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Knowledge about Teaching and Learning English

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Knowledge about Teaching and Learning English

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-ELL need more than just "good teaching."
*Adjustments are needed
-ELL need precise assessment. As teachers, we need to identify and address gaps in academic language
-ELL need support and motivation
-ELL need direct ELD/ESL instruction
-ELL need oral language development
-ELL need academic language development
*Developing academic language is the cornerstone of ELL's school success (BICS vs. CALP)

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Kids Learn English: Float Like a Butterfly

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Kids Learn English: Float Like a Butterfly

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Teaching America's English Language Learners 

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Teaching America's English Language Learners 

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Leer en español (read in Spanish)
At a time when the value of play is a raging debate in early education, Liliane Vanoy has an almost singular focus for the prekindergarten students enrolled in her school.

Vanoy says the word three times for emphasis: vocabulary, vocabulary, and vocabulary.

"I don't care if your student comes here with two words. At the end of the year, he needs to know 5,002," Principal Vanoy tells her teachers at the city's Dual Language Academy.

Vanoy understands the expectation may seem intense and stressful for 4- and 5-year-olds, especially those learning English as a second language.

Parents often question her about how much playtime their children are getting at the school, where at least two hours per day are dedicated to teaching literacy. Vanoy agrees that children should play, but she also explains to parents that their children are tested early and often in kindergarten.

In Oklahoma, student literacy is assessed during the second week of kindergarten classes, and children are tabbed as above- or below-grade-level before some of them have even adjusted to classroom routines.

"Early childhood is not what it used to be," Vanoy said.

For nearly two decades, Oklahoma has provided universal access to free prekindergarten classes for every 4-year-old in the state, and Tulsa's programs are considered the crown jewels.

The laserlike focus on literacy has produced notable early results here, especially for English-language learners-those students who come from non-English speaking homes.

Despite the program's early success, questions remain about the long-term benefits.

Overall, the Hispanic children who pass through Tulsa's pre-K classrooms come to kindergarten more academically prepared for school than those who don't, according to a long-term study from Georgetown University.

The Georgetown researchers have found that they are, on average, months ahead of their peers who don't enroll in pre-K in reading and four months ahead in writing.

The team has spent 15 years studying Tulsa's efforts, and the data indicates that English-learners are among the student groups who have benefited most from the access to free pre-K classes.

But Tulsa's state test scores in elementary reading have remained stagnant for the past decade and have even slightly declined for English-learners.

Dual Language Learning

Seeking out solutions, Tulsa has undertaken a small-scale experiment at the Dual Language Academy, where the classrooms are an almost-even split of native English speakers and Spanish speakers.

The dual-language approach makes it possible for an English-learner to help a native English-speaking child sitting next to him learn Spanish and vice versa.

Like Tulsa, more states and school districts are aiming to reach English-language learners in the earliest stages of the education pipeline.

Research indicates that early exposure to a language boosts a child's odds of better academic performance later on.

That's crucial for Tulsa, a district of nearly 40,000 students that has undergone a dramatic demographic shift in recent years.

Hispanic students are now 31 percent of the student population, outnumbering all other races and ethnicities in the public schools here.

In the past decade, the number of Hispanic students in Tulsa has more than doubled, and many of them are native Spanish speakers. Overall, nearly 1 in every 3 students in the district speaks Spanish at home.

"The urgency of getting this right is even more pressing," said William Gormley, one of the lead Georgetown University researchers and a co-director of the university's Center for Research on Children in the United States.

At the Dual Language Academy, a pre-K through 5th grade school, science and social studies lessons are taught in Spanish, while math instruction is in English.

The school's 40 pre-K students bounce from teacher-led dance- and sing-a-longs to science and art stations every four minutes, with native Spanish- and native English-speakers often paired together to increase their exposure to the languages.

Recent research has found that there are benefits of dual-language learning over English-only classes for English-learners.

