Strategies for Language Aquisition

Google Read and Write 

This past week our school had a Professional Development Day centered around Mindfulness in the classroom and strategies for teaching ELL’s (English Language Learners).

International Schools across the globe are teaching curricula in English to culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. “[A]  broad range of terms has accumulated to refer to the students who are involved in the massive task of absorbing a new language, English, into their cognitive base so that they can proceed through their schooling, and thus their whole life, with as much success as possible” (Carder, 2013, pg.86) . Teachers need to develop and implement strategies to help students progress through the stages of language acquisition. Teachers need to develop multimodal lesson activities and assessments that are relevant, contextualized and appropriate for their a student's stage of language acquisition.

Dr. Ann Anderberg (2013), Assistant Professor of Education at Eastern Connecticut State University offers various strategies that can be used to assist CLD students within the learning environment. A link to her video can be found here!

• Parallel Talk
• Narrating what the child is doing (play by play of their action)- creates link between the language and actions
• Self Talk
• Narrate  what you as a teacher are doing -  creates link between the language and the actions

• Ask Questions

• Encourage students to extend their talk
• Instead of learning language in order to talk about interesting things, we should talk about interesting things in order to acquire language (Annenberg Foundation, 2016)
• Total Physical Response Technique
• Use your whole body - connecting language with movement (helps to make meaning clear)
• Learn About the Students Language
• Some languages may share cognates (animal in french and English is spelled the same and mean the same thing)
• When studying a key concept you can use a student's native language to help them  make sense of it (Johnson, 2009)
• Support Families in Building their First Language
• Development of first language can build transferable skills that can be used to acquire a second language
• Use Symbols and Images for Contextualization
• Whatever helps make input comprehensible, helps language acquisition (Krashen, 2012)

Along with the strategies mentioned above, Google Read and Write offers a tool that synthesizes many of the strategies listed above into one innovative platform!.This Google extension is an excellent innovative tool that students can use at home and/or in the classroom. This tool allows students to “hear words, passages, or whole documents read aloud with easy-to-follow dual colour highlighting” (“Read&Write for Google ChromeTM,” n.d.). They can look up definitions, create picture dictionaries and translate text into their native language.

References:

Annenberg  Foundation (2016), “Teaching Foreign Languages K-12 Workshop”, retrieved from: https://www.learner.org/workshops/tfl/session_04/analyze.html

Carder, M. (2013). International Education and Schools: Moving Beyond the First 40 Years:English language teaching: The change in students' language from English only to linguistically diverse. Chapter 5

Read&Write for Google ChromeTM. (n.d.). Retrieved March 10, 2017, from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readwrite-for-google-chro/inoeonmfapjbbkmdafoankkfajkcphgd