5 Tips to Help ESL Students on the First Day of School

As a teacher at an International School, many of my students were English Language Learners. Even my native English speakers were living in a non-English speaking country. Due to my unique teaching position, I have had some readers ask for tips on teaching English Language Learners. Here is this week’s Tuesday TESOL Teaching Tip: 

A new school year is about to begin, and since there are 5 million English Language Learners enrolled in US public schools alone, not to mention the number enrolled in schools in Canada, the UK, Australia, South Africa, and the many International Schools around the world, there is a good probability that you will have at least one child in your class who has limited or no experience with English.  In fact, according to the US State Department, if you teach in a big city, you will likely have 10 – 15 % of your class enter with limited or no experience with English, and if you are teaching at an International School outside of an English speaking country, you can up that to 25 – 75%.  After three years of teaching at an International School in Morocco, I picture the first day of school to be one where 75% of my students only understand 10% of what I say.  Whether your class roster includes one English Language Learner or twenty, here are some tips for helping your ESL students get the most out of their first week of school.

1.)  Try to find out how much your students know.  If possible, send home an ESL Parent Questionnaire with parents during Meet the Teacher night or on the first day of school.  This will give you a chance to know exactly how much English exposure students have had.

2.)  Take time to teach the names of school supplies (pencil, backpack, notebook) and important people around the school (nurse, principal, lunch lady).  Use my Back to School Vocabulary packet, which has 4 differentiated levels – so that you can use the same type of packet for all of your students – ESL and native speaker.  You can download this packet for free from my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

3.)  Repeat important directions 3 or 4 times, using models and speaking slowly.  ie.  Put your pencil (hold up pencil) into the cubby (point to cubby) with your name on it (point to name labels).

 

4.)  Have a variation of your getting to know you activities that will work for non-speakers.  One year, I planned these cute collage people, where students would create a picture of themselves with pictures from a magazine and then cut out words that described themselves to put around their picture. The 30% of my class who spoke NO ENGLISH couldn’t do words that described themselves, so they simply found pictures and spelled out their name on the outside - easy differentiation.

5.)  If you have enough native speakers, seat each ESL student next to a native speaker so that they will have someone to watch and model their actions after.  If you have any multilingual students, spread these students out so that non-English speakers will have someone to look to with questions.

 

What do you do to help your ESL students during the first week of school?

I’m Learning How to Read

I’m 29 years old and I’m learning to read…………………………………… in Arabic.  I know how to read in English (of course) and French & Spanish (kind of), but learning how to read in Arabic means learning a whole new alphabet and learning to read in a whole new direction.  I truly feel like I’m learning to read all over again, and it’s really helping me understand how my students feel when they are learning how to read.  Since most people don’t remember the cognitive processes they used when they were learning to read, I thought I would share some of my experiences and insights. 

I am only beginning to learn (I’ve been at it about a month.), so I have a long ways to go – but here’s what I’ve already learned about reading by learning how to read all over again.

1.  Different variations of a letter don’t look the same until you train your brain to see them that way.  When I began working on the alphabet, my husband pointed at two letters and called them both the same letter - Ghayn  - he couldn’t figure out why they didn’t look like the same letter to me.  I couldn’t figure out how they looked the same to him.  (In Arabic, there are no Capitols and Lowercase, rather the letters look different depending on where they are in a word.)  Then, it occurred to me that a capitol A and a lowercase a really don’t look like they belong together at all.  The only reason we know that these letters are the same is that we have train our brains to see them both as the same thing.

2.  I can sound out words very well, but have no idea what that word means.  I know we have all had word callers in our class, and know that this phenomena is common, but I never understood it in the same way as when I sounded out this great, long word in Arabic and realized that it head no meaning to me whatsoever.  Now, when that word is next to a picture, or written in a place in my notebook that helps me remember what it means, I’m good, but written in a random place in a book, and I’m lost!

3.  Handwriting is important.  In English, my handwriting stinks, and I’ve never really thought it was all that important, as long as it was legible.  However, I have realized that different handwritings can be like different fonts.  Just like the capitol A and the lowercase a don’t look like each other – different people’s a’s might also look different.  I know that the pretty, neat writing that my teacher uses doesn’t always reflect my husband’s quickly written Arabic, or the fancy Arabic fonts that can be found on cereal boxes and billboard signs.

4.  Environmental print encourages reading.  Now that I can sound out words, I am starting to make more sense of all these Arabic words that have been surrounding me for the past 9 months.  I see Arabic everywhere here in Morocco – street signs, billboards, packaging, books, etc.  However, much of the time, the Arabic words have corresponding French words, which are MUCH easier for me to figure out, so my eyes have pretty much skipped over the Arabic writing as a whole.  Now that I know what the letters are, my eyes are beginning to search for the Arabic and trying to sound out words everywhere.  (It’s actually driving my husband a little crazy – lol!)