Ways to Help ESL Students Survive in the Content Area Classroom

Ways to Help ESL Students Survive in the Content Area Classroom

Through Listening
-Record lectures on tape as you teach and give ESL students copies so they can listen to the presentation more than once. Better yet, make lessons into podcasts so they can be accessed from the internet.
-Use “advance organizers” to help students know the lesson’s focus in advance. Recap important ideas at the end of your talk.
-As you lecture, write key words so ESL students can both see and hear what you are saying.
-Use video that has English captioning or subtitles to help improve the acquisition of English reading vocabulary.

Through Speaking
-Read aloud selected passages and ask ESL students to summarize what was read. Re-read the passage to verify accuracy and details.
-Plan activities where ESL students are placed in small groups with native English speakers.
-Ask ESL students to explain how content area information will be useful in their lives.
-Set up specific purposes prior to reading text. Discuss the purpose after the material is read.

Through Reading
-Use culturally familiar texts, emphasize fluency and word recognition skills, and teach students how to resolve unknown vocabulary, ask questions, make inferences, as well as using bilingual strategies such as searching for cognates, translating, and transferring knowledge from one language to another.
-Chose native-speaking students who take effective comprehensible notes and provide them to your ESL students as study aides.
-Encourage students to use bilingual dictionaries. Introduce them to a thesaurus.
-Request content-area books be ordered for the library in students’ native languages.
-Pictures, charts, and timelines make material more “user friendly.”

Through Writing
-Have students keep a vocabulary book or glossary for each content area class. Words and their meanings should be added to this book as they are introduced.
-Dictate sentences from your content area incorporating vocabulary being studied for students to write.
-Alternate difficult activities with easier ones to all ESL students to experience early success.
-Use the cloze procedure to check ESL student’s comprehension of the content. Provide them with a passage that they have studied and leave out every fifth word. Ask students to write in the words that belong in the spaces.
-Give students opportunities to label diagrams (maps, body parts, parts of a leaf, etc.) Labeling helps students become familiar with the parts of an object as well as learning their names.
-Written exercises should be focused on the recall level of learning – for example, using who, what, when, and where. Interpretive and evaluative level questions (why and how) can be incorporated as ESL students become more proficient in English.



From The Help! Kit: A Resource Guide for Secondary Teachers of Migrant English Language Learners