Teaching Strategies for Your ELL Classroom

• rap·port

I discovered that I needed to focus on building a strong rapport with my students in order for them to feel comfortable to ask questions and practice their writing and conversational skills. These teaching strategies are important to focus on in all levels of ELL classrooms.

Interaction:

Have a conversation with your students during the few minutes before class starts. Interacting with your students has many benefits:

Concept checking:

In an ELL class, concept checking is when the teacher asks questions about the concept to check for student understanding. This process helps the teacher avoid asking “do you understand?” to which students can easily answer “yes”.

Benefits of concept checking 3 C’s:

Planning and Staging

In an ELL classroom there needs to be a clear division from one stage to another. It helps if the teacher communicates the lesson goals/objectives during the beginning of class to help students follow along with the plan. For my ELL classrooms, I like to use Jeremy Harmer’s strategy that he discusses in “How to Teach English”, which contains the following stages: Engage, Study, Activate.

Board work and error correction:

In a non-ELL classroom using the board and error correction is important, but in an ELL classroom it’s a must. Students need to hear out and see instructions, new concepts, words, definitions on the board. Visuals in an ELL classroom helps students with: memory, clarification, recognition, understanding, reminding and error correction.

It is important to error correct in an ELL classroom in order for students to learn the proper use of the language.

_{Definition of Rapport: courtesy of Google definitions.}