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English language learner (ELL) students (also known as English learners, multilingual learners, and emergent bilingual learners) make up over 10% of the K-12 population. This percentage has risen gradually over the past decade, and experts anticipate it will continue to increase.
Teachers of ELL students face a unique challenge in providing adequate differentiation and planning culturally relevant lessons to develop their English language skills while also building their academic knowledge.
There are many ELL best practices you can use, and most of them, at their foundation, are just extensions of the excellent teaching you already do. Today, we’re looking at some of these approaches to help your ELL students achieve success in all areas of their education.
[9 teaching best practices to support ELLs](id-best)
Effective ELL teaching strategies are crucial to help all your students succeed. But beyond that, they can also help you prepare more effective lessons, better monitor student progress, and help your students take ownership of their learning.
[1. Build background knowledge](id-background)
Sometimes, ELLs require additional information to fully understand the content discussed in class. This is likely to occur at the beginning of a new lesson or unit, but it can happen at any time.
For example, if a middle school ELA class reads “The Red Badge of Courage,” some students, including ELLs, might have some knowledge of the U.S. Civil War. But ELL students may have significantly less knowledge than their peers, depending on how long they’ve been in U.S. schools.
These students require additional support to bridge the gaps and explore opportunities to connect their knowledge and experiences. Newsela subject products make it super easy to build background knowledge on any topic in the classroom.
Key concepts and skills: Resources to review key concepts from core social studies courses.
Explainer videos: Interactive resources that show key information about historical events and people necessary for understanding social studies topics.
Issue overviews: Deep dive into topics that shape government policy and affect students’ daily lives.
Science core ideas: Build a foundation for science with activities that increase in depth and complexity.
Science videos: Explore core concepts and ideas across science disciplines with interactive videos.
Virtual field trips: Explore a variety of locations like zoos, national parks, and space.
[2. Connect students’ cultures](id-culture)
All students should be able to see themselves and their classmates in the content they explore in school. This helps spark curiosity and empathy, so it’s essential to integrate these elements into lessons throughout the year.
You can achieve this by incorporating more lessons that feature content familiar to your ELL students. For example, if you have Spanish-speaking students in your class, you may choose to teach about or celebrate holidays familiar to them, like Cinco de Mayo, Día de los Muertos, or their native country’s independence day.
Newsela’s subject products have over 15,000 pieces of content and a variety of activities that you can pair with your lessons to add more diverse perspectives and cultural topics.
It’s also helpful for your ELL students to see themselves represented visually and verbally in your classroom. Add classroom decor, such as posters and flags, that represent the diverse cultures of your students. You can also honor students' first language alongside their ELL journey by bringing it into the classroom or to specific lessons and sharing it with English-only speakers.
[3. Create a welcoming environment](id-environment)
Aside from giving students opportunities to connect their culture to the lesson, your classroom must be a welcoming place for all students, including ELLs. Consider how uncomfortable or even scary it is to be unable to understand most of the people around you in class every day. You might feel anxious, frustrated, and out of place.
Adding more social-emotional learning lessons to classrooms with English language learners can help. They can allow students to connect with their emotions and with each other in ways that highlight their similarities rather than their differences.
[4. Vary ways to show knowledge](id-knowledge)
Do all students need to present in front of the class to show what they know? If you’re teaching public speaking skills, the answer might be yes. But that’s not the case for every lesson.
Students can demonstrate their knowledge and use language through various means, including writing, speaking, drawing, and art. Allowing them to show what they know in different ways is a best practice for differentiation for all students, but it’s especially helpful for ELLs. Alternative assessment opportunities enable ELLs to demonstrate their understanding of content and concepts while minimizing the language barrier.
Formative offers 20+ activity types to provide students with varied options to demonstrate their knowledge on any activity or assessment.
[5. Use alternative learning materials and styles](id-alternative)
Alternative learning methods aren’t just for assessments or assignments. You can incorporate various methods to enable students to practice what they’re learning and target their learning styles. This is especially helpful for ELLs who may not be able to share the ways they prefer to learn due to the language barrier.
Differentiated instruction acknowledges your students’ unique needs, interests, and aptitudes. When they engage with the materials in multiple ways, it deepens the understanding for all students and provides a buffer zone for ELLs to work through language barriers.
Adding more opportunities to view or listen to interactive content, or engage in hands-on activities allows students of all learning styles to interact with information, enabling them to learn and remember it.
Newsela Science seasonal STEAM projects are a great way to add more kinesthetic activities to your lesson. Each includes a step-by-step STEAM activity paired with a holiday or seasonal moment. They also include texts and videos that explain key science concepts behind the experiments that make them work.
[6. Provide more ways to access and scaffold materials](id-scaffold)
When planning your lessons, it’s essential to determine the most effective ways for students to access classroom materials and scaffold knowledge to ensure it sticks. More interaction and collaboration, with a focus on effective communication, can help.
For example, rather than listing key terms on the board and asking students to define them, a science teacher may do experiments to demonstrate what the terms mean. For a lesson on buoyancy, the teacher may fill a fish tank with water and then ask students to predict which objects will float. Students vote, and the teacher drops the items in the water to test their predictions.
These types of experiments help students connect the concepts of floating and sinking to the vocabulary word buoyancy. It’s especially important when teaching English language learners to provide a tangible example that they can tie to new words in a new language.
