For teaching any grade or any group of students, a teacher must carry with them effective strategies to help teach content. YOED 6020 has helped with adding effective strategies and methods that I will use when teaching ESL. One of the strategies that I learned is to reflect and what better way than to use technology so I can obtain feedback from others in my profession. At first, I was skeptical about blogging on the internet about reflections I had, however, I believe it has made me more accountable and I put more into it since it will be open to the public. I will continue to blog on the Internet about my experiences when I become an ESL teacher (hopefully next school year!).
Next strategy that is helpful and will work to build a learning atmosphere with my ESL students is to write a “Newcomer Brochure” to send home. The brochure contains helpful community resources for the parents, importance and tips for literacy at home in both languages, and rules and expectations within the school and classroom. I believe that the parents will greatly appreciate that the teacher took a second out of their day to introduce and welcome them to the school and community. We teach their children and therefore must include them in the learning process. I believe it is extremely important to have the parents informed about details of the classroom and have tools to help the student at home. By working together, the student is bound to succeed.
The next strategies will be helpful for the teacher within the classroom to teach literacy development and assess the oral development to ESL students:
- Cloze procedure: the teacher selects an appropriate text for the students and then deletes every fifth word to assess if the reading level of the text is suitable or not.
- SOLOM Instrument & Oral Language Development: two assessments that are used to assess a student’s oral development through grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, fluency, etc.
- Anticipation Guide & Writing Prompt: Both of the strategies help build writing skills for ESL students through reading a text and answering and/or building on prior knowledge.
- SDAIE Lessons and Strategies: SDAIE is a lesson template that helps “specifically design academic instruction in English”.
All of the strategies discussed above are tools that I will carry with me and I offer those beginning like me to examine if they would work for them as they begin their ESL teaching journey. I also encourage those beginning in the ESL teaching journey:
- To examine ESL in their state and county,
- Look through the resource guide for ESL and the curriculum guide for their state,
- Search for useful strategies and methods and write them down, discover what designer method(s) fits them best and tips for that method(s),
- Search and buy multiethnic literature to build their classroom library,
- Look at different assessments such as: the dolch word lists, fry readability graphs, SOLOM instrument, and Oral Language Development instrument,
- Research Writer’s Workshop, and
- Research the five essential components of reading instruction.
