Educating students before they enter the K-12 education system is critical to their development and offsetting the achievement gap, which widens as they get older. The National Institute for Early Education Research says achievement levels in language and reading are most heavily established from birth through elementary school. Head Start, a federal pre-K program established in 1964, provides early education to low-income students, many of who are ELL students.
One important step is having both students and their parents feel comfortable, respected and welcome in the classroom. For parents, it is especially important that they feel comfortable asking questions and are involved with their child’s education. Teachers can use multisensory experiences and nonverbal communication to establish how much information they are relaying to the ELL student and make the child feel comfortable. It is important to know the background and social and emotional needs of the student in your classroom to fully understand them and their learning requirements.
Educating yourself on second language acquisition and student language assessments can be very helpful in understanding the learning process of the ELL student in your classroom. Second language acquisition courses are not required by most higher education teaching programs, but learning these theories can help you to communicate with your student better. It is also important to understand how your student’s language skills are assessed and at what age. Language assessments vary between states, but these are critical components to not only understanding their competency level, but planning your lessons, as well.
Outside-the-box teaching strategies that employ games, stories and physical activity can help captivate the attention of young ELL students. Storytelling can be a powerful tool to teach young ELL students vocabulary and sentence structure of a second language. ESL Base, an online resource center for teaching English as a foreign language, recommends using stories because of intrinsic motivation in students. This theory implies that young children are motivated by their internal desire to hear stories. In listening to stories, they will internalize language structure, vocabulary words and key phrases. In addition to storytelling, children often learn without realizing it through games geared toward learning English vocabulary. Young children also stay focused when they are moving frequently, as opposed to sitting for long periods, and use their hands during activities.