Teaching Strategies for EAL students
Teaching strategies can help students expand their vocabulary and improve reading and writing skills, both in and outside the classroom.
Vocabulary
In general, a student needs to be familiar with 90% of the words involved in a task in order to understand it. How can teachers help EAL students get started? By teaching vocabulary strategies.
1. Dictionary use
Learners should have a dictionary handy, hardcopy or electronic version offered by an app. The advantage of the latter is that it can provide an audio recording of the word, which is helpful for sound letter mapping and reinforcing phonics. teachers might put together a list of dictionary apps or purchase several paper copies to keep in the classroom. teachiing students how to use a dictionary and understand the part of speech data it provides is also useful.
2.Flashcards and Student Response Systems (SRS) review
There is no point in looking up language if you do not have a halpful way of ensuring new words make it into long-term memory. Teachers can show students how to make flashcards that contain images and definitions in both the native and the target language. Google Images is a great provider of useful visual resources. These days there are even electronic flashcard apps that use a student's individual forgetting curve to create a review schedule that ensures words are learned in the most efficient and effective way.
Student Response Systems (SRS)
A Student Response System (SRS) is used in a classroom to rapidly collect answers to questions from every student, and if desired, to graphically display a summary of data. This helps instructors activate the classroom as well as peers to engage with each other while interacting with complex materials. This system utilizes no separate hardware but rather asks students to use the devices they already have with them in class including a phone, tablet, or laptop. SRS implies using a software, it is useful in hybrid or physically distance learning.
3. Mnemonic Devices
When words are difficult to remember, teachers can suggest students to think of a word in their first language that sounds the same as the English word. Next, the teacher will show them how to create an anecdote or mental image that connects the meaning of the target word to the native language word. This may be a slow way to learn vocabulary, but it is helpful for beginners and EALs who are struggling with particular difficult terms.
4. Guessing from Context
Some EALs may be quick to reach for the dictionary. Nevertheless, it is often worth taking a few seconds to guess at what a new word might mean using clues provided by the context of the sentence. When teachers model this first, it can help students learn how to do it more efficiently. More often that not, guesses will be correct, and if they are not, students can always verify the meaning by looking words up the dictionary. Plus, all of this extra attention spent on a word will make it less likely to be forgotten.
5. Write and Type Words or Phrases
"Repeat them several times and say the words out loud as you go". Multi-sensory learning is an effective strategy for everyone.
6. Debate Mapping as a precursor of assignments writing
In-class collaborative debate in three steps.
a. At the start of class, ask students to work in groups of three to identify two pro-security arguments and two pro-privacy arguments made by characters in a story/article/novel on privacy vs. security in the contemporary society. Distribute large Post-it notes (5″ x 7″) to the students along with a few markers. Ask the students to summarize the arguments they identified in the story/article/novel on the Post-it notes, with pro-security arguments on orange notes and pro-privacy arguments on magenta notes. Each Post-it note would include the name of the character of the story/article/novel making the argument, along with the corresponding page number, if possible. During this time, the teacher will circulate among students, answering questions and making sure groups stay on task, and ready to help groups who are stuck.
b. Then, ask the groups to take turns sharing an argument they identified with the class and posting it on a whiteboard. Ask students to place more practically focused arguments (“Is all this surveillance really catching terrorists?”) at one end of the board and more principled arguments (“It is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, in that order”) at the other. Also, ask students to connect their argument to one or more other arguments already on the whiteboard (this argument supports that one, this argument counters that one, and so on), drawing arrows to represent those connections. The teacher may step in and make suggestions (“That sounds like a fairly practical argument” or “Your argument seems to support this other argument”). Basically, this is the way the debate mapping is created.
c. Blog assignment, such as: “Briefly summarize and react to a passage in Little Brother that caught your attention.”