When adapting activities for English language learners, teachers may wish to consider using differentiated teaching strategies. In the case of the aspects of quantity and quality for example, the same reading task can be assigned to the whole class, but students do not have to do the same number of questions or exercises. The students are given a choice and can choose to do one or more tasks; it is important for them to progress at their own pace and interest. The teacher can also adapt the reading activities to two or three different levels, thereby enabling the student to choose the level at which she or he can function.
This combination is most meaningful for mixed ability ESL or ELL students who cannot do the same amount of questions or exercises and at the same level. They can, for example, be asked to do some of the questions including text based skills in order to prepare them for ELL educational standards.
Open-Ended Activities Help Teachers Target Reading Fluency
Teachers should also give exercises where the emphasis is on fluency and that are open-ended. An open-ended activity allows students to work at their own pace and also allows for a variety of responses. ESL and ELL teachers can choose from a wide range of open-ended activities which can also be completed using group or pair work techniques where the students are sharing and thereby producing better, or richer work than they might have done on their own such as: brainstorming, prediction, completing sentences, plan different tasks for the same activity.
Other open-ended activities include finishing sentences with a certain grammatical base:
- If you had a million dollars, what would you do?
- How many reasons can you think for....?
- In what situation might you....?
- What would happen if.....?
Using Group or Pair Work
Another technique for differentiating instruction is group or pair work, where the participants are sharing and producing better, or richer work than they might have done on their own. In a mixed ability class, group work can help ELLs function better in the classroom where the teacher can also pair an ELL with another student whose knowledge of English is not limited. Some group work activities include recall and share, such as:
- The students learn a text, listening comprehension passage or simply a list of vocabulary and they recall as much as they can on their own and then add more by sharing ideas with each other.
- The students prepare the answer to an exercise in pairs that will be later checked with the entire class.
Using Individual Work
A final technique is individualization that does not require extensive preparation but only a little imagination similarly to the way a teacher can present a reading activity from a textbook. In a regular day to day lesson, the teacher can use the following examples. Instead of the regular "open your textbook to page X and do question 5," teachers can say to the class:
- "do as much of question 5 as you can in 10 minutes" or
- "choose which question you want to start with"
Individual Spelling and Vocabulary Lists
Another type of differentiated teaching strategy is using individual spelling and vocabulary lists. This technique helps English language learners master different lexical items using differentiated teaching strategies. For learning the spellings of words for example, ELLs can group words according to a list that matches their learning abilities (i.e., lower performing, middle, higher performing groups). Teachers might also give ELLs two lists of words. One list is required and the other is optional.
The same principle can be applied to learning lexical items. The word level is the common starting point for teachers, which also allows students to review other core components of the curriculum such as sound-letter correspondences. Teachers can either reinforce sound blends from the sound and move up the scale to the word level or teach the sounds in an inductive way, via the words themselves. Therefore, individual spelling and vocabulary lists represent one way for ELLs to learn and master different lexical items, where the responsibility to record and learn new words becomes that of the learner.
By using different learning configurations such as group or pair work, teachers can appeal to their mixed ability classes consisting of English language learners in order to help facilitate the learning process. By including more opportunities for differentiation, teachers have a better chance to improve their ELLs' reading levels fluency so ELLs have a better chance at ultimately thriving in a general education classroom or ESL learning group.
Dorit Sasson - Hello! I'm an ESL instructor, teacher diversity coach and writer for the educational markets who writes on English language learners ...
