Some believe children come to school with a tabula rasa, the truth is everyone has a story that influences their learning journey. Learning in a language that is not students’ home languages is a challenge for both the educator and the learner. A challenge that can be addressed with a good plan.
1. Learner Centered Environment and Lessons
The National Foreign Language Center created Star Talk principles that are best for English Language Learners in an educational setting. The concept of a learner center environment encompasses many of the things that will best support all learners. These include important factors such as taking into account the “learners’ age, interests, abilities, and needs,” (National Foreign Language Center, 2019). The learner centered environment is on the top of my list because it factors in many of the principles below, like playing different roles as an educator and using the students’ interests to incorporate into the lesson. This goes back to looking at the person as a whole and not just a piece of the person. By incorporating the student’s background, experiences, culture, and interests into the planning, a learner is more motivated and has a higher chance of success rate.
2. Standards Based Curriculum
Sometimes using standards can be restrictive for teachers who are wanting to engage learners in authentic, real-world project based learning. A educator may not feel they have the freedom to allow the students to follow their passions. However, when dissecting the standards, we can see that the skills needed to achieve the standard will be taught and learned along the way through those purposeful projects. It is through authentic experiences that a person best learns. This is especially important for learners with different cultural backgrounds who need to find more connections to the content and their personal stories, experiences, and heritage. Often mainstream content overlooks the underrepresented, and using standards through project based learning are great ways to have a learner buy in to the lesson or unit.
3. Write Language Based Objectives
We learned that writing language objectives is necessary to make the student and teacher aware of what skill will be needed in order to meet the objective of the lesson. Tan Huynh (2020) explains how to use a formula for writing language objectives in a way that a student can state the language objective: “I *verb* *noun/concept* with *interactive person*.” It turns the objective into a part of the language domain. The picture below illustrates the difference between an objective of the lesson versus a language objective. The content objective is to “identify the theme” where the language objective uses one of the domains “writing a description of the theme.”
“When you write language objectives, you have the chance to provide an equitable learning experience,” (Huynh, 2020).
4. Teach Strategies for Skills in How to Learn
As a learning support (or special education) assistant, one of the things I work most at is identifying the skill that a student needs to work on in order to get to the objective. For instance if a grade six student is required to write a mythical story, then I know the student needs to first understand or review the concepts of writing about character descriptions, setting descriptions, plot development, and resolution at the end of the story. The objectives of the teacher or content may be so far out of reach for the student I work with, because they are not able to do the sub-level tasks. One of my jobs is to teach strategies for how to learn. The most basic things such as creating mind maps, planning out a story, take notes or highlighting texts for important information, organizing writing into boxes and bullets, all the way to what to do if you get stuck. Strategies help bring confidence to a student and the goal is to create independence. It is a bit like teaching a person to fish, instead of giving them a fish. I think that modeling the strategies are also within this principle. It must not be assumed that all learners in a classroom have had the same experience. In fact it can be assumed the opposite is true. For language learners, the strategies may be just as foreign as the language. By explicitly teaching the strategies, it levels the playing field for language learners.
5. Plan for Engaging and Interesting Topics
These topics should be real-world and relevant to the student. Which goes back to the top principle in my post, the learner centered environment and lessons. The beginning of planning starts with knowing the learner as a whole person. The teacher needs to know the interests, the academic level both conceptual and language wise. The background and culture of a student must be considered and part of the plan in order to get the learner connected. This is one of the main goals that will allow for the language learner to truly want to engage with the material. This principle leads nicely into number six, where opportunities are created to use the language to engage with others about the content.
6. Create Connections and Opportunities to Use Language
Purposeful Communication is at the heart of Star Talk’s principles. Once the language learner has begun to engage with the content through learning how to write or speak about it, the next step is to communicate with others who speak the target language “and effectively with those from other cultural backgrounds,” (National Foreign Language Center, 2019). This skill must also be taught explicitly as in number four above. Learning how to use the academic language in a real-word, authentic context is a path to connection in the brain.
7. Offer Explicit and Culturally Relevant Instruction
This may seem redundant with number five, but I think it’s worth separating the two principles. The principle of creating engaging and interesting material could be a precursor to offering explicit and culturally relevant instruction. I think the idea for this principle is to dive deeper into understanding where a student is coming from culturally speaking and where they are at in their language development. With these pieces of information, an educator can better decide which instructional strategies will benefit and best suit a learner. The College Board Research Report (Li, 2012) uses lessons and research from others in their report stating that teachers need to make accommodations for learners that take into account their prior education, socioeconomic status, prior content knowledge, immigration status, life experience, and culture (Freeman et al., 2003; NCTE, 2008). Again this links back to principle number one, which is pervasive through many of the principles. Know your learner academically, culturally, and personally.
