English Crash Course

Generally, when students arrive at our school they have at least some knowledge of English. In Sweden, media is overrun with English. Television shows, movies and games are not dubbed (except for very young children), and English words creep their way into any available spaces in an otherwise fully Swedish sentence.

This year, we have a new challenge in that some students are coming to us without the ability to speak English or Swedish at all. To work with these students, two of us are borrowing them from their regular classes to conduct what we are calling "crash courses" in each language. This will help the students to feel more confident, and help the teachers to communicate more effectively with them as they continue to teach them. While these students will have help in their native languages from teachers outside of our school, we hope this will help them in the meantime (it can take a while to get those teachers assigned to them).

Topics we will cover include:

• Greetings

• Vocabulary for classroom objects

• Numbers

• Colors

• "Survival Phrases" like "Could you please repeat that?"

• Common actions and polite requests

• Feelings

• Basic questions

Strategies we will use include:

• Visual aids (both during the lessons but also on a "cheat sheet" that they can take with them to class)

• Physical aids (a pencil when we're learning the word "pencil" for example)

• Hand gestures

• Repetition, repetition, repetition!

• Using simple sentence structures

• Speaking clearly and slowly

• Games to keep things fun!

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It is important also to learn more about this student and what their experiences in the classroom have been like before. This can be tricky when the student isn't comfortable in English and Swedish, so we'll use a translation app on the first day to support this understanding. Understanding the student's background and interests will help me to tailor the lessons to them, and allow me to support them in making connections between their everyday life and their new language.

You'll notice also that the student's first language (in this case, Turkish) is included as a column on the Survival Word List. This is because we learn language by making connections. The more connections the student can make between the language they already know, and English, the more they will be able to remember and build on. The Survival Word List will live in a special notebook we are giving to the student, where we'll paste in copies of the key words we are working with as well.

If you want to learn more about getting to know English Language Learners, and why it's imperative to do so, check out the resources provided on this page by Colorín Colorado.