and pasting internet images of celebrities in the table. Be sure to make several different versions with celebrities in the different spaces. It's okay if the students don't know all of the celebrities; in fact, it may be better if there are some they don't know, so they have to rely on describing physical features rather than giving names. Print a second blank grid with the pictures of the celebrities cut out into individual pieces but not attached to the grid.

Students should sit back to back and be instructed to not peek or cheat. The student with the table with pre-assigned celebrities should give the other student instructions on how to fill in his table with the celebrity picture pieces. For example, the first student might say "The picture of Brad Pitt goes in the first square, and Angelina goes in the square below Brad Pitt." It may be helpful to pre-teach the vocabulary "columns" and "rows."

3. Stand up/sit down

When working on individual sounds, give students a target sound and then read a script out loud that contains multiple examples of this sound. For example, if you are practicing the /ae/ sound (like in "cat," "hat," etc..., you could read the following script. "Yesterday, my cat ate a plastic toy and swallowed it fast." Whenever students hear this sound for the first time (cat), they should stand. When they hear it again (plastic), sit down. Read slowly enough for them to have time to stand up or sit down. This activity is great because it gets them out of their seats and lets them get some excess energy out!

5. Vowel discrimination

Another good activity to do when you are studying specific vowel sounds is to give students two different color note cards (e.g. one red card and one blue card). For a review activity, assign one vowel to the red card (e.g. the /ae/ sound as in "bat") and another card to the blue card (e.g. the /ei/ sound as in "bay"). When you read a word, have students raise the card in the air for the correct vowel/sound they heard. For a more advanced game, give students several colors of cards to correspond with several different vowels. Also, you could give the students several cards and read a sentence where each word represents a different vowel. Students must recreate the pattern of sounds they heard by lining up their note cards in the correct order.

Students engage in listening every day, so it's important for ESL students to continue developing their listening skills.

Engaging them in fun listening activities will hopefully motivate them to practice more listening and take advantage of all opportunities around them.
How do you get your students excited for listening practice? If you're an English teacher teaching students aged kindergarten to senior high (or even adults), check out our partner sites HelpTeaching, KidsKonnect, and Elementary Librarian for hundreds of additional ESL resources including worksheets, quiz questions, tests, books, and more!

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Do You Hear What I Hear?: 8 Activities to Improve Listening Skills

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by abepiusc 654,456 views If students struggle to listen carefully, they will miss out on important interactions both inside and outside of the classroom. The problem with listening instruction is that it is commonly thought to be boring and passive; students simply sit and listen. However, teaching listening doesn't have to be dull!

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Silly Starters is a writing scaffolding strategy that helps randomly prompt students different starters for writings. It helps students get the ball rolling on writing and expanding topics they may have never written about. It allows students to pursue a creative topic and go in any direction they want.

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For this specific activity, Fish Bowl, there is a small group in a circle in the middle, this is the fish bowl. Then, there is a larger circle around them. This is the audience. The people in the fishbowl do the activity. This uses students who understand to demonstrate the activity to the audience on the outer circle. For ELL's they could start on the outer circle, so they have a chance to see how the activity is done before doing it themselves.

http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/activities/fishbowl.html

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This is a writing scaffolding activity in which the students will each have a piece of paper that has categories and a line next to each and students will walk around and find other students that fill each slot. Potential categories can include things like "find someone who likes Taylor Swift" or " find someone who likes Chick-fil-A."

https://www.edutopia.org/discussion/3-activities-try-your-english-language-learners

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With film circles, the class is given different scaffolds like word banks, graphic organizers, guiding questions, etc. The class watches a film together and then put in small groups to discuss the film together. These groupings can be mixed or by ability level and it is a low-stress environment. By exploring and discussing the film, students are critically thinking and strengthening their language acquisition by sharing with one another.

