Transcript

The first thing to remember is that access to print and getting engaged with print is crucial and so we need to make sure that students have access to books that they can relate to, that they can read, if they can bring these books home to read to their parents that's going to be excellent. We can encourage parents to read to their children. It doesn't matter whether they're reading in the first language or in English, that exposure to books and building up that affective bond between children and books is a crucial aspect. 

There are a set of skills and strategies that teachers can use to help students gain access to content. One of these strategies is scaffolding instructions. For example, using visuals, graphic organizers, paraphrasing what we say, so that students have a better chance of understanding it, providing access to group work and cooperative learning so that students can plan together and get more input in the language. So, there's an ESL toolkit of strategies that are fairly well known by ESL teachers but may not be that well known to classroom teachers and it's not just a matter of making content comprehendible to students, it's also a matter of extending students' proficiency and awareness of how academic language works across the curriculum. So the language development that students are getting is not just happening in the ESL class, not just in the language arts class, but when we're teaching science, we're teaching language, when we're teaching social studies we're teaching language but if we don't realize there are opportunities here for us to do that, then we may not take advantage of the possibilities. 

So again a challenge is to alert teachers, make them aware of how language and content are inseparable and when we're teaching content if we articulate a set of language objectives while we're teaching content it's going to help students catch up much faster.