Working with L2 Learners

Matilda* and Megan Rawlings

2. Describe a time when you found a lesson to be particularly effective.

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 2.
Discussion Board
 “Teaching English Without teaching english” (Guzman)
‐ Key Points:
- Develop students’ critical thinking skills
- Neutralize logical fallacies
- Identify levels of cognition
- “It's the job of an instructor to present information to students in a
digestible manner and answering questions is a part of that process.” -
Student A
- “It does not necessarily matter that a teacher know how to speak
someone else's native language, what matters is that teachers
understand what areas a non native English speaker would struggle with
more, and how to address them.” - Student B

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 “6 Essential strategies for teaching english language learners” (kaplan)
‐ Key Points:
- 1) Cultivate relationships and be culturally responsive
- 2) Teach language skills across the curriculum
- 3) Emphasize productive language
- 4) Speak slowly—and increase your wait time
- 5) Differentiate—and use multiple modalities
- 6) Incorporate students’ native languages—and don’t be afraid of technology
- “While some of these strategies - like speaking slowly or incorporating cultural
differences - are impossibly futile to introduce unilaterally into college settings,
some, like teaching language skills across curricula, can be very effective.” -
Student C
- “I would not call other students a "translation technology", but the use of peers
would definitely help mitigate the use of technology.” - Student D
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 3.
Strategies for Teaching ELLS
 Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and Verbotonal method (VTM)
‐ Communicative Language Teaching (CLT): an approach to teaching languages that
focuses on the development of communicative competence through interaction
‐ Four components of communicative competence:
‐ Discourse
‐ Grammatical
‐ Strategic
‐ Sociolinguistic
‐ CLT emphasizes the importance of:
‐ Student-centered teaching
‐ Awareness of preferred learning styles
‐ Real-world contexts
‐ Fluency and accuracy
‐ Verbotonal Method (VTM): an approach to teaching languages that promotes a
demonstrated aural and oral understanding of a given sound system
‐ Teachers benefit from identifying differences between the L1 and L2
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 Presentation, practice, production (PPP) lesson plan
‐ Presentation
- Share content and language objectives
- Introduce new material
- Present students with comprehensible input at the beginning of the
lesson
- Practice
- Provide students with multiple opportunities to practice the language
- Make tasks increasingly difficult
- Alter between individual, pair, and group work
- Production
- Allow students to engage in an activity that involves speaking and/or
writing

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 Content before grammar (AS Told by Guzman)
- “If you want to learn a language, must be willing
to make mistakes -- lots of mistakes!”
- Grammar will inevitably be a part of those
mistakes
- Learning a Language ≈ Working with a Recipe
- A recipe won’t do the “good trick”
- More than just memorization
- “Learn how to cook, not how to read a book”
- Create an atmosphere where students are
unafraid to ask questions about their content
- “Fear the people who fear questions, not the
people who ask questions”
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“Cultural conflicts in the writing center: expectations and assumptions of esl
students” (Harris)
‐ Key Points:
- Culture influences the expectations that students have for instructional settings
- Tutor perspective
- Tutor will act as collaborator
- Tutor asks students questions to encourage them to pinpoint and resolve
issues
- ELL perspective
- Teachers are experts that work with large groups
- Tutors are “‘not as advanced’” and work one-on-one with students
- Teachers and tutors present information that should not be questioned
- Teachers and tutors identify and resolve problems
- Cultivate strong student relationships
- Approach ELLs’ writing with sympathy, patience, and understanding
- Gauge students’ language goals (vocabulary, etc.)
- Learn about students’ culture
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 Being Culturally responsive
- Understand students’ passivity in tutorials/lecture
- Expectation that students listen, instructor lectures
- May be taught to memorize in past experiences
- Students may expect instructor/TA to solve the problem
- Begin with an open-ended question or statement such as “Please
explain…” instead of “Why” or “How”
- Students do not criticize teachers or peers
- Create collaborative environments where students feel
comfortable sharing and challenging ideas, not people

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 Additional Strategies
Content and Language Objectives Scaffolding
‐ Consider the language that students
‐ Divide lesson into small, manageable
need to know to accomplish the
steps
objectives
‐ Consider students’ zones of proximal
‐ Share 1-2 objectives every lesson
developments and background
‐ Use student-friendly language and key
knowledge
lesson terms
‐ Use students mastered skills to help
‐ Read them aloud or call on volunteers to
them learn the new material
read them
‐ Three types
‐ Display the objectives throughout the
‐ Verbal
lesson
‐ Procedural
‐ Ask students if and how they
‐ Instructional
accomplished the objectives
‐ Evaluate the lesson for its effectiveness
in achieving them
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 4.
ELL Scenarios
 Breakout Rooms
1. In groups of three, read your assigned prompt.
2. Then, discuss:
○ What may be the reason for the problem presented?
○ If you were the instructor in this scenario, what would you do?

*Instructions are also included in the Google Doc*

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 Summary of strategies
‐ Craft strong content and learning objectives and share them with
students
‐ Incorporate scaffolding
‐ Use students’ background knowledge and the skills for which they have
achieved mastery
‐ Target the reading, listening, writing, speaking, and pronunciation skills
of students across curricula
‐ Emphasize the importance of content over form
‐ Consider student interests and goals
‐ Cultivate a positive and safe classroom culture
‐ Practice patience and understanding
‐ Explore cultural differences between student and teacher
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THANKS for listening!

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