10 Great Teaching Strategies to get the most out of every student in every lesson by Peter Fogarty
These ideas are taken from this fabulous new teaching resource: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/eal-toolkit-6040879
- Buddy Up – a really simple concept but an idea not done nearly often enough.
You take a student who is a confident reader or speaker and you buddy them up with a less confident reader and speaker. It may sound like you are slowing the confident one down, but quite the reverse! If a child really wants to understand a topic, then the best way to do this is to regularly need to teach it to another student. Both students benefit from this learning cycle.
This could be part of an induction programme, for specific activities such as group work or extended writing, or as an on-going strategy.
- Picture Rules – This is again immediately obvious when you think about it yet I rarely if ever see it in practice in the school. The idea is simply that the 5 main rules of the school or classroom are displayed clearly on a wall with a picture. This means a teacher can quickly and easily remind a student to put their hands up to answer a question or to remain in their seats. The more visual a picture, the more likely the students will remember and follow it in the future.
- Dictionaries – A school teaching English should have a lot of freely available bilingual dictionaries to use in each classroom. This means that whenever a child comes across a word they do not know, they look it up in the class English –Romanian dictionary and the native speaking teaching says the word for them to repeat. The student then writes this in their own person English – Romanian dictionary.
- Images – Students learn best with images. Whenever you are explaining a subject, or new topic, fill the classroom and the whiteboard with lots of colourful images. I would personally recommend http://www.pixabay.com as my main source as ever image there is completely free to use in anyway you like. If you make your resources into a commercial teaching resource, you can then sell it!
- Sentence Starters – I love using these in the classroom. You give half a sentence and the students in turn need to complete the sentences to express their opinions. The nice thing about this resource is that it provides a lot of modelling for students and they can take and adjust each other’s sentences to create their own sentences.
Provide sentence starters (also a good way to get everybody down to writing).
e.g.
One side of the argument is…
Another side of the argument is…
Therefore my conclusion is…
- Talk to support staff and other teachers teaching the same topic. In our busy day we sometimes neglect to make the connections between different topics and fail to integrate the same message across different lessons in both languages. With a little focus and effort, you find you are able to tie together the learning taking place in both the English language classes and also the main Romanian language classes. The result is a smoother, more effective teaching method.
- Role Models: Use group work to help EAL students hear positive English language models.
This may also be helpful to the student in internalising the ‘hidden’ rules of language inside and outside the classroom.
As the students become more confident in their speaking and listening, adding some role models and group role play works well. The students like to act and express themselves in the roles of different characters. If you are wanting it to be even more effective, you record these role plays and play them back to the class for group suggestions and further analysis. Obviously these recordings cannot then end up on the web!
- Pre-teach Vocabulary – This is something I learnt a long time ago. If you have vocabulary – introduce it at the start of the lesson. Then when the students discover the same words in the middle of the lesson, they know what you are talking about. Then at the end of the lesson I review the same vocabulary again.
This is particularly true if students are working or reading from textbooks, either individually or as a class.
Additional support may also be able to provide extra visual aids, or assist in reading text in advance with students.
- Open Questions : Open questions have many benefits. One may be the opportunity for EAL students to verbalise their reasoning. This gives the teacher a chance to analyse how they are using language in the subject – i.e. Are there certain (subject) conventions which they are circumventing? This of course, this may turn out to be a good thing! Anything which extends the sentences from a yes or no or a short single word answer into a fuller more detailed explanation is to be actively encouraged.
- 10. Rehearsal – Prime EAL students that you will come to them for answers. Ask them in the interim to orally rehearse these with a (helpful) peer. This technique may be usefully applied to all students. If students know you will be asking them more questions about what they are learning, then they will pay more attention. In addition, if they have first practiced asking and answering questions with a friend, when you do ask, they will be a lot more confident.
Also please check out the growing list of free resources I am including at http://www.TimeToTeach.co.uk.