First, we must understand the different sides of language.
Language is a social skill; the purpose is mainly communication. Children need to communicate in order to build relationships with other children through interaction and by participating in the youth culture of sports, games, television and other varieties of media. This goal can only be met by placing the child that does not have English as their native language by placing them in an English language-rich environment or school where for six hours a day they receive constant language skills to succeed. The skills these English language learning students are developing are called Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills or BICS.
Language is also an academic skill; the language kids need to succeed in school is different from the oral language skills they use in social context. Even students with a high level of social skills may lack critical language skills for learning academic content. Social language, or BICS, involves such abilities as retelling stories, describing experiences, narrating activities or offering personal opinions. The language of the classroom makes conceptual demands that are beyond BICS talk. In the classroom, students are asked to do abstract and cognitively complex assignments such as comparing and contrasting, analyzing, justifying, evaluating and classifying. These classroom language skills are known as Cognitive Academic Language Progiciency or CALP.
Types of Learning Strategies
•Metacognitive strategies are those involved in thinking about learning which can be something that deals with planning and organizing learning such as using an assignment notebook to write down the homework for tonight or dealing with self-monitoring and self-evaluating learning such as discovering strategies that best work for you.
•Cognitive strategies involve practice activity which promote deeper understanding and an increased ability to apply new knowledge. Activities include making connections between English and the students native language, creating graphic organizers and condensing notes to study for a test.
•Memory strategies consist of any technique that helps rote recitation of language which are simply to recall elements without any attempt to understand the material completely. A Mnemonic is a memory strategies that often students create themselves such as "I before E except after C" or the "tricks" of a multiplication table. English language learning students can even use their native language to create mnemonics.
•Social strategies are those when the learner works with one of more classmates or simply learns from the surrounding environment which become more fun for the student. Such activities involve working in pairs or doing homework with a friend.
•Compensation strategies are used to make up for something that is not known or immediately accessible from memory. As English speakers we use this strategy regularly in conversations by using phrases like whatchamacallit or thingamajigg by replacing words which we can not find the meaning for currently.
All students need to use a variety of strategies however English language learners in particular will learn more effectively from using strategies in combinations.
Teaching Content Using Textbook Strategies
• Use textbooks as aids; they are a resource to help students understand the information in the text.
• Teach students how to use the contents and index: a simple technique is to give a group of students a list of topics and have the note the page number(s) in the text where information is given.
• Preselect and preteach vocabulary before assigning textbook work to the students.
In general, textbooks are a good resource aid to help English Language Learning students.
There are also many resourceful websites that can be used to find activities that will help benefit the students. For example Everything ESL not only provides not only helpful tips, but lesson plans and even a page to to "Ask Judie" or post questions and get a response from professionals. Also Free English Teaching and Learning is a website that offers many tules for both teachers and students.
There are also websites available to access information for specific subjects. English Language Learners in Math is a great resource for those who are having troubles teaching this specific subject.
Reiss, Jodi. Teaching Content To English Language Learners: Strategies for Secondary School Success. White Plains, New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2005.
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