A joint study published in 2015 by the Houston schools and Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research found that native Spanish-speaking students in the district have more success learning English when they're enrolled in two-way dual-language programs that include native English-speakers in the classroom.

It's among a growing body of research that points to the benefits of teaching students in two languages.

In several North Carolina districts with two-way, dual-language instruction, students score statistically significantly higher in reading in 4th grade than their nondual-language peers, a pattern that continues through 8th grade, researchers from George Mason University found.

Thus far, the Dual Language Academy is the only school in Tulsa that provides dual-language instruction for pre-K students. That means less than 5 percent of the district's 500-plus pre-K English-learners are experiencing the model.

Hopeful that the school's approach will yield results for the district's burgeoning English-learner population, administrators are closely monitoring assessment scores for students who have come up through the dual-language program.

Anecdotal evidence shows that the dual-language approach is working, said Laura Grisso, who oversees the district's ELL programs.

Kindergarten students who participated in dual-language pre-K are working on writing half-page stories that they can explain in English and Spanish; and English-learner kindergarten students in English-only classrooms are working on recognizing and reciting the alphabet, she said.

Learning English Takes Time

The stakes for achieving student literacy are high in Oklahoma.

State law requires that students who aren't proficient on a 3rd-grade reading test repeat the grade. It's one of at least 16 states that requires a do-over for 8- and 9-year-olds who do not meet grade-level reading expectations by the end of that year.

More than 90 percent of children in the Tulsa schools who've been affected by the law have been special education students and ELLs, said Andy Mackenzie, the assistant to the superintendent for early-childhood services.

Exemptions are granted for students with a limited grasp of English, namely those who have had less than two years of academic English instruction.

"When you're learning a second language, it's all a matter of time," said Vanoy, the principal. "And sometimes our time does not match up with what our state requires. The law doesn't even take into consideration how much a child has grown," in literacy skills.

Third grade is considered key for student literacy, as it's the year that students transition from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." In other words, they're expected to focus less on reading and more on the information they're reading.

An early focus on literacy is key if children, especially English-learners, are to make that crucial transition, said Maria Adeliada Restrepo, the director of the bilingual language and literacy laboratory at Arizona State University.

"We need rich conversations, exposure to vocabulary, complex language," Restrepo said.

English-learners who enter kindergarten with a basic grasp of academic language, "either in their primary language or in English," are more likely over time to be reclassified as former ELLs, an analysis from Oregon State University researcher Karen Thompson found.

Thompson, an assistant professor of cultural and linguistic diversity in the university's college of education, reviewed nine years of student data from the Los Angeles Unified School District to gauge how long it takes students to develop proficiency in English.

Thompson's analysis shows that students who don't reach proficiency by the time they reach the end of elementary school are less likely to do so at all.

Those students share a common characteristic: They enter kindergarten with a limited command of academic language, the skills that allow children to retell stories or solve word-based math problems. Students in this category are 24 percent less likely to be reclassified than their peers. They are also more likely to score lower on academic tests. The also graduate from high school at lower rates than their peers, Thompson's analysis found.

Does Pre-K Help ELLs in the Long Run?

Even with universal pre-K, Oklahoma has been treading water as it tries to keep up with the average national gains in 4th grade reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Gormley, the Georgetown researcher, said the reliance on state and national exam results to measure the program's effectiveness is shortsighted.

"Fadeout occurs whether it's an early-childhood program or piano lessons or anything else that kids are exposed to," Gormley said.

The larger question, Gormley said, should be whether there are any long-term benefits, such as increased enrollment in honors courses, better grades, and improved discipline and attendance records, for the students who participated in pre-K.

Quality preschool programs can play a role in helping establish that strong start, and it's that much better if students are able to learn in their native language, too, said Restrepo.

There is a clear difference between early-childhood and pre-K programs that focus on language development and literacy and those with environments that more closely resemble a day-care setting, Restrepo said.