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Hula Hoop Number Counting: Caroline Parham 

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Hula Hoop Number Counting: Caroline Parham 

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This activity, as shown in the video below, is a great way for students to get up and moving. Hula Hoops are placed on the ground with numbers in them in sequential order from 1-20 (or any group of numbers that you want your students to review). Then the students are asked to jump in the hoops, like hop scotch, in the correct number order. This scaffolding activity, like the others in the video below can be altered and created based on the students learning level. By creating differentiated groups, you can cater a more individualized learning experience for your students to be successful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iki2hAYK74

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Read-alouds allow students to make connections by seeing how words are pronounced, used, and how context clues are used. It also gives the teacher the opportunity to help students that struggle with story-telling and how pictures help tell the story.
https://www.collaborativeclassroom.org/blog/scaffolding-techniques-english-language-learners-part-1/

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A Quick Write is a short writing task which takes around 3-10 minutes to complete. It is important for students to practice their writing daily, and Quick Writes can be a lot less intimidating for EL learners. Through this activity, they are able to hone in on a small chunk of their writing opposed to feeling overwhelmed by long essays. "Chunking" a task makes it seem more doable. It is important to find activities that allow for EL students to feel comfortable doing, rather than coming up with unmanageable tasks. Eventually, they will build their way up to the larger writing activities, but it is important not to push them too hard at the early stages of their writing.

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by Valentina Gonzalez

Scaffolds are temporary supports meant to be released when no longer needed. Think of buildings that are under construction. When the building is in the early phases, more scaffolding is necessary to sustain the structure. As the building progresses, less scaffolding is needed. Finally, before the construction is complete, the scaffolding is removed.

Scaffolding our instruction for students, English learners or not, is similar in theory. Assessing when and where the scaffolds are needed, and removing them at the right time is critical. Keeping a scaffold for too long can create a crutch for some, and students may become dependent on scaffolds that remain too long. The goal of a scaffold is to support students toward future independence.

These 8 writing scaffolds can be implemented in any grade level or content area:

1. Sentence Frames

Sentence frames are highly structured. They are basically sentences with fill in the blanks that support students at earlier stages of language proficiency. Here are a few examples of frames:

The ___has ___sides.

The ____revolted against the___.

A ___is larger/smaller than a ____.

2. Sentence Stems

Sometimes sentence stems and sentence frames are used interchangeably. However there a difference between the two. As shown above, a frame provides a tight grammatical structure. A stem, on the other hand, is as the name indicates, just the "stem" or base of a sentence and not a whole sentence. Students must continue the thought. Sentence stems give students just enough structure to begin more elaborate writing. Here are some examples of sentence stems:

Based on the experiment, I can conclude that...

In the beginning I thought..., but now I think...

One way that ___and ___are alike is that....

On the other hand, they are different because...

3. Mentor Texts

Mentor texts are also known as exemplars. They are models of high-quality writing for students. While adult-authored books or articles are often a main source of mentor texts, it is also effective to use high-quality student-authored examples. One teacher I know would save the original student samples of writing to use as exemplars. Another made digital copies. (Either way, always be careful to remove any identifiable information such as names.) Mentor texts set students up for success because they show students what the target is, which makes it much easier to achieve. Sometimes using student-created exemplars makes the target seem more attainable for students.

4. Interactive Word Walls

Interactive Word Walls (IWWs) are large, thematic or unit-based graphic organizers filled with rich vocabulary and visually supported with graphics and real objects. IWWs are often co-created with students rather than premade by the teacher. They can be used as scaffolds for writing in all content areas because students can easily take the language from the unit-based word wall and use it in their writing.

5. Model Writing

Model writing is similar to the Read-Aloud; in fact, some call it Write-Aloud. When we write in front of students in real time, we have the opportunity to "think aloud" and model what effective writers do mentally. This helps to make the writing process visible for students. Students see how an idea moves from the abstract to a concrete piece of writing. Modeling writing in all content areas helps students develop the language of the domain. For example, when we model how to write a lab report, we can share with students the language structures and academic vocabulary that scientists use. This modeling process supports students as they go off to write on their own.

6. Quick Writes

Not every piece of writing students do has to be lengthy. In fact, quick, daily writing is an effective way for English learners to practice writing in a low-stress setting. Long essays and pages of writing can be intimidating for students who are learning the structures of the English language. What's the saying? "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." Breaking a task into small chunks (or "chunking" the task) makes it seem doable. A Quick Write is a short writing task-usually about 3-10 minutes. Author and teacher, Larry Ferlazzo writes about the power Quick Writes, or Micro-writing, holds for ELs here in an article for ASCD. He shows how this type of writing can improve English learners' confidence and language proficiency.

7. Language Experience Approach

The Language Experience Approach has been around for a long time. It is a method of shared writing in which students and the teacher write together after a shared experience. This is actually one of my favorite techniques because it builds community, models writing, and increases student participation and engagement. Students listen, speak, read, and write.

