Working with English language learners, you have the wonderful opportunity to observe them as they absorb their new language. The following are twenty suggestions for working effectively with young ELLs.
- Provide a visual demonstration.
- Keep language clear and simple.
- Invite children to act out what they mean.
- Engage children in conversation, but allow silence until the child becomes comfortable.
- Check understanding.
- Invite children to repeat the language of stories.
- Provide "wait and think" time.
- Avoid correcting children's attempt at language.
- Use repeated readings of read-aloud books, shared reading, and poems to give children opportunities to articulate book language again and again.
- Explain the vocabulary words in texts as necessary.
- Teach and check for understanding of academic language.
- Value and encourage drawing and talking about drawing.
- Have children repeat the messages they are attempting to write.
- Help children create repetitive written texts so that they can articulate the same English language structures again and again.
- Use previously written texts as resources.
- Help children with the pronunciation of words, and teach them to say words slowly and accept approximations.
- Learn as much as you can about children's home languages and cultures.
- Provide "hands-on" activities using letters and pictures.
- Be sure that English language learners are in a position to hear and see everything while you are teaching.
- Create strong connections with children's home (language and culture.)
From Literacy Beginnings: A Prekindergarten Handbook by Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Copyright (c) 2018, 2011 by Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Published by Heinemann.