8. Integrate Planning for All Domains of Language: Listening, Speaking, Reading, & Writing
As we learned a little this week, integrative planning for all the domains of language are an important feature in language instruction. Even when a lesson is planned to focus on one discrete skill, the lesson can still encompass all the domains through the delivery, engagement, and assessment of the content. In order for a language learner to practice what they are learning, it is good to make use of all the domains. This goes back to providing opportunities to use the language in different ways. Collaboration is key when using the domains, especially orally listening and speaking. The College Board research suggests modeling a lot of up front to give the language learner models to use as they start to take their first steps in communicating their ideas of new concepts to their peers (Li, 2012).
9. Use Multiple Instructional Strategies
Instructional strategies is merely the way one delivers and interacts with the students in a lesson. It is the action part of the whole operation. All the principles leading up to this have been planning. Instructional strategies are like a buffet of possibilities to deliver content and material to the learners. Kaplan (2019) interviewed veteran teachers, including Tan Huynh, about their instructional strategies for English Language Learner. She notes that it’s important to identify the specific needs of ELL’s because of theirs are slightly different from other learners. Her interviewees advocate for using home languages and technology when appropriate and using physical pre-determined signals that the class understands as feedback and communication. Simple things like speaking slowly and adding wait time are also important for language learners. The success of understanding when listening to someone who is speaking clearly and at a slower tempo is higher than when listening to someone who is mumbling and speaking very fast. Also, as we learned in the previous principles, give time to collaborate with peers in groups speaking and listening. Allow students to give feedback on peer’s work, orally or in writing. Play different roles from being a teacher, to a facilitator, to a coach. Direct, explicit instruction is also valuable for someone who needs a lot of modeling before they can practice the skill. Huynh suggests teaching vocabulary and academic language up front to allow the students to pre-load the ideas. Using translators and translanguaging helps learners understand new concepts. Allow language learners multiple ways to interact with the material and show their understanding. Which brings us to the final principle for this blog post.
10. Use Performance Based Assessments
I have noticed that many of these principles are intertwined with each other. The last one is following suit. Performance based assessments are important because they offer authentic ways for the students to show their learning. Performance assessments can be formative (that is informing the teacher what to do next) or summative (showing what the student has learned at the end of a lesson, week, or unit. Assessments can be student choice, and are driven by the interests and background of the students for which the lesson was planned based on the learner centered classroom. The Star Talk principles stress the importance of having the learner be involved through self-assessment and reflection (National Foreign Language Center, 2019). Reflection can serve as a formative assessment tool for both the learner and the teacher. A key piece of the assessment is that the learners have been doing things that will prepare them for the assessment. It makes no sense to talk about fractions and division for the unit when the assessment will be about graphing. The job of the teacher is to prepare everyone for the assessment. On the way to the final summative assessment the teacher should be giving feedback and mini-conferencing with the student. The learning activities should have so much modeling and practice that a student can confidently go into an assessment pretty much knowing what the outcome will be. It’s all about preparation, planning, and consideration of the learner. The higher level thinking of the assessment is the point where the learner connects their new conceptualization of learning to what they have experienced previously, connecting to their home language, heritage, life experiences, and other learning. Another important part of the assessment process according to Alrubail (2016) is to separate the language assessment from the content assessment. Having different rubrics to assess the different elements will better inform the teacher where the student is, and will also allow the student to be a part of the process by taking part in those self-assessments. By making accommodations like extra time, using a translator, allowing a choice of method to show understanding, en equitable environment is created.
I think this picture that was presented at our school’s introduction to the new committee, Equity, Justice, and Belonging, illustrates the point about making accommodations. Equality means everyone gets the same thing. Equity means everyone gets what they need.
All of these principles are working together to weave the fabric of language instruction. Without one, you have a hole in the basket, but with the principles woven together, you have a strong vessel to carry your tools for a solid language instruction practice. Of course, there are many more that can be added to strengthen the practice, but these are my chosen top ten that I thought would work with my international school setting where we have many different languages and grade levels.
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