ESL tips

A few ideas to take away from ESL training:

1. American society values some things that make communication with other cultures difficult. Individualism and equality are valued in the US, and sometimes they are valued in other countries, but that isn't the case always. Closely related to these values is competition: Americans rank themselves in comparison to others all the time, and that can make multicultural experiences more difficult because we might not appreciate all the opinions or viewpoints of another culture.
2. A bad way to teach ELLs: have them do worksheets that aren't related to each other and don't help the children develop communication skills. A good way to teach ELLs: have them discuss something like a field trip together as a class, and make notes on a flip chart with words that describe the trip. The students can then split up and write about their experience, and they can refer to the chart if they need to.
3. ELLs and really any English learner benefits from speaking and writing. A great exercise for an ESL class or a Lit class is having the students write stories every day when they come in, and then they share the stories later in class. Or have them predict newspaper headlines, and then they can comb through the newspaper to find those headlines. When there's a new ELL, assign a buddy to them every week, someone who can help them understand what is going on in class.
4. Tests are great assessments, but they don't help students learn very much