Language is all about communication. How, then, do you teach beginner ESL students to communicate in a language that only one of you speaks?
In my previous post, I talked about what to teach beginning English learners. Today, I would like to focus a bit on the strategies that you can employ to successfully reach your students, especially ESL newcomers.
It is perfectly natural for both the teacher and the student to feel unsure and maybe even a little silly when one tries to convey a message and the other just looks them in the eye and (hopefully) smiles.
There are strategies, though, that will help you out. They will work both teaching a larger group of students and one-on-one.
After all, verbal communication makes up about 30 percent of all human interaction. When we employ the other 70 percent, it really works to the students’ advantage.
Plan
We all know planning is essential in teaching. And sometimes, when you have a lot of experience and/or little time, there is that temptation to skip planning because you think you know what you are doing. However, planning is super important when teaching ESL beginners. They rely on you to supply them with the basic words and structures that will help them communicate. Therefore, the lessons have to be very specific and targeted.
A few key things to consider when planning:
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- the age of your students
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- what it is you want them to know by the end of the class, week, quarter, semester, year? (not all at once, of course:)
- what are the skills they will need to be able to achieve those goals (will they be able to speak, read, or write)?
It is always better to plan for more (say, two lessons) than to be under-planned, so to speak. When there are fewer students, the lesson might go quicker and you will run out of material sooner. Also, keep in mind that sometimes even the best lesson plans don’t stick due to a variety of reasons (from student mood to unexpected fire drill), so having a plan B is a must.
Use visuals
Beginner ESL students know how things and ideas are called in their first language and now their task is to learn words that represent those same things and ideas in another language. Some of them are easier demonstrated than others but making it visual for English learners is an absolute must.
Visuals include photos, pictures, your own drawings on the board or on paper, as well as realia like toy figurines or real life objects.
Many of the everyday objects are already available to us. For example, when you teach names of items found in the classroom, you can point or touch the actual things because they are already there. The students then can draw them in their notebooks, thereby having a visual representation next to the word. When teaching about animals, you can pick photos, look at books that you already have or even bring in toy animals if that is available to you. When the conversation is about clothing, you can easily point to the clothes someone is wearing as well as show additional pictures. And so on.
Kia from thinkinenglish.org has a wonderful blog post about how to teach beginners using photography. In it, she breaks down different activities targeting different language learning aspects – vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, etc. Click here to check it out.
Demonstrate
Did I mention that sometimes you will feel like you are making a fool of yourself? Yep, this is the part that may come naturally to some of you, but it may be a bit uncomfortable to others.
An actual physical demonstration is very effective for a couple of reasons: it helps explain verbs, such as run, walk, sleep, cook, etc. It also allows the students to see real-time action and associate a word with it, which will, through repetition and association, become their own.
In addition, when you ask students to demonstrate a word or a grammatical structure, it helps them come out of their shell. By doing, they are exposed to the language in a more physical way.
Use vocabulary workbook
Vocabulary is key when learning a language. And there is no other way about it – in order for words to be remembered, they have to be spoken, written, read, repeated and recycled.
When you introduce new words, saying them, spelling them and then writing them down is a good strategy for vocabulary memorization. The more the word is repeated in varied contexts, the more chances it has to become your “own” word. According to research, it has to be repeated at least 7 times for someone to remember or even start paying attention to it, so go ahead – repeat yourself.
Students can start their own notebook of English words and write ones that you assign in class as well as those they find interesting and useful. Or you could use a vocabulary workbook that has been pre-made, such as the one I have created. You can check out the post about it and download it here.
Use short, telegraphic sentences
Think about how a child learns their first language. It all starts with a one-word phase, which then becomes strung into two-word sentences that contain the most important information of who does what. The how, the where and the why come a bit later.
Similarly, when someone is learning a second (third, fourth, etc.) language, they are learning nouns first, then verbs. Although the process of learning a second language when one is already proficient in their native language is much faster, it still follows similar patterns. As the ear gets accustomed to the sound of new words, it is able to discern the familiar and “tune out” the foreign. However, if someone talks fast and in long complex sentences, we are sure to lose our learner.
