ESOL

In my class, I have five students who speak two languages, their native tongue and English. All five students speak their native tongue at home. Alida has been completing a TESOL paper the last year and often will send us notes or any ideas she thinks may be useful. 

Here are my takeaways from the last few emails about scaffolding. 

1.      Sensory Scaffolding

Sensory scaffolds allow ELLs to use their senses to understand abstract concepts or learn new ideas. For most students, using visuals (pictures, charts, graphs etc) and manipulatives are effective forms of sensory scaffolding because images and gestures contain meaning without a dependence on language.

·        For beginning level ELL’s, sensory scaffolds are often the most effective kind of scaffolding, because there are fewer language barriers to understanding.  

·        When physical objects and visuals are combined, they offer even more opportunities to access content.

Examples of sensory scaffolds include: some forms of information transfer tasks; picture matching tasks and picture dictionaries.

2.      Interactive, Collaborative Scaffolding

As humans are social learners, teachers should integrate social interaction/collaboration into their lesson design.  For ELLs, social scaffolding is an excellent opportunity to use language for meaningful purposes as interaction forces ELLs to produce and use language.  

In interactive, collaborative tasks ELLs are forced to use language and content to discuss ideas, offer observations, and form opinions. This process means ELLs synthesize content knowledge and internalize language. Interaction is mainly used when students are: synthesizing knowledge, planning actions, or creating products. 

If something is important for students to internalize, use an interactive scaffold to have them verbalize it.  If they can correctly articulate it, they’ve owned it.

Two commonly used types of interactive scaffold are:

·        Jig-saw learning: - which requires students to internalise one aspect of the new content, learn to listen carefully when peers present their aspect, and work collaboratively to piece all the things they’ve learned to create new understanding.

·        Think-Pair-Share (TPS) – which fosters comprehensible input. ELLs often need to pause during instruction and synthesise the content that was just presented before learning new content.  

3.      Graphic Scaffolding

Scaffolding using graphic supports means teaching through charts, tables, and graphic organisers that convert numbers and data into visual representations.  Graphic scaffolds are particularly effective when teachers want to communicate highly abstract concepts or show relationships between things.  

Commonly used types of graphic scaffolding include: information transfer tasks, story maps or story graphs, mind mapping and word clouds.  

As graphic supports are forms of texts, which often lack a storytelling element, teachers need to model how to read them.  It usually takes multiple readings for a student to fully comprehend the graphic’s ideas.  Teachers may also need to directly teach ELLs how to interact with the graphic. For example, how to fill the empty spaces in a table. 

So what? What will I try in my classroom tomorrow? 

I am going to use more sensory scaffolding techniques, pictures and graphs to help some of my students grasp new ideas around world war one ( Our current inquiry focus). Also, I am going to incorporate more think pair share ( with enough wait time) to allow students to synthesis the content.