Teaching Academic Language, Essay Example

Introduction

English language learners are faced with many challenges in the content area. Most of those challenges are faced in reading literature in English classes because literature is mostly based upon culture. When teachers expect students to have prior knowledge about genres, which is not always the case for non-native English speakers. In most cases they have had no experience with fairy tales, myths, legends, or tall tales that American students have.If the teacher fails to provide prior knowledge and build a background, ELL students will not understand the text. In many cases the students can read the words, but they do not understand the text. The author of this article discusses the various strategies that are useful in helping ELL students.

Cloze Reading

ELL students have difficulty with parts of speech and how words fit together forming the syntax of sentences. The cloze reading or cloze syntax is a strategy that can be used with a text that ELL’s are familiar with. The teacher covers up words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, prefixes and suffixes. As the text is read aloud, when the student comes to a word that is covered up, the student makes a prediction about what word goes in the blank. The ELL student discusses with his/her partner about the word they chose. This strategy is great because it helps the ELL student learn to use context clues to determine the missing words. For example, in the article the author discusses how he used the book The Tiny Seed as a read aloud first. Next, he used the book to show comparatives and superlatives forms of adjectives. The ELL student already had prior knowledge of the book because it had been used as a read aloud in class.

Lift a Sentence

This is also a good strategy to integrate knowledge across courses. With this strategy, the teacher takes a familiar text and takes one sentence out that exemplifies a certain language structure. The sentence can be written on the board or chart paper. The ELL student is then asked to make sentences using that same sentence structure on a topic that is familiar to him/her. Using this strategy, ELL students are able to relate text to real life situations. The Sentence scramble is a strategy that is uses in conjunction with the lift a sentence. Sentence scramble requires the teacher to take a sentence that the student is familiar with and cut that sentence into several sections. The student has to place the sentence back together in the correct order. This teaches the student the word order for the English language. For example, the subject comes before the verb in most cases and adjectives typically follow nouns.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary is one of the most important aspects of reading for ELL students. Often these students have a different concept of what the word means. There are many effective strategies to help build vocabulary levels for ELL students. The first step is to teach them site words. These are words that students will come in contact with in their daily curriculum. Next, the students need to practice content-specific vocabulary. The students need multiple chances to practice these words in order to ensure a concrete understanding of the words.Another great way to teach word meaning is through pictorial and cartoon drawings. This gives students a chance to visualize what the words mean. The author had his students to use their own visual representations of the words in their notebooks or journals. He felt that this technique helped them connect the word to something they can relate to in their lives. Some students have even used pocket charts of picture words to help them review words they are having a difficult time to remembering.