Learning ELD through Oral Language

Kids love to talk, until it’s time to talk in front of the class. While many students are shy or afraid to give the wrong answer, ELD students’ fears are compounded if they are self conscious about their English. Many beginning and early-intermediate ELD students are so afraid to speak in front of their peers that they remain silent in class. This can lead to teachers misinterpreting their silence as comprehension. These invisible students fall through the cracks because they are too worried about being put on the spot.

On the other hand, many ELD students who are at the intermediate or early-advanced levels are quite conversationally fluent. Because they can get by in most face-to-face discussions, their conversational fluency can be mistaken with fluency in literacy. Have you ever had a student who speaks perfect English but struggles to connect the words on the page? The result is the same as their quieter classmates: students who need more practice in English and literacy and aren’t getting it.

Benefits to Listening and Speaking

One of the best ways for beginning and early-intermediate ELD students to practice their English is by speaking with their peers. Not only can they rehearse the word pronunciations and speech cadence, but by listening to others speak English, they are able to hone their own knowledge more easily. There are many ways to ease the stress of speaking in front of the class.

Reading Out Loud

Many students, especially students who aren’t yet comfortable with their English, dread reading out loud. Why would they want to suffer the embarrassment of mispronouncing a word? However, listening to others read can be very valuable for ELD students. If they follow along in their own texts, they can find and internalize the rhythm of the words more easily. I found that if I took a turn reading a passage, students understood what was read much better than if they had read alone.

I would always assign parts to read out loud ahead of time so students could rehearse any difficult words before their turn came up. Offering extra credit or class participation for readers is a great incentive as well.

Accommodation for Beginning/Early Intermediate Learners: Break students into small groups of varied skill level and have them read passages out loud to each other. Walk through the class to casually assess reading skills, stopping to help with struggling readers or difficult words.

Perform a Skit

Tap into your students’ dramatic sides by having them perform skits in your class. First, have your students complete a freewrite on any topic that relates to their daily life. For example, if you’re starting a novel about a character who fights with his parents, have your students write about a time when they fought with their parents. When they are done, divide the class into groups of three or four, and have them read their stories aloud to their group members. Each group chooses one story to perform, and they can start writing out the actions and lines of the story as a skit. Each student should have at least one line. Tip: try to include at least one outgoing student in each group to get the enthusiasm up.

Pre-written skits and plays can be just as valuable to your ELD students. Novio Boy by Gary Soto is a big hit with students of varying skill levels.

Accommodation for Beginning/Early Intermediate Learners: Model the skit-writing process as a class and choose a few students to act in the skit. Seeing the translation of story to dialogue can be valuable for developing ELD students.

Think-Pair-Share

Pair your students, whether they are English Learners or not. When it’s time to answer a question or share an opinion, give the pairs thirty seconds to share their ideas with each other. Even the quietest student would rather talk to one person than thirty. After thirty seconds have passed, ask for volunteers (or select students) to share their partner’s answers. A quiet student will feel less pressure if they are repeating someone else’s answers, rather than feeling ownership over his or her own response.

Accommodation for Beginning/Early Intermediate learners: Have the pairs write down their responses and trade while they discuss their answers. Students can then simply read what their partners have written rather than remembering it.

Some other great lessons to try in the classroom:

The Skit

Take students through the process of writing skits and plays with this activity, which is based on a scene from Hansel and Gretel. They will learn how to produce original content, using the correct structure for a skit.

High Anxiety

Emotional situations are the topics of this lesson, which uses real-life application and issues to write complete skits. Students will then explore how they could make their skit into a short movie.

Reading Poems Aloud: Sound and Meaning

This poetry activity prompts students to “think aloud” as they examine the parts of a poem, chosen from a list (which can be substituted for a song or poem of any level to accommodate your learners).