Best Practices

 Pronunciation analysis

One of the suggestions that I have read about is taking current t.v. shows or movie excerpts and using them to help teach pronunciation. Rachel's English is a Youtube site that I have mentioned in my website resources. There are many valuable clips in on her site but I especially like her use of the t.v. show Friends. I think that this is still a very popular show, with well-known actors and actresses, and that adults would find the examples engaging. The reason I chose to share this clip is because I think that using current media helps to involve and engage the learner in a way that repetitive drill and practise tasks would not keep them interested.

Friends Intonation lesson

Creating an ELL Friendly Learning Environment 

The first chapter in this excellent teaching resource speaks to the importance of the learning environment. Haynes and Zacarian do an excellent job of reminding teachers that providing students with the learning destination helps them to achieve their goals.In addition the tasks we choose and how we present them impact the ability to learn. They refer to Krashen's three core elements for acquiring a second language (Haynes & Zacarian, p. 7):

• A comfortable learning environment with a low threshold of anxiety
• Meaningful tasks that purposely engage students to learn how to speak, listen, read and write in the new language
• Engagement in tasks that are just a bit beyond the student's current ability. 

Following is an excerpt from the book.

Teaching English Language Learners Across the Curriculum

Haynes, J. and Zacarian, D. (2010). Teaching English language learners across the content areas. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.  

 

Successful Strategies for English Language Learners 

In their article Research Matters/Successful Strategies for English Language Learners (2004), Gray and Fleischman talk about some of the important strategies that work for English Language Learners:

• establish strong relationships
• view the ELL as resource in the classroom
• use scaffolding strategies
• keep the language simple
• use actions and illustrations
• ask for completion, not generation (e.g. cloze passages)
• model correct usage and judiciously correct errors
• use visual aids

Gray, T. and Fleischman, S. (2004, December). Research matters/successful strategies for English language learners. Educational Leadership,  62(4), 84-85. 

 Real-life Conversations

One of the suggestions that I thought was brilliant came from the CLB Listening Assessment video. The instructor explained how she recorded everyday conversations to use as listening activities for her students. She explained how the students enjoyed the fact that she was on the recording. There would be some comfort to the students, in that they are familiar with the speaker's voice, but also I think there would be an appreciation of the extra mile she went to record the information. As she also had other speakers who were part of the conversation, the students would still be exposed to listening to others who might speak more quickly or slowly

Designing CLB Listening Assessments Using the CLB 2012