Approaches and Methods for ESL

Approaches and Methods for ESL

1. Calla Related Concepts

   • Literacy Across the Curriculum: reading/writing across the content areas, integrated instruction.
     • Application: Use reading passages about landforms to teach reading skills while learning about United States geography in social studies. Include opportunities to read, write, speak, and listen.
       • Application: Include in the geography lesson landforms found in students' home countries.
   • Language Experience Approach: provides experiences that help develop language in context.
     • Application: Carve a pumpkin in class, cutting and emptying the pumpkin together. Talk, read stories and write about pumpkins and the experiences.
   • Balanced Reading Approach: a balance between whole language and phonics instruction.
     • Application: Teach the /or/ phonics lesson during a Halloween reading and writing unit focusing on candy corn.
   • Cooperative Learning: students work together to construct knowledge through tasks.
     • Application: Students work in cooperative groups to solve a break out game.
   • Inquiry: an activity aimed at extracting meaning from experience
     • Application: Students design and carry out an investigation to answer a question, such as "What happens to plants if they are planted too closely together?"
   • Process Writing: writing in all subject areas that requires reflection and revisions
     • Application: Students write a paragraph that summarizes the learning in a social studies unit. They use peer editing and a rubric to reflect and revise.

2. Sociocultural Theories

   • Students learning is impacted through internal cognitive and affective factors and external social and cultural factors.
     • Focuses on learning through social interaction and cultural context.
       • Application: Provide opportunities for students two construct knowledge in groups and through scaffolding, such as during teacher-student and student-student discussions.

3. CALLA Model

   • Integrates content instruction, academic language development, and explicit instruction in learning strategies.
     • Content instruction based on standards
       • Why? To develop knowledge, learn skills and processes, and content is motivating and interesting.
       • Help students connect content to their own cultural backgrounds.
       • Teach content by linking new to known, providing experiential learning, and addressing all learning styles.
     • Academic language: includes listening, speaking, reading, writing
       • Used for cognitively demanding tasks
       • Requires lower-order and higher-order thinking skills.
       • Academic Language is essential to success in content areas and not usually learned outside of school.
       • Select Academic Language that is relevant to student needs and learning.
       • Teach through modeling and providing listening, speaking and writing opportunities in content areas.
         • During a lesson about facts and opinions: Students turn and talk about their own opinions on a given topic, listen to a read aloud and identify facts and opinions, read examples of facts and opinions, and write examples of facts and opinions. Students are provided with language supports such as: "According to the text..." and "I disagree because..."
     • Strategies instruction helps students be mentally active and analyze and reflect on their learning.

4. Cognitive Approach

   • Recognizes that memory and processing are fundamental to learning.
     • Procedural Memory: what we know how to do, learned through practice
       • Application: Students perform a task, such as measuring liquid volume and creating a vertical numberline on a bottle to learn about capacity.
     • Declarative Memory: information stored in schemata, content knowledge, learned through connections to background knowledge.
       • Application: Before beginning a lesson, do a quick write listing prior knowledge about the lesson topic.

Images and files in the map