How to Keep English Language Learners Engaged

The diversity students bring to the classroom make our learning environments rich with uniqueness and learning opportunities. English Language Learners (ELLs) make up a large portion of our student populations, and it is important that as teachers, we reach out to these students and utilize strategies to keep them engaged in learning.

Create a Classroom of Relationships 

    It is vital that we establish relationships with all students, but making ELL students feel at home in our classrooms is of utmost importance. These relationships should include teacher-student connections, as well as peer relationships. An atmosphere of inclusion, acceptance, and celebration needs to be established. When you have a student’s heart, you will have a better chance of having his/her mind too. Each year, I incorporate a family heritage project into our social studies curriculum. This project allows students to take time to discuss family traditions and history with their parents at home before sharing those traditions with their classmates. The students love to hear about different languages spoken in their peers’ homes, holiday traditions, foods eaten, and how cultures different from their own celebrate life events. It creates a feeling of family and community in the classroom, where everyone is accepted, and the students are eager to learn about their next classmate’s family history. 

Involve the Whole Family 

    Students are more engaged in learning when their families are involved in the learning too. For example, it is common