The ESL / ELL Teacher's Survival Guide E-Book

Larry Ferlazzo

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: J-B Ed: Survival Guides
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 506

Beschreibung

A much-needed resource for teaching English to all learners The number of English language learners in U.S. schools is projected to grow to twenty-five percent by 2025. Most teachers have English learners in their classrooms, from kindergarten through college. The ESL/ELL Teacher s Survival Guide offers educators practical strategies for setting up an ESL-friendly classroom, motivating and interacting with students, communicating with parents of English learners, and navigating the challenges inherent in teaching ESL students. * Provides research-based instructional techniques which have proven effective with English learners at all proficiency levels * Offers thematic units complete with reproducible forms and worksheets, sample lesson plans, and sample student assignments * The book s ESL lessons connect to core standards and technology applications This hands-on resource will give all teachers at all levels the information they need to be effective ESL instructors.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Jossey-Bass Teacher

Title Page

Copyright

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Getting Started with English Language Learners

Chapter 1: ESL Instruction: The Big Picture

Some Facts About the ELL Population

A Primer on ESL Research

A Quick Tour of ESL Best Practices

Chapter 2: ESL Classroom Basics: Building a Positive and Effective Learning Environment

The First R: Building Relationships

The Second R: Resources in the ESL Classroom

The Third R: Establishing Routines

Part Two: Teaching Beginning English Language Learners

Chapter 3: Key Elements of a Curriculum for Beginning ELLs

Key Elements of a Curriculum

Chapter 4: Daily Instruction for Beginning ELLs

Reflection

Homework

Field Trips

Assessment

Picture Word Inductive Model Unit Plan

A Sample Week in a Two-Period Beginning ESL Class

Year-Long Schedule

Other Activities

Part Three: Teaching Intermediate English Language Learners

Chapter 5: Key Elements of a Curriculum for Intermediate ELLs

Key Elements of a Curriculum

Chapter 6: Daily Instruction for Intermediate ELLs

Reflection

Homework

Field Trips

Assessment

A Sample Unit: Problem-Solution

A Sample Week in a Two-Period Intermediate ESL Class

Inductive Lesson Plan

Using Text to Generate Analytical Writing Lesson Plan

Other Activities

Part Four: Teaching English Language Learners in the Content Areas

Chapter 7: English Language Learners in the Mainstream Classroom

What Is the Organizing Cycle?

Chapter 8: Teaching Social Studies

Building Relationships with Students

Chapter 9: Teaching Science

One Size Does Not Fit All

Building Relationships with Students and Accessing Prior Knowledge

Identifying and Mentoring Students' Leadership Potential

Learning by Doing

Reflection

An Important Final Note

Chapter 10: Teaching Math

Making Math Relevant

Building Relationships with Students and Accessing Prior Knowledge

Identifying and Mentoring Students' Leadership Potential and Learning by Doing

Reflection

Part Five: Further Strategies to Ensure Success

Chapter 11: Using Learning Games in the ESL Classroom

Research Support

What Are the Qualities of a Good Learning Game?

Chapter 12: Handling Potential Challenges

Student Motivation

The Advantages of Being Bilingual or Multilingual Lesson Plan

The Qualities of a Successful Language Learner Lesson Plan

Textbook Integration

Error Correction

Limited Access to Educational Technology

Multilevel Classes

Primary Language Use in the ESL Classroom

Classroom Management

Book Selection

Chapter 13: Assessing English Language Learners

Assessing ELLs: Key Principles

Afterword

Index

Jossey-Bass Teacher

Jossey-Bass Teacher provides educators with practical knowledge and tools to create a positive and lifelong impact on student learning. We offer classroom-tested and research-based teaching resources for a variety of grade levels and subject areas. Whether you are an aspiring, new, or veteran teacher, we want to help you make every teaching day your best.

From ready-to-use classroom activities to the latest teaching framework, our value-packed books provide insightful, practical, and comprehensive materials on the topics that matter most to K–12 teachers. We hope to become your trusted source for the best ideas from the most experienced and respected experts in the field.

Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by Jossey-Bass

A Wiley Imprint

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax [phone], or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Permission is given for individual classroom teachers to reproduce the pages and illustrations for classroom use. Reproduction of these materials for an entire school system is strictly forbidden.

Material in Chapter 1 from I felt Like I Was from Another Planet: Writing from Personal Experience by Norine Dresser, copyright © 1994 by Addison-Wesley Publication Company, Inc. Used by permission of Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ferlazzo, Larry.

The ESL/ELL teacher's survival guide : ready-to-use strategies, tools, and activities for teaching English language learners of all levels / Larry Ferlazzo, Katie Hull-Sypnieski.

p. cm. — (Jossey-Bass teacher)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-09567-6 (pbk.), ISBN 978-1-118-22359-8 (ebk.), ISBN 978-1-118-23697-0 (ebk.), ISBN 978-1-118-26191-0 (ebk.)

1. English language—Study and teaching—Foreign speakers. I. Hull-Sypnieski, Katie, 1974- II. Title.

PE1128.A2F455 2012

428.0071—dc23

2012011534

About the Authors

Larry Ferlazzo teaches English and social studies to English language learners and mainstream students at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. He has written three previous books: Helping Students Motivate Themselves: Practical Answers to Classroom Challenges; English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work; and Building Parent Engagement in Schools (with co-author Lorie Hammond).

He has won numerous awards, including the Leadership for a Changing World Award from the Ford Foundation, and was the grand prize winner of the International Reading Association Award for Technology and Reading.

He writes a popular education blog at http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org and writes a weekly teacher advice column for Education Week Teacher. His articles on education policy regularly appear in the Washington Post and the Huffington Post. In addition, his work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, ASCD Educational Leadership, Social Policy, and Language Magazine.

Ferlazzo was a community organizer for nineteen years prior to becoming a public school teacher. He is married and has three children and two grandchildren.

Katie Hull Sypnieski has taught English learners of all levels for fifteen years in the Sacramento City Unified School District. She has served as a teaching consultant with the Area 3 Writing Project at UC Davis for the past ten years and as a district lead trainer for the WRITE Institute.

She is a member of the Teacher Leaders Network and has published articles in Education Week Teacher.

Sypnieski currently teaches English and ELD at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. She is married and has three children.

Acknowledgments

Larry Ferlazzo. I'd like to thank my family—Stacia, Rich, Shea, Ava, Nik, Karli, and especially, my wife, Jan—for their support. In addition, I need to express appreciation to my co-author, Katie Hull Sypnieski, who has also been a classroom neighbor and co-teacher for eight years. I would like to thank Kelly Young at Pebble Creek Labs and my many colleagues at Luther Burbank High School, including Principal Ted Appel, for their assistance over the years. Thanks also to Dr. Stephen Krashen for his helpful review of the manuscript. And, probably most important, I'd like to thank the many English language learner students who have made me a better teacher—and a better person. Finally, I must offer a big thank-you to Marjorie McAneny and Tracy Gallagher at Jossey-Bass for their patience and guidance in preparing this book.

Katie Hull Sypnieski. I would like to thank all the students I've had over the years for their determination, their creative energy, and for helping me to grow as an educator and as a person. In addition, I am grateful for all of the support I have received from my colleagues at Luther Burbank High School, especially Larry Ferlazzo, my co-author, co-teacher, and friend. I also greatly appreciate the help from Marjorie McAneny and Tracy Gallagher at Jossey-Bass. Finally, to all of my family members, especially my husband, David, and children Drew, Ryan, and Rachel, I want to thank you for supporting me in this process—you are the best!

Introduction

There was a great forest fire—everything was burning and all the animals were scared and didn't know what they could do. A hummingbird, though, went to a lake and got a drop of water. It flew to the fire and dropped the water there, and it kept on going back again. The other animals kept on telling the hummingbird that it was wasting its time, telling it there was no way a little water was going to make a difference. The hummingbird replied, “I'm doing the best I can.”

—Japanese folktale1

The hummingbird did its best in the face of many challenges and adversity, and nothing could stop it.

While it would have been ideal for the hummingbird to organize all the animals to join it in fighting the fire, always encouraging the use of that kind of strategy is not the main point of the story or this book. This book is primarily designed to help the secondary-level ESL teacher do the best she can in her classroom (though it does also include a chapter on how to help mainstream educators make their content more accessible to English language learners, too). In addition, the majority of approaches and strategies we discuss can be easily modified for younger ELLs.

This book is written by two committed and experienced educators who have a rich family life outside of school, plan on continuing to teach for years to come, and who are always interested in providing high-quality education to their students without requiring enormous extra work for the teacher.

It is not written by or for teachers who lack awareness of their own limitations and what is needed to stay in education for the long haul.

This book is a careful distillation of selected instructional strategies that have been used successfully by us for years in the classroom.

It is not a laundry list of every ELL teaching method that's been discussed in the literature.

In addition to providing a selective review of ELL teaching methods, this book shares highly regarded research supporting just about everything we suggest.

It is not just speaking from our experience and what we think is good.