"They need to play, but there should be people talking with them," Restrepo said.

"What I see is kids banging blocks in the corner and fighting with each other for the naked baby [doll] in the preschool classroom and nobody's building the language."

English-learners enrolled in English-only courses often face two challenges: Their English instruction is often oversimplified, and there's no reinforcement in their primary language, she said.

The pre-K classes at Tulsa's Dual Language Academy could help address those issues, but finding bilingual teachers to staff classrooms has been a struggle in Tulsa, just as it is in many school districts.

Latino Families Least Likely to Access Pre-K

Oklahoma has put a premium on increasing access to prekindergarten, and Tulsa has one of the highest participation rates in the country, with 3 out of 4 4-year-olds enrolled in a pre-K program.

But participation among Hispanics, and English-learners in particular, lags behind other groups here and elsewhere.

Historically, Hispanic parents have been less likely to enroll their children in early-childhood-education programs and Head Start, the federal education program designed to support the needs of low-income children and get them ready for elementary school.

Though Oklahoma offers pre-K that is open to all age-eligible children, the ability for families to access it isn't universal.

Gina Adams, a senior fellow with the Urban Institute in Washington, has studied the barriers to preschool participation for immigrant children and English-language learners in Silicon Valley and Chicago.

In cities around the country, transportation, cost, and lackluster outreach efforts are among the issues that emerge as obstacles for those families who want to enroll children in pre-K but don't have the resources or time to do so.

The language barrier between schools and families with a limited command of English is often the primary hurdle, said Adams, who worked as a child-care teacher for infants and as a home visitor for low-income Latino families in Austin, Texas, before coming to the Urban Institute.

"If there's nobody there who can connect, it makes sense that parents would be hesitant to take their children," Adams said.

To attract more parents, pre-K providers have to actively recruit families, Adams said.

"If you don't, the school readiness gap is not going to be addressed, because the kids who need [pre-K] most are not going to be there and they'll still be coming to school unprepared," Adams said.

One of the city's early-childhood-program providers, Community Action Project-Tulsa has started opening Head Start sites in the city's most heavily Hispanic neighborhoods in its push to get more families through the door.

Paving the way for families to enroll can make all the difference for the English-learners, said Restrepo, the Arizona State University professor.

"We're trying to make up for lost ground," she said.

Published in Print: May 11, 2016, as Early Jump on Oral Literacy Crucial for ELLs' Later Success

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Building ELLs' Literacy Early Is Crucial

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Leer en español (read in Spanish) At a time when the value of play is a raging debate in early education, Liliane Vanoy has an almost singular focus for the prekindergarten students enrolled in her school. Vanoy says the word three times for emphasis: vocabulary, vocabulary, and vocabulary.

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Strategies to Engage English Language Learners in the Classroom

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Resources for Teaching English-Language Learners

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From literacy instruction to arts and technology integration, explore strategies for engaging English-language learners.

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ESL Worksheets and Activities for Kids. Basico buenas ideas para taliano

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This 3rd part of ESL ideas (view other parts of the series here: part 1, part 2) features 7 more quick but powerful tips. Some of them will will definitely come in handy one day. Who knows - you might even end up using them all with your class - one after another! As always, it's a high quality print-friendly poster that you can download and print out.

If you believe these ideas are worth spreading, we invite you to share the link on Facebook, tweet about this poster, pin it onto your Pinterest board, or email it to your fellow teachers. Happy teaching!
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This 3rd part of ESL ideas (view other parts of the series here: part 1 , part 2 ) features 7 more quick but powerful tips. Some of them will will definitely come in handy one day. Who knows - you might even end up using them all with your class - one after another!

