APPROACH, METHODS, TECHNIQUE AND STRATEGIES TO TEACH ENGLISH
The basic principles of the direct method approach are:
- Teach language inductively: In this method, we don’t explain the rules to the students; we let them figure it out for themselves. We challenge them and guide them to the correct use of the language, but we also force them to think through things as they learn. We can do this by showing them objects and even calling the objects by the wrong color, so they will figure out what the object is NOT as well as what it is.
- Only use the target language: Our goal is to not have the students translating from their mother tongue but to learn instead to think in the foreign language. When a person learned their first language, there was no translation from another language; they had nothing to base it on. The direct method approach believes in trying to mimic first language acquisition
- And...
- Oral communication is the main objective: The direct approach focuses on speaking far more than the importance of reading and writing. This practice is the complete opposite of the grammar-translation approach, where students learn all of the rules of a language but often cannot speak or communicate effectively in the second language. Using the direct method, we encourage our students to speak, even to make grammatical mistakes, so they can get their point across and put into practice what they are learning in their classrooms.
- Showing or using multiple examples of a word or concept: There should be an overkill of props, images, or gestures used to make sure the point comes across for a student. The overuse is needed to ensure comprehension since there is no translation being used at all.
- Props and TPR (total physical response): Visual cues are extremely important for a student learning with the direct method. The student needs to see the image or the action many times in order to associate the concept with the new word or language they are learning.
- Listening and repetition: Not only do the students need to see something to create an association, but they also need to hear something. They need to hear how the language is used, how it is pronounced, and how to incorporate it into their oral communication.
- Speaking: the students need to be able to practice the concepts of words they are learning. Once they have seen it, seen examples, heard it, and created an association of a word or concept in their mind, they will need to put it into practice with actually speaking and communicating. Give them ample opportunity to try to speak and praise them when they are correct. If you don’t understand, be patient and repeat the examples, TPR, images, etc.
What is the Direct Method / Natural Approach?
Advantages to using TPR in an ESL classroom
TPR (total physical response)
- Teacher-centered: Having all eyes on the teacher helps a lot with shorter attention spans. The students are waiting to see what the teacher will do, rather than looking at each other or even being self-conscious about their speaking.
- Engages shy students: Shy students do not have to speak until they are ready, but they can show they understand the concept through physical actions. This helps to take the pressure off of those who are paralyzed by the thought of speaking incorrectly or in front of their peers.
- Time management: As mentioned already, usually our ESL class time is limited. The use of TPR can maximize the time available by corresponding actions with reading and auditory instruction.
5 Popular ESL Teaching Methods Every Teacher Should Know
Method #1: Direct method
For the direct method, all teaching is done in the target language, translations are not allowed in class, and the focus lies heavily on speaking instead of grammar. This makes the direct method a very student-centered strategy that has gained popularity in recent years.
Students are supposed to learn the target language naturally and instinctively, which is why the direct method is also called the “natural approach.” Mistakes are corrected as they happen in class, and teachers reinforce the correct usage of the language with praise.
Method #2: Communicative language teaching (CLT)
Communicative language teaching is perhaps the most popular approach among the methods of teaching ESL today. CLT emphasizes the students’ ability to communicate in real-life contexts, and students learn to make requests, accept offers, explain things, and express their feelings and preferences.
Since CLT focuses on teaching language through real-world assignments and problem-solving, it’s less concerned with grammar accuracy and instead focuses on fluency.
Promote communication and fluency in your classroom with these ESL speaking activities for adults.
Method #3: Task-/project-/inquiry-based learning
This teaching strategy for ESL students can sometimes be considered a part of CLT, but it heavily emphasizes the students’ independence and individuality. Inquiry-based learning is a modern approach that is becoming widely popular at schools all over the world. By asking questions and solving problems with the teacher as a mere learning facilitator, student motivation and participation in tasks and projects is thought to increase.
Online ESL teacher, Sallie, uses TPR, realia, and other strategies to motivate her students.
