As a new semester starts, ELLevation is a great tool to learn lots of information about English Learners in your classroom! You can log in at ellevationeducation.com.
Click here to watch a video tour of ELLevation, or keep reading under the break! Once you log in, there are three tabs at the top: Student List, Monitoring, and Instruction. Click to read more about them!
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What is Language Transfer?
When acquiring a new language, you use the language(s) you already know to help you make sense of the new sounds, words, and sentence structure. Often, this can be helpful – for example, when Spanish speakers understand that the suffix -tion in English is the same as the suffix -ción in Spanish. When knowledge of the first language helps in learning the second language, this is known as positive language transfer. Negative language transfer can also occur. For example, in Spanish the letters b and v sound the same, so Spanish speakers have a difficult time learning the difference between the two sounds in English. As a teacher, knowing differences and similarities between your student’s native language and English can help you make direct connections between the two languages and know when you need to directly instruct the student to avoid negative language transfer. Keep reading to learn a bit about similarities and differences between English and the most common languages in our district - Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Developing biliteracy is important for all ELs. For newcomers, reading text side by side in their native language and English helps develop English literacy while allowing them to use their native language strengths to understand content. For long-term English Learners, bilingual texts help them begin to develop literacy in their native language and think about reading metalinguistically.
Several websites offer free bilingual books that can help readers begin to make these linguistic connections. Here is a brief list of such websites: NewsELA World Stories Bilinguis Parallel Text Unite for Literacy You can also translate texts yourself using Google Translate's Document Upload feature! Or, if students are using Google for research, try 2lingual for side-by-side bilingual searches. Buying bilingual books for your classroom library is a great way to engage all students in language learning, not just ELs! Seeing their native languages represented in your classroom goes a long way to making newcomers feel welcome. Check out this Spanish/English booklist or this search engine from Lee and Low or ! If you are reading an in-class novel or textbook and have a newcomer you believe would benefit from a translated text, please reach out to me! I will be glad to see if we can find the book in the student's native language. The District EL Plan is your One Stop Shop for EL policies in DeSoto County! You can find a board-approved copy of the plan attached to this blog post! For classroom teachers, there are a few major parts of the District Plan that are important to know: How ELs are Identified, EL Grading Policies, the SET, and Language Instruction.
Newcomers are EL students who just entered school in the US and need support in learning both academic and everyday English vocabulary and sentence structure. Having a newcomer student in your content-area class for the first time can be overwhelming, but also very rewarding! Here are some tips to get you started: First, figure out what your newcomer student CAN DO. Can they read and write in their native language? If so, try out some translation options. Do they have more language proficency in reading than listening or are they better at speaking than writing? Use the better domain to scaffold the one they need to build! Use your student's native language to determine how much content knowledge they have. Next, it's time to figure out what scaffolds the student needs in order to comprehend the content you're teaching. Translated notes, visuals, simplified language, and more can help a student understand. Using electronic translators or scheduling a parent conference can help you determine what scaffolds are best for this student right now. Finally, how can you adapt your assessments to allow the student to show what they know? Newcomer students don't have to take the same assessments as all other students, though some students can do just fine on a translated test. Think about the standards you are trying to teach and ways your newcomer can use the language they do have to communicate their knowledge about them! I created the Newcomer Resource Guide below to give you more options and guidance for teaching newcomers. Questions? Send me an email!
Newcomer ELs who are new to English can often benefit from a blend of translation and simplified English. There are many options for providing translated materials. The video below shows how to use translation options for newcomer students!
Read Aloud is a popular accommodation and can be very effective for students whose listening skills are better than their reading skills. For traditional students, read aloud can be provided in the classroom by sitting the student near the teacher so they can ask for the whole test or certain questions to be read aloud. However, there are also several options for providing read aloud via computer for classroom tests. Tests given in enCase can have Read Aloud turned on, but tests in Schoology have the option as well.
Three Options for Read Aloud in Schoology include using the built in voice recorder in Schoology, installing the Read&Write Chrome Extension, and using the website NaturalReaders to upload a PDF. The video below shows how you can use each of these three options!
NewsELA is a free, versatile website with leveled and bilingual texts. Using Schoology's individual assign feature, you can assign easier or harder texts to students with no one else in the class knowing! The video below walks you through the process of making decisions for individually assigning in Schoology.
English Learners in DeSoto County are incredibly diverse. The video below serves as an introduction to questions you can ask about the ELs in your classroom.
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