Begin by sharing an experience (like a field trip, science experiment, movie, book, etc). Next, have students talk about the experience with partners or a group, and come up with sentences to share with the teacher. Then lead the class in creating a text about the experience on chart paper (or under a document camera) as students share their sentences with you. After you write each sentence, have the class read it aloud chorally. (This provides tons of reading practice for fluency.) When the shared writing is complete, the class rereads the whole piece. Finally, lead the class in discussing organization, revision, and editing. Students can suggest adding and deleting sentences and decide to change words or punctuation. To see an example of what this can look like, check out Carol Salva's use of LEA here!

8. Mentor Sentences

Think of a mentor in your life. Who did you imagine? Someone you look up to? Someone you try to emulate? Mentor sentences are sentences students try to emulate. Jeff Anderson, author of Mechanically Inclined and Patterns of Power writes about the effectiveness of mentor sentences. The sentences that we choose can come from Read Alouds or we can make up our own sentences using information relevant to our students and our class.

For instance, suppose we had a visit from the fire department and the kids couldn't talk about anything else. So my mentor sentence may have been, " While waiting anxiously to hear all about the apparatus, a crowd of kids huddled around the fire truck ." First I read it aloud, and then we read it chorally. I then invited students to discuss the sentence with their partner or in groups. What did they notice? What did they observe about the sentence? I called on a few students randomly. Some noticed that there was a comma. One student said that the sentence was in the past tense, and we asked how he knew. He said, "Because the word 'huddled' ended with an -ed." Another student said that it looked like two sentences stuck together. We talked more about that and discovered that the first part of the sentence wasn't a complete sentence but a phrase. Finally, the students wrote their own sentences modeled after the mentor sentence. Some students used this frame:

While waiting ______to hear all about the_____, a crowd of ___huddled around the ____.

One student wrote: While waiting eagerly to grab all the kibble, a crowd of dogs huddled around the food bowl. To add to it, he drew a group of dogs around an empty food bowl.

If you have students who struggle with writing, try some of these scaffolds to support them along the way to independence and success!

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8 Ways to Scaffold Writing for English Learners

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by Valentina Gonzalez Scaffolds are temporary supports meant to be released when no longer needed. Think of buildings that are under construction. When the building is in the early phases, more scaffolding is necessary to sustain the structure. As the building progresses, less scaffolding is needed.

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Mind Maps are like brainstorms with pictures. there is a central topic and then branches come off that topic into subsections and then branches come off the subsections to make smaller subsections. This could be given to students when starting a new unit. Some parts of the mind map could be provided to the students like central topic and subsections that are going to have a lot of branches coming off. Then the student fills in the knowledge as we progress through the unit.

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This is a quick way to assess the students while the information is fresh in their mind. It forces students to come up with something they learned that day in class. This will also encourage students to pay attention during class if they know that they are going to complete this at the end of class.

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Red, Yellow, or Green: Cameron & Monique

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Red, Yellow, or Green: Cameron & Monique

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Students each have three cards of the colors red, yellow, & green. At the end of a lesson, the teacher will ask them to hold up a card depicting how they feel about their level of understanding. (Red=very confused, Yellow=somewhat confused but somewhat understands, Green=fully understands) The teacher will then use this to note how well the students are picking up on the material.

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The teacher would give each student a piece of paper with a question about the lesson on it. Then, each student would write their answer on the paper and crumple it up. Then the students will engage in a "snowball fight" and toss these papers across the classroom. At the end, the student will choose a "snowball" and uncrumple it and read the question and answer aloud. The class can discuss the answer and the teacher can see how effective the lesson was.

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This formative assessment requires students to display their work or projects around the room so that their peers can view what they did, and then the teachers ask the students to write one thing they liked about their peers work and one constructive criticism. This allows the students to be vulnerable which can create a better class community and hearing their peers feedback and ideas can be very beneficial to students.

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Katie Lemon and Erin Osborne

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Offer students a "3,2,1" Meaning: 3 things I learned, 2 questions I still have, and one thing I really enjoyed.
It allows them to remember part of what they learned, it allows us to see what questions they have, and for them to get the chance to ask questions, and it also allows us to hear what they enjoyed so that we can continue to help them learn in the ways they enjoy learning.

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This is  for at the end of the year, but do monthly check-ins to track progress.

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The students will be asked to write down a question that they have about the day's lesson. They will crumble up the piece of paper and through it around the room. Each child will get a different question, and they will have to answer it out loud to the class.