Method #4: Total physical response (TPR)
You may have heard of this teaching strategy for ESL before, but what exactly is TPR? Total physical response has become a very popular approach in which students react to the teacher with movement, such as miming, gesturing, or acting out the language.
For example, the teacher and students might make an exaggerated frown and pretend to cry when learning the word “sad.” TPR suggests that students learn the target language best through physical response rather than by analysis.
Method #5: An eclectic approach
Many teachers choose from the collection of humanistic approaches (TPR, for example) and communicative approaches (the direct method and CLT), as well as many other teaching strategies for ESL learners, and use what works best for them.
For example, a teacher who uses mostly the direct method may occasionally do a lot of grammar explanation when teaching a test preparation class, or a CLT advocate may borrow some aspects of the direct method or use TPR.
The list of ESL teaching styles doesn’t have to end here! You can find your own favorite TEFL/TESOL method from among those listed above, combine several strategies for teaching your ESL students, or develop your own ESL teaching methods and techniques.
Experiential learning is an engaged learning process whereby students “learn by doing” and by reflecting on the experience. Experiential learning activities can include, but are not limited to, hands-on laboratory experiments, internships, practicums, field exercises, study abroad, undergraduate research and studio performances.
Well-planned, supervised and assessed experiential learning programs can stimulate academic inquiry by promoting interdisciplinary learning, civic engagement, career development, cultural awareness, leadership, and other professional and intellectual skills.
Learning that is considered “experiential” contain all the following elements:
- Reflection, critical analysis and synthesis.
- Opportunities for students to take initiative, make decisions, and be accountable for the results.
- Opportunities for students to engage intellectually, creatively, emotionally, socially, or physically.
- A designed learning experience that includes the possibility to learn from natural consequences, mistakes, and successes.
How does it work?
Kolb’s (1984) cycle of learning depicts the experiential learning process (see figure below). This process includes the integration of:
- knowledge—the concepts, facts, and information acquired through formal learning and past experience;
- activity—the application of knowledge to a “real world” setting; and
- reflection—the analysis and synthesis of knowledge and activity to create new knowledge” (Indiana University, 2006, n.p.).
Ten Teaching Techniques to Accommodate ESL Students
1. SIOP Techniques:
Sheltered English instruction helps ESL students to comprehend and participate in as much classroom learning as possible. When you speak to your ESL students, speak slowly and clearly, and repeat instructions several times to ensure comprehension.
Use simple sentence structure, support your instruction with visual references and physical gestures, and check for understanding often. It is imperative to differentiate your teaching to meet the needs of all learners.
2. Read-Alouds:
Provide lots of opportunities for your students to read aloud. This is an excellent way to blend auditory, oral, and reading skills. It will assistant your ESL students to become more comfortable speaking English in front of their peers.
3. Teach by Doing:
Model your lessons for your ESL students before having them complete the activities. This way, they will feel more comfortable with what you ask them to do, and there will be less confusion.
4. Consistent Homework:
Since most ESL students go home to a household that doesn’t speak English, providing students with regular homework allows them to continue to use and practice English while at home.
5. Multicultural Lessons:
Make your ESL students feel like they belong and pique their interest by making creative lessons incorporate their personal experiences and backgrounds. This will help them become more interested and passionate about learning English words and phrases because it will help them communicate about the things critical to them in their lives.
These lessons will help students feel included and appreciated. They will assist students in connecting with their peers and learning about other cultures.
6. Oral Communication:
Even though reading and writing are both important skills, forcing your ESL students to speak as much as possible helps to ingrain the language’s sound and feel in your students’ minds. Students must develop a level of comfort with speaking English in front of others. This will ultimately determine their level of success.
7. Cooperative Learning /Group Work:
Learning a new language and communicating in English becomes more fun and natural when students can work through it together. Learning a language alone is much more difficult. Cooperative learning groups allow students to learn from one another and have fun.
Heterogeneous and homogeneous grouping are and their benefits in the classroom.
8. Teach Keywords:
School and learning, and especially certain subject areas, have their own specific vocabularies. It’s essential ESL students learn these words as soon as possible.
Providing the students with flashcards with corresponding pictures of each word can motivate and help them learn these words quickly. Words such as bathroom, student, teacher, math, addition, subtraction, recess, bell, or cafeteria are essential for getting through a school day. It’s important ESL students know how to ask for things.
9. Use Peer Partner Learning:
It is critical your students can rely on a responsible and trustworthy student to accompany them throughout classroom routines and complete various assignments.
They must have a buddy to help them navigate the school and various learning community schedules. When your ESL student is brand new, they will need assistance locating certain things, like the cafeteria, buses, classrooms, etc.
10. Opportunities for Success:
Lastly, your ESL students are probably overwhelmed with all the changes and easily become discouraged by how difficult some tasks are in a new language. Provide students with opportunities to shine and increase confidence.
Focus on subject areas where the language is not front and center – like physical education, drama, art, or music, and let them show off a skill or talent. This can extend to all subjects as well by making sure to acknowledge their small hurdles with learning and using English.
6 Essential Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners
We interviewed educators with decades of experience in teaching ELLs and tapped a network of experts and observers to find the strategies that work.
Over 10 percent of students in the United States—more than 4.8 million kids—are English language learners (ELLs), and the number is on the rise. Though these students do not learn differently than their native-English-speaking peers, they do have particular educational needs.
To learn about these needs—and best practices for addressing them—I interviewed a range of educators and observers, including Larry Ferlazzo, an educator and author of The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide; longtime teachers of English as a second language (ESL) Emily Francis and Tan Huynh; and the journalist Helen Thorpe, who spent a year observing a teacher who works with ELLs.
The group emphasized that the strategies listed here, which include both big-picture mindsets and nitty-gritty teaching tactics, can be incorporated into all classrooms, benefiting both native English speakers and ELLs.
1. CULTIVATE RELATIONSHIPS AND BE CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE
No surprise here. A successful classroom, our educators agreed, is one in which students feel known, appreciated, and comfortable taking emotional and intellectual risks. That requires intentional planning and consistent messaging by the teacher.
Emily Francis, an ESL teacher in Concord, North Carolina, makes clear that she wants her students to “embrace their culture and their language as a foundation of who they are” and to consider their acquisition of a new culture and language “not as subtractive, but as additive.” To help support students who may never have attended school before or may be coping with migration-based trauma, Francis emphasizes that little things make a big difference. “The first thing that I need to think about is, how is my student feeling in my classroom?” she says. “Are they sitting next to a buddy they can ask a question in their home language? Do they feel comfortable tapping me on the shoulder if they have to go to the bathroom?”
But creating a supportive environment is also about cultivating an appreciation of diversity—it’s critical that both the curriculum and the classroom environment honor and reflect the lives of the students. For instance, Francis makes certain that her classroom library is reflective of her students’ diverse backgrounds and identities.
ESL teacher Katie Toppel, who teaches near Portland, Oregon, champions the value of home visits to get to know students’ families and takes care to incorporate the particulars of students’ lives, such as pets’ names and favorite sports, into lessons. Students are most engaged when they feel a personal connection to a lesson or unit, a connection that’s created in part by a teacher’s investment in culturally competent relationships.
2. TEACH LANGUAGE SKILLS ACROSS THE CURRICULUM
English language learners should not be learning the fundamentals of English in isolation; they should be applying their developing language skills to rich academic content in all subjects.
“It is key that in mainstream classrooms, teachers understand their role as language teachers,” says Valentina Gonzalez, a district leader in Katy, Texas, suggesting that all teachers should be aware of the specialized idiom they work within. “If we teach math, then we teach the language of mathematics. If we teach science, then we teach the language of science.” Math teachers, in other words, should take the time to teach the unfamiliar vocabulary of mathematics—add, subtract, calculator, solve—concurrently with the teaching of math skills.
3. EMPHASIZE PRODUCTIVE LANGUAGE
The educators I interviewed agreed that productive language skills—hard-to-master dimensions of language fluency like speaking and writing—should be front and center from day one, even if students feel hesitant about them.
Beginning ELLs often develop receptive language skills like listening and reading first. Educators who are unaware of the typical path to fluency may believe that students who can follow verbal or written directions will be able to produce oral or written language, but that’s usually not the case.
To support reluctant speakers, Tan Huynh, an educator who blogs at Empowering ELLs, suggests using sentence frames. “For example, when a science teacher wants ELLs to produce a hypothesis, they might offer the sentence, ‘If _____ was added, then _____ because _____.’ This sentence frame provides clues that empower ELLs to sound and think like scientists,” Huynh says.
Andrea Honigsfeld, a professor of education at Molloy College in Rockville, New York, suggests that all lessons touch on every letter of the acronym SWIRL, which stands for Speak, Write, Interact, Read, Listen. The approach intentionally privileges productive language skills “from the beginning,” she says.
4. SPEAK SLOWLY—AND INCREASE YOUR WAIT TIME
Easier said than done. Still, many of the teachers I spoke to said this simple change is vital. You can record yourself speaking in class to measure your cadence, and adjust.
“Adding in an extra three to five seconds after we pose a question offers all students time to think,” explains Gonzalez. “However, for English learners, it also gives time to translate, process their thinking, translate back into English, and develop the courage to answer. If we call on students too quickly, many of our students will stop thinking about the answers—or trying to answer at all.”
That means undoing some of our own habits, according to Larry Ferlazzo, a high school ESL teacher in Sacramento, California. “Researchers have found that typically most teachers give one to two seconds between asking a question and expecting a student response,” he says. “The same researchers have shown that if you wait three to five seconds, the quality of responses is astronomically greater.”
5. DIFFERENTIATE—AND USE MULTIPLE MODALITIES
All kids learn better when they engage with material in multiple ways: Lessons that involve writing, speaking, drawing, and listening, for example, give students four opportunities to deepen their understanding of the work. For ELLs, those additional engagements also provide a little breathing room so they can work through the language barrier.
Helen Thorpe, a journalist who spent a year observing Eddie Williams’s classroom in Denver in order to write a book about immigrants called The Newcomers, marveled at Williams’s method of differentiation. “Eddie would enunciate very clearly in English multiple times, he would write it on the board, and he would go to the projector to give a visual. And, finally, he’d be asking the kids to verbalize aspects of the lesson themselves,” she says, tracing Williams’s efforts to move his students from receptive to productive language fluency.
Toppel uses a strategy called QSSSA to scaffold classroom discussions with ELLs. The letters stand for Question (the teacher poses a question, then gives ample think time); Signal (a designated motion like a thumbs-up, a finger on the nose—something that lets students indicate that they’re ready to answer); Stem (the teacher provides a sentence starter for the question—for example, for “What is your favorite place to read a book?” the stem might be, “My favorite place to read a book is _____”); Share; and Assess.
6. INCORPORATE STUDENTS’ NATIVE LANGUAGES—AND DON’T BE AFRAID OF TECHNOLOGY
Bilingualism is the goal, of course, not replacement.
Ferlazzo uses a strategy called “preview, view, review,” which leverages a student’s native language skills as a foundation for learning the new language. He introduces a topic and encourages students to preview it in materials in their home language (often using multilingual videos and other online resources); he then teaches the topic in English, and then has students review the information in their home language.
Ferlazzo also encourages teachers to embrace technologies that students find helpful, like Google Translate. He stresses that the app can be a useful way for students to translate words quickly—but warns that it can quickly “become a dependency” if it’s used as more than a handy dictionary.
Thorpe agrees that Translate can take pressure off teachers, who sometimes find that they “just stand at the front of the room and say things over and over. And if the kids didn’t know what those words are, they’re out of luck.” Translation technology means you can say it once (or twice) and let the students use the technology to translate key words and phrases.
Comments
Post a Comment