ELL Strategies

Arguments that can be made that academia is on its own a second language. Think about it: in every class, teachers build up vocabulary and ‘lingo’ for the subject matter and work every day on making their students fluent in every aspect of the curriculum. Science, for example, is very vocabulary dependent and without the common basis of understanding between students and the teacher and the material then no work can get accomplished. Lab work alone can could be considered its own language – from this non-science person’s point of view. Math could also fall under this category. Students spend all day long learning a new language so to speak.

As I was reading the article, “Language Acquisition: An Overview”, written by Kristina Robertson and Karen Ford, I realized that there were similarities between second language instruction and the basic instruction that goes on every day as the teacher scaffolds between the standards and the struggling students. In the article, readers are lead through the six steps of language acquisition and the teaching strategies that coincide and reading through those led me to some unique insights between ELL students and my experiences in my student intern placement. These insights arose from what is probably a unique situation- I get a rotation of 6^th grade, 7^th grade, and 8^th grade students daily. The specific scaffolding and chunking of every single step and the progression of instruction for ELL students is strikingly similar to the scaffolding and direct instruction and how it moves from 6^th grade all the way up to 8^th grade.

Having studied best teaching practices in college and steadily working on implementing them on my own in the classroom, I recognize many of the strategies for each stage of the language acquisition and I can process why they work so well for students learning a new language. However, when I looked at the strategies and considered the growing number of struggling students in classrooms (and the push from every side for better test results and more ‘effective’ teachers) I couldn’t help but wonder if the specific scaffolding for ELL couldn’t be adapted to provide language acquisition skills to every student learning the academia language.

In a recent in-service – my first as an almost teacher – an outside specialist was brought in for the afternoon session and considerable time was spent on scaffolding. Scaffolding is a basic household names to most teachers and is probably being used in most classrooms (because no one gets their dream students that read perfectly at grade level, however, I thought that the session was missing a certain real-world application when thinking of the general classroom. I really enjoyed the article because for each stage of learning acquisition there were direct steps and techniques to not only help the student survive in the classroom but climb in skills. When I implement scaffolding skills into my own teaching and lesson plans, I often get the feeling that I am helping the students survive but I’m not helping them climb in their skills. I keep specific students afloat in the class and caught up but do their reading skills ever increase?

As I read through the specific learning stages and the coinciding strategies I got the direct sense that these strategies weren’t just to fill out an IEP but to move a student up- there was a distinct expectation of learning and progress. Often, I feel that I am assisting learned helplessness in struggling students through my scaffolding – my techniques have no expectation of increased progress and the eventual stop of scaffolding but instead hold my desires that no student get left behind.

My point in whole is that ELL strategies are designed to move students quickly and effectively through the new language with a clear end-goal in mind. Complete control and handle on the language in both school and social circles. Scaffolding in the classroom does not often have that clear-end goal in mind. As I studied the techniques for each learning stage and took notes to implement in my own lesson plans I determined that in CORE 4, with specific students in mind, I would make it my goal to use scaffolding so effectively that students would end the school year needing significantly less scaffolding. Their skills would increase not plateau because of the level of assistance they were receiving.

Robertson, K., Ford, K. “Language Acquisition: An Overview.” Web. http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/language-acquisition-overview#h-stages-of-language-acquisition