This week, I got lucky because the first hit on my Google Alert immediately caught my attention. I was interested and overwhelmed by just the title, so naturally I needed to read the article.
“Thirteen Instructional Strategies for Supporting ELL Newcomers” by Larry Ferlazzo from EducationWeek was the article I chose this week. It is definitely an opinion piece where he also has input from several other professionals in the field. I have read a few other pieces by Larry Ferlazzo before through his segment “Classroom Q&A”; he even has a short radio show that he has linked into this article as well.
The title mentions thirteen instructional strategies, that was what caught my attention. If I’m being honest, I normally find resources that list more than ten “resources, solutions, hints, tips, tricks etc.” to be too much. That was not the case with this article. With the input from the other professionals the article breaks up the content into smaller chucks, based on what they can do to help ELL students. Larry includes five of his favorite strategies first then it breaks down into sections on: promoting interaction, ELLs ‘Need to Feel Safe’, ‘Language-Learning Goals’, and Stations.
All of the guest professionals had great input where a key theme was building relationships with ELL students and really getting to know them can really make the difference in their education. Building relationships with students leads to a safe learning environment where students can feel comfortable being themselves and making mistakes, in language or in learning, so that they are able to learn from those mistakes. Fundamentally, making mistakes is one of the only sure-fire ways to actually learn something. Coming from my math perspective, everyone makes mistakes no matter where you are on the road to mastery; I make mistakes all the time, sometimes even speaking or writing!
I wanted to talk a bit more about what Larry presented as five of his favorite strategies; some of which were new to me.
1. Picture Word Inductive Model (PWIM)
2. Games
3. Dialogues
4. Freire’s Learning Sequence
5. Language Experience Approach (LEA)
When I read through the description of each point it made me think of what we learned in class this week about digital storytelling and how I could relate the two topics. For example, with the Freire’s Learning Sequence, the students are given an image illustrating a problem. The students are asked to describe the picture and they use their descriptions to identify the problem. Then they are asked if anyone has had experience with the problem which is followed by a discussion about potential solutions.
This made me think of error analysis problems we do in our class. Error analysis is an interesting way to teach problems because some of the students are able to pick up on exactly what is wrong and pin point the mistake, while other students feel that there is not an error. If it explicitly taught as an error, the students who did not originally see the error will then know what to do (or not to do) in the future instead of solidifying the misconception as fact leading to more errors.
It could be interesting to approach digital storytelling based on the Freire’s Learning Sequence, especially from the mathematical perspective.
Ferlazzo, L. (2021, February 23). Thirteen instructional strategies for SUPPORTING ell Newcomers (Opinion). Retrieved February 24, 2021, from https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-thirteen-instructional-strategies-for-supporting-ell-newcomers/2021/02