How NOT To Create Dependent ESL Learners.
If you are an ESL teacher who pushes in students in other content area classes, you might sometimes ask yourself a question whether you create dependability of students on you. This is a tricky question because I personally believe there is nothing wrong if L1 and L2 students perceive me as the source of the language, feedback, and correct information. L3s and L4s might stick to me sometimes just because they feel with me they do things easily while I do provide a lot of support in a language.
With higher levels, however, I tend to be a much feistier “mom” than with my beginner learners. And yet, I think no matter the level, students need to be given the time and the opportunity to take risks in their language behavior, which will plant in students the seeds of independence and responsibility for their work.
In this post, I will describe a couple of situations when I teach students to be more self-dependent even if they are beginners.
1) I ask my students to read what they write out loud.
If they can’t read what they write, it means there is work to be done by a student (in most situations). I always say that if their own ideas are confusing to them (no matter how simple they can be), it will be confusing to any audience.
Asking students to read their writing aloud prevents slacking, develops accountability and stops “bad quality” work drifting to me for fast grading.
As an ESL teacher, I am probably able to decipher a lot of writing and make sense of what the real audience would struggle with; however, asking students to read their work out loud also teaches them to consider the audience of their writing and be more clear no matter how simple their writing is.
2) I ask my students to separate complete ideas with periods.
Surprisingly, it works not only for my Spanish language speakers but for any languages speakers – learners of English. What I have observed with many of my students is that inability or the choice not to separate their ideas with periods does not happen due to the lack of punctuation rules but rather lack of assurance about what they really meant to say.
Students who are asked to use periods as separators of ideas are more likely to reread their writing and think about what they intended to say.
I make sure I provide examples of complete and incomplete sentences beforehand in a mini-lesson to give students an idea about what is expected.
3) To the question, “Is it good, teacher?” I reply, “Do you like it? If you like it, then it’s good!”
In practicing this reply, I teach students to be the judges of the quality of their work (no matter the level). Very often, by asking “Is it good, teacher?” students don’t ask about grammatical correctness, but they want to know if their work is enough for a good grade.
By letting students decided how good their work is, I teach them accountability for every single step in their work on the project or just an assignment.
This technique pertains to those situations when students are required to experiment with the language (Ex.: writing a short story, essay, respond to the prompt, picture prompts) not when they practice a particular language aspect (the order of Subject and Verb).
4) Teacher: “Tell me what you are doing.”
Student: “I don’t know.”
Teacher: “Reread the instructions and tell me what you are going to do.”
Student reads the instructions: “Oh, I need to ________.”
Teacher: “That’s right! You can start. Don’t hesitate to ask me questions.”
Since I’m a push-in teacher, I go to content area classes and assist my students in what they do with a content area teacher. Before I start work, I always ask students to explain what they are required to do. At times English learners don’t start working until an ESL teacher comes in and shows them what they need to do. This happened to me before.
In most situations, I noticed students would wait for me to come, explain and give the steps and the tools of doing the assignment. What indeed happened is that students avoided the responsibility of understanding what was required from them and waited for the easier way out.
What I did was I would ask them to explain the requirements of the assignment and would not start working with them until students can explain or show me (rarely) what is required from them. This technique teaches students to be more independent in their learning procedures and fosters responsibility as to understanding the procedures and requirements of the content area class.
5) Student: “Teacher, can you check it? Is it correct?”
Teacher: “I’m sure you did your best. Ask me a question. What exactly do you have trouble with?”
Very often English language learners try to shift the responsibility of raising the quality of their work to an ESL teacher because ESL teacher’s approval would have to guarantee a good grade.
And while an ESL teacher’s job is to teach the best practices about using the language, the quality of work students submit is still subject to the evaluation of another specialist in a content area.
For example, if students do a project about body systems in their science class, as an ESL teacher I can guarantee the correctness of the language; however, students need to understand that the quality of their information and its presentation will be judged by a content area specialist.
Ask your English language learners to be more specific in their requests for help. Is their struggle related to the language or did they miss the lecture on body systems and are now struggling to complete the project?
Set strict boundaries of your help. You are not babysitting or helping with any work. Your job is just a language.
6) Student: “Teacher, can you help me?”
Teacher: “What exactly do you need?”
Student: “I need to answer this question.”
Teacher: “Read the question for me. Do you think we read about it in Chapter 5 about Egypt and Nubia?”
My students would ask me to help, and this would just mean they wanted me to sit with them and do the assignment together because they thought it was easier. To differentiate who really struggles and who just wants to have an easier way, I would ask questions about what type of help they need and ask them to be more specific about the support with a particular assignment.
Those who needed specific help would get it from me after specifying what exactly they struggled with. This technique would help me to be more strategic about my support in a content area class, and it teaches responsibility in students.
7) If you work with beginner learners like me, you probably use a lot of sentence frames and stems to help your students learn writing.
I use sentence frames many times. Some of my students would be more active in engaging with sentence frames, others would wait for others and me to complete frames and would copy them without bothering to understand.
I changed this by still providing frames but asking my active students to complete them together orally and in writing individually. I would ask some students to repeat the completed frames a couple of times. I would not provide the written completing of sentences but leave it for students to do.
If students struggle with spelling, I would ask them to check it through paper or online dictionary or ask a friend to spell. This technique fosters total students’ attention, participation and listening. If they passively sit and wait for the written responses, they will fail. They need to listen to the oral responses, repeat them, check for spelling.
This technique also teaches accountability and requires each individual student to be on task and engaged.
Have a happy day! Keep creating!
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