ELD Samples
See this page for resources, lesson plans, and strategies designed to support English language development of ELL students through meaningful communication, vocabulary growth, language-rich activities, and collaborative learning.
ELL Portfolio
In putting this together it was important to me to give students, through this medium, the chance to gather samples of their work (formative, summative, traditional, authentic and everything in between!) which allows for them to reflect on their own work and progress in learning English, as well as for myself as the teacher to assess their language acquisition holistically. I have based the assessment portion on WIDA’s Proficiency Levels, simplifying them into more “student-friendly language”.
Conversation Circles
ELLs benefit from speaking as much English as possible, and it benefits them further to discuss subjects that are familiar to them first and/or pique their interest or stir strong emotions. Conversation circles, discussions between groups of 2-4 students, allow for students to practice their English in a low-pressure situation and support each other's language development. Students also get the chance to suggest topics and questions/prompts.
Warmup Work
ELLs benefit from learning grammar rules, academic vocabulary, and idioms explicitely, but learning this way can get boring quite quickly. We work on these through 5-10 minute warmups at the start of each lesson. Warmups include sentence corrections, clozes, idiomatic phrases, cognates, etc.
Above is a sample of one term's worth of warmups in grade 9.
Collaborative Work
Students in grade 9 read the mystery novel And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. Although the text is quite advanced for ESL students, they are intrigued by the story and it is always a favorite unit.
To support students as they read, we conduct regular collaborative work to make sure we are all "on the same page" regarding major plot points and characters. Students read in groups and complete timelines together. This way, students get answers to their questions even if they are too anxious to speak out in the lesson.