Teach classroom phrases to your beginner ESL students with a demonstration: open the book, close the book, raise your hand
Similarly, you can use the same verbs to teach the students to close the door/window, open the door/window, etc.
Remember, in the very beginning stages, showing and telling it in short are essential.
Utilize music
In my recent post about how to teach with music, I mentioned that it is such a great tool for language teaching. And even though it takes a lot of words to understand the lyrics, you can still do it with beginners. You can pre-teach them target vocabulary, grammatical structure or sentence structure before listening and then have them pay attention to it during the song.
This is easier done with the little ones because they have the ABC song and all other kiddie songs, which might sound uncomfortable for teens or adults. However, who says you can’t take a melody and attach the days of the week, or months or other words that need to be memorized to it?
Create an interactive class
It is important to have an interactive classroom. Like I mentioned before, it might feel a bit scary or you might feel silly in the beginning, but it is super important to make the students comfortable and to make sure they are communicating as best they can with you.
Interactive classroom means that there is communication going on and hopefully, students communicate more than the teacher. Repetition of words and phrases alone is great but it tends to get boring soon. That’s when you can incorporate technology if that is available to you. Teenagers use phones and tablets all the time, and when appropriate, they can be incorporated into lessons as well. Here are a few ways you can have an interactive classroom with technology.
- YouTube videos. They are good for listening and speaking practice. The students can use the vocabulary they have already learned as well as pick up new words and structures.
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- create a classroom Instagram account. You can post vocabulary, short picture messages or quotes on there and then have a classroom or individual discussions.
- Create vines. You can do it and the students can do it. This is also great for vocabulary development.
As a side note, if your students haven’t had much exposure to technology, introducing them to it serves as a great lesson in itself.
Focus on whole language approach
As I mentioned in the beginning, learning a language is learning how to communicate in it. And communication encompasses not only speaking and listening, which we think are a given, but also reading and writing.
Generally, it is said that as a survival skill, listening comes first when learning a second language, especially if one is in an immersion situation. Then speaking.
However, if your ESL beginner student is older and literate in their first language, reading will also be among the first skills learned in another language. When I reflected on my own teaching, I noticed that I tend not only to speak the words out loud and draw/show pictures but also write them on the board so the students know the spelling.
Speaking and writing are productive skills, which require students to have enough vocabulary to be able to express themselves. Modeling simple sentences in your own speech and giving sentence frames for them to complete when writing will help them.
Final note
Mistakes. Yep, the dreaded mistakes that discourage so many people from continuing with language learning. Many of my students, especially older ones feel bad about “their English”, as they themselves put it. Beginner level students might feel embarrassed:
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- to pronounce words in English because they may sound funny to them.
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- They may also have difficulty producing certain sounds that do not exist in their native language (an example is digraph “th”, which is non-existent in many languages).
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- by the lack of vocabulary that they have
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- by the fact that they want to be the same as everyone around them and might be discouraged that they have a long way to go
- making mistakes is not acceptable in their culture and they are expected to succeed no matter what (likely without a clear path on how to get there)
It is super important to stress to your ESL students that mistakes allow one to learn and grow one’s brain. If everything came easy, we would likely take it for granted. The teacher’s job is to guide and give the tools and skills and only when using those tools and skills that we learn the language.
Quite honestly, I feel very passionate about this because I see so many bright English learners who beat themselves up and parents who look only at grades, which certainly do not reflect the half of what the students are capable of. But that’s a topic for another day, I suppose:)
That was a long post, wasn’t it? To recap, here are the 7 strategies for teaching beginner ESL students in short:
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Planning
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Using visuals
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Demonstration
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Vocabulary workbook
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Short sentences
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Music
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Interactive classroom
I feel like there is so so much to talk about when it comes to teaching ESL beginners, so I would like to extend an invitation to you to join The ESL Teacher Boss Society! Check it out and discover ready-made lesson plans, worksheets, ESL teacher roadmap, personalized coaching and more => The ESL Teacher Boss Society!
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