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Free ESL Fun Games & Interactive Exercises Online

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ESL Fun Games and Activities online for Grammar, Vocabulary and Pronunciation Practice, Interactive fun games for ESL classrooms, flash games and quizzes, grammar games, vocabulary games, spelling games, hangman, snakes and ladders, mazes, memory games, wheel of fortune, TV games, betting games and…

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Hey guys! With the start of our new fall semester, we have been on the look out for more ESL websites that could help us out with our new lessons. Even though we work at a hagwon that is owned by a major corporation with strict guide lines for us to follow with complete lesson plans, there are still times that we find the lessons to be a little sparse so we are always needing more fillers.

Get Epic is a great collection of children's books for both parents and teachers. Non-teachers are required to pay $4.99 per month to use this site, but teachers can gain access for free. Filled with stories for young readers, this is a great tool for us educators who also don't have many books for their students. You can easily use this in the classroom by simply finding a book, and projecting it onto your screen for the whole class to see.

Mostly focused on younger students, this website offers hundreds of games for PowerPoint as well as printable games and worksheets. Having a wide variety of options for various language ability levels, this site is a go-to when last minute preparation or a change of schedule occurs. For the occasional ESL teacher required to go beyond English and teach other subjects, there is also a math section for games and activities. Much of this site if geared toward younger students, but older students often enjoy the simplicity of a "refresher game."

For students as well as teachers, English Club is a great resource for games that reinforce spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. The added benefit of this site is its compatibility with mobile devices. As more and more people become reliant on mobile device use, this site allows games and resources to be used from phone, iPad, or tablet as well as your computer. Homework becomes a mobile possibility with this site, as does speaking practice from anywhere. Still a great resource aside from the mobile possibilities, this site is certainly worth a look.

Waygook has its pros and cons like no other suggestion on this page. The word "waygook" is an English spelling of the Korean word for foreigner, so there is a tongue-in-cheek tone from the beginning from its users. Requiring a membership to use Waygook's resources, this site has a Massively huge library of resources from English teachers in Korea from years and years of sharing between all of us "waygooks" lost and nervous about creating our own lessons and materials. While not the best design, taking the time to learn its method of navigation is absolutely worth the effort. Since so many contributors from so many backgrounds have contributed so diligently, you can imagine that the quality of resources varies wildly...BUT we highly suggest this site for beginning teachers and anyone looking for inspiration. We often browse for ideas that other teachers have had success with, and we commonly take the PowerPoint files we find on topics that interest us and re-engineer and retool it to our liking. BE WARNED, some ESL teachers, like people from all walks of life, are not happy and Waygook is often a forum for discussing experiences both good and bad. Stick to the "Lessons" sections to avoid negative people. Separated by levels from Elementary to University and private tutoring adults, this site can be a lifesaver with its games and lesson ideas and templates. Some seriously dedicated and talented ESL teachers have offered their resources for others to enjoy, so we'd like to share this secret resource with you!

This website is made by ESL teachers who live and teach in Asia and North America. They heard your desperate cries for free teaching materials and have answered! Stumped on what to do for class? They have entire lesson plans for you to use. You can find word searches, worksheets, and there is even a job board with several job postings for ESL positions. However, my favorite is their ESL games section. They have many different board games that build different skills such as reading, listening, speaking, and so on.

Bonus

For extra quiz practice in a variety of subject, Free Rice is a website that donates 10 grains of rice to the World Food Program for every answer its users get correct. You can play for free and make a huge difference in the lives of victims of hunger around the world. In the classroom, this site can be used to not only reinforce vocabulary, but also create a fun competition. By creating free accounts, teams can compete against each other and donate even more food while having fun.

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Hey guys! With the start of our new fall semester, we have been on the look out for more ESL websites that could help us out with our new lessons.

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Top Ten Spoken Languages in ELL Students’ Homes

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(ELL) participate in appropriate programs of language assistance:
English as a Second Language
High Intensity Language Training
Bilingual Education, to help ensure that they attain English
proficiency, develop high levels of academic attainment in English,
and meet the same academic content and academic achievement
standards that all students are expected to meet.

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English Language Learners: Culture, Equity and Language