Three Tough Truths of Teaching English Language Learners

Teaching English Language Learners (ELLs) can be incredibly rewarding, but it also comes with some tough truths. Below, this post will describe three of these truths in hopes that they will help teachers and districts plan how to best support this growing student population.

1. Maintain high expectations for all students in your classroom.

Adjust your goals for students, not your expectations. All students are capable of learning through rigor – even though that learning will look different from student to student.

Teachers should strive to have language-based activities, protocols, and assessments for their ELL students. This will ensure that those students are challenged in a way that is relevant to their current knowledge goals – learning and practicing academic English. Allowing ELLs to sit by the wayside while the rest of the class experiences rigor through subject-specific content is not acceptable practice.

Meet students where they are and have empathy for the challenges ELLs are facing in and out of school.

2. It is almost certain that you will need to make materials for ELL students.

It is likely that a student whose language proficiency is not at grade-level will struggle to access grade-level texts and materials. Adapted texts, specific scaffolding, and other supports will be required to help them make meaning from their school work.

Teachers will benefit from having access to flexible templates, graphic organizers, and activities that can be used for any unit. As students work and rework with these materials, they will learn quickly what is expected of them. These scaffolds will help them extract the linguistic skills they need to succeed in school.

Properly designed materials could be used across different units in the same classroom, different content areas, or even across grade levels.

3. ELLs should primarily focus on improving their language skills.

Teachers must accept that ELLs need to learn language before they can access the totality of the content in the classroom.

As an ELD teacher, I spoke with many Gen-Ed classroom teachers who struggled to get past the idea that an ELL needs to understand the complexities of the content in order to be successful. The problem with this is that those teachers were using the same measures of success for both their English-speaking students and their ELL population.

Complexities within a content-area are important, but ask yourself how a student without English mastery will be best served by their experience in school. Their teacher can do pedagogical somersaults to get them to understand the comparative social structures of the Mayan and Incan empires – but where does that leave the student? The teacher’s effort would be better used helping that student master the language necessary for academic achievement. A student who walks away from that unit deeply understanding terms like “compare” and “society” has a much better foundation for accessing more detailed subject-area content in the future.

Use the content of your class as a vehicle for improving ELL’s language skills. Adjust content learning targets, emphasize language targets for language learners, and shift assessment to match these new aims.