This book shares numerous specific suggestions about how ESL teachers can use technology to bring a value-added benefit to their language-learning students.

It is not a treatise on how educational technology is the “magic bullet” that is always (or even often) superior to nontech strategies.

This book recognizes that teachers need to deal with standards (we use a simple summary of California State ESL/ELD standards throughout the book that has been developed by the Sacramento City Unified School District—see Exhibit 3.1 in Chapter Three), textbooks, and standardized tests. This book also recognizes that not everything always goes according to plan, and includes a lengthy chapter on how to deal with potential problems. This book understands the realities of what work in the classroom world actually is like.

It does not offer a pie-in-the-sky view assuming we operate in an ideal classroom world all the time.

This book emphasizes the importance of learners being co-creators of their education.

It does not encourage the teacher being the “sage on stage.”

The point of this book is not to claim it is the be-all and end-all for ESL teacher professional development. We strongly encourage teachers and their schools to develop ongoing mentor relationships with experienced educator organizations, and we recommend three of them in the Afterword.

This book does not promote the idea that any teacher is an island and only needs a few books and informal professional relationships to reach his full potential.

We hope that you can gain from this guide at least as much as we learned from writing it.

Bonus Web Content

Numerous Tech Tools supporting the lessons and instructional strategies that we discuss are highlighted throughout this book. In addition, we have a lengthy web page listing links to all the tools we cite, as well as to many others that we did not have space to include. All Exhibits in the book can also be downloaded. Readers can access these resources by going to www.josseybass.com/go/eslsurvivalguide. To post messages pertaining to this book or interact with the authors, join the Twitter conversation: #eslsg.

1 “The Hummingbird and the Forest Fire” (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hr3i3LYGU4.

Part One

Getting Started with English Language Learners

Chapter 1

ESL Instruction: The Big Picture

Long ago in the southwestern part of the United States an Indian tribe lived near a range of mountains. Climbing the highest of these mountains was considered an important accomplishment, and all the young boys of the village couldn't wait until they were old enough to make the climb on their own.

One night, the Chief gathered the boys together and said to them, “You have reached the age to take on the challenge. Tomorrow you may all go and climb that mountain with my blessings. Go as far as you can, and when you are tired, turn around and come home. Remember to bring back a twig from the place where you turned around.”

The next morning, the boys began the long awaited climb. A few hours later, one of the boys returned with a piece of buckthorn. The Chief smiled and said, “I can see you made it to the first rockslide. Wonderful!” Later in the afternoon, another boy arrived with a cedar frond. “You made it halfway up! Well done!” remarked the Chief. An hour later another boy returned with a branch of pine, and the Chief said, “Good job. It looks like you made it three-quarters of the way. If you keep trying, next year you will surely reach the top!”

As the sun began to set, the Chief began to worry about the last boy, who still had not returned. Just when the Chief was about to send out a search party, the boy finally returned. He ran to the Chief and held out his hand. His hand was empty, but his eyes sparkled with happiness as he said, “Chief, there were no trees where I turned around. I saw no twigs, no living things at the very top of the peak, and far away I could see the majestic sun shining off the sea.”

The Chief's eyes also sparkled with joy as he proclaimed, “I knew it! When I looked in your eyes I could see that you made it! You have been to the top! It shines in your eyes and sings in your voice! My son, you do not need twigs or branches as prizes of your victory. You have felt the prize in your spirit because you have seen the wonder of the mountain!”1

This tale describes the satisfaction and joy felt by the boy who reached the mountain's peak and witnessed the compelling view from the top. He didn't return with any physical “prizes,” but instead carried the treasures of his journey within himself. The next time he climbs the mountain, he will be motivated from within, not because there are tokens or prizes to be collected.

As educators, we hope all of our students will “see the view from the peak” and will feel compelled to take on many more journeys as they learn and grow. In a recent paper, Stephen Krashen explains how “compelling input” relates to language learning:

Compelling means that the input is so interesting you forget that it is in another language. It means you are in a state of “flow.”2 In flow, the concerns of everyday life and even the sense of self disappear—our sense of time is altered and nothing but the activity itself seems to matter.3

This idea will be reflected throughout this book as we identify and describe research-based instructional strategies and approaches that “compel” students to want to learn English. Compelling input can help students “reach the peak” of acquiring language without seeking external rewards. However, it is ultimately important for students to come to their own conclusions about the value of “reaching the peak.” Once students see the value of language learning and become intrinsically motivated to learn English, they will take the risk and climb that mountain over and over again. Sometimes they will need encouragement and support from us, especially when the peak is obscured by clouds along the way.