[7. Provide access to texts in native languages](id-native)
Providing translated texts helps ELL students connect with what they’re learning by accessing it in their first and new language. Some teachers may be hesitant to provide translated texts because they can become a crutch. The concern is that ELL students may rely too heavily on content in their native language and fail to learn English.
There’s a difference between just handing students a copy of the book you’re reading in their first language and using materials in their first language to scaffold understanding. The first option doesn’t provide any room for growth. The second allows students to build on previous knowledge by using the two texts together and making connections.
Other options include providing reference materials, such as dictionaries, in students' native languages, or access to translation apps where students can look up and listen to translations from English to their native language and back again. You may also allow students to take notes in their native language or when working in small groups to create their own set of reference texts for studying.
Newsela products offer over 5,000 texts in both English and Spanish to differentiate for ELL students in the classroom. Access each text at five reading levels and assign Spanish-language quizzes and writing prompts to go with them. Students can use read-aloud mode with Spanish texts to hear the content.
[8. Use graphic organizers](id-organizers)
Regular use of graphic organizers can help students organize their thoughts and identify patterns and connections within a text. Students learn how to use these tools when they’re embedded in classroom instruction and treated like essential tools for success.
ELL students who have spent less time in U.S. schools than their peers may be less familiar with what graphic organizers are and how to use them.
Help English language learners become more familiar with graphic organizers by including them in your lessons. Newsela offers a variety of downloadable and printable graphic organizers—like flowcharts and Venn diagrams—to share with your students. Filter your search for worksheets to see all the graphic organizers you can access.
[9. Teach vocabulary](id-vocabulary)
Contrary to what we’re often told, it’s challenging to learn vocabulary through context alone. Context helps students make sense of vocabulary words and learn when to use them appropriately.
But they also need explicit instruction on words and their meaning to learn new vocabulary. This is even more critical for ELL students who may not understand the context of a new English vocabulary word in a sentence. Some sources suggest that students may require between 12 and 14 exposures to words and their meanings in a new language before they fully grasp new vocabulary.
Provide explicit instruction whenever the need arises. You may do it as a pre-teaching activity before students read a text, in the middle of a lesson to check for understanding, or at the end of a lesson to review.
The Power Words feature on Newsela ELA provides in-context definitions for Tier II vocabulary words. It provides definitions for each word and allows students to hear them spoken aloud.
[ELL best practices FAQs](id-faq)
Still have questions about the best way to differentiate your classroom for ELL students? Check out some of the answers below:
How can I better understand the needs of my ELL students?
Just as with all students, there is wide variability among your ELL students. It’s likely that not all your ELLs will speak the same language, so you may have to accommodate various linguistic backgrounds. They’ll also vary in their proficiency with literacy skills and their linguistic abilities, like fluency, in both English and their home language.
It’s important to remember that these differences aren’t deficits. Differentiation in the classroom can help you accommodate all ELL students, just like you would for your English-speaking students on individualized education plans (IEPs).
Get to know your students outside the context of just schoolwork to better understand their backgrounds, interests, and learning styles. Relying on their formative, interim, and summative assessment data to learn more about language and literacy proficiency levels can also help, and be a tool to help you check their progress throughout the year.
How can I support my ELL students with both reading and writing in English?
Reading and writing often go together in school, especially in ELA classes. But they can become trickier to teach to ELL students who are also learning an entirely new language while trying to learn to read and write.
To help your students become more proficient in using English in the classroom, it’s essential to recognize that receptive language skills like listening and reading often come first. Students may be able to understand what you’re saying, or make meaning from a written English text, before they can produce words and sentences in English themselves.
You can emphasize more productive language skills, such as speaking and writing, from the first day of class, which can help students develop these skills in the long term. ELLs may be hesitant to speak or write in a new language when they don’t feel confident, but repeated practice combined with dedicated and modeled writing instruction can help.
What are some ways I can encourage peer interactions for my ELL students?
ELL students may feel intimidated by group work or peer interactions due to language barriers, even in a classroom that promotes diversity and cultural awareness. Here are some things you can do to help all your students feel more comfortable engaging in group work:
Provide structured opportunities for students to engage in discussion, such as with prompts.
Pair students up rather than letting them choose their own partners. Pair a more English-proficient student with an ELL to help them build on each other’s strengths.
Give each member of the peer group a designated role during the discussion, or a topic to bring up, so students can prepare before they’re asked to speak extemporaneously.
What are some ways I can collaborate with others to ensure my ELL students succeed?
The more you can partner with other ELL specialists, the students themselves, and their families, the more you can help them succeed in the classroom. Here are some tips to help you with teaching and collaborating to create an impactful learning environment for your ELLs:
Coordinate with ESL teachers and specialists to get insights about how to overcome challenges with your ELLs.
Create partnerships with multilingual families and staff members at your school to help build community and support systems for new ELL students and caregivers.
Meet regularly with your multilingual families to check in and provide accommodations as needed.
Ensure your students and their families know how to access available school and district language services.
Set English language learners up for success with Newsela
Even if EL teachers want to follow these best practices, knowing where to start can be a challenge. They need support and instructional materials designed to help them educate all learners, not just those who speak English as their primary language.
Newsela products provide a range of in-class and independent supports for English learners, equipping them with the tools they need to acquire content knowledge alongside a new language. They allow educators to feel more comfortable differentiating instructions for ELLs to avoid gaps in their content knowledge that a language barrier could create.
Not a Newsela customer yet? You can sign up for Newsela Lite for free and get access to the content and skill-building scaffolds you need to support ELLs in your classroom.
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