Imagine
walking into a classroom everyday where the language is completely foreign or
you cannot hear at all. All that you hear is a bunch of words running together
or all you are seeing is lots of mouths moving. Deaf/ hearing impaired and
English Language Learning students are becoming more prominent in everyday
classrooms. As a future teacher this is some thing that really touches me
because one day this could be my student.
 |
This picture resembles a student that is confused and frustrated because she does not know what is going on in the class, much like a deaf of ELL student may feel. |
The article “ How to succeed with EAL students in theclassroom” by Mark Gershon, sheds a more positive look on what it
takes to educate students who’s native language is not English. It provided
good incite on ways to interpret the language to these students and it was a
proactive article. As a future educator proactive advice is what I was looking.
This article explains the classroom can be a challenging place for these
children to develop the English language.
In this situation it is easy for both the teachers and ELL students to
have misunderstandings. The ELL student can be overwhelmed by the other teacher
students relationships along with the fast pace conversations. ( Gershon 2011).
The article highlights “Eye- Speech- body” which draws the focus in efficiently
and encourages thinking about the
images learners can visualize and how they can help the students with words
that are said and written. It is also ways you can improve how clear of your
own speech is as a teacher. The body encourages teachers to bring their body
language to life and use it to show the students what it is you are asking,
explaining or expecting (Gershon 2011).
The following article highlights
more of what to do in the classroom and how to develop these ELL leaner’s
language skills. This article is called “Strategies for Teaching EnglishLanguage Learners.” The main focus point of this article is utilizing the idea
of English Language Development (ELD) which are instructional strategies to
encourage learners to acquire the English language. The ELD approach believes
strongly in full immersion and it focuses on teaching the English language in a
similar way to how the students learned their native language; I think that it
is important to keep it as familiar as possible to help the students to feel
more comfortable. The main domains of this strategy are “listening, speaking,
reading, and writing.. the students [also] need to instructed at their
proficiency level for different domains” (Spillett 2). This article also
strongly suggest focusing on the basic communication skills and then go into
fluency and learning to speak English. The four skill that the EDL approach
focuses on are function, form, fluency, and vocabulary; which are all skills I
think are really great to focus on when it comes to teaching the a new
language.
The
last article looked at really encouraged creating a language-rich environment.
This immediately caught my eye because that is what I would be looking to
create for my future ELL students. This article was called “Supporting ELLs in the Mainstream Classroom: Language Tips.” The language rich environment is
described as having “access to books, and reference materials, labels and
posters, and student work on bulletin boards” (Robertson 1). I also learned
that their language learning process should be organized around learning the
alphabet and phonetic sounds new vocabulary words, sight words, grammar rules,
conversational phrases, and writing structures( Robertson 2). I also really liked how it expresses the importance of highlighting the relationship between the student's native language and English. This article was a
wealth of knowledge and covers areas that are very important to language
development for ELL’s such as: word families and how different forms of words
are used, helping students to understand when to use different languages, successful group
work, and reaching out to families about helping them and the students at home to understand the language and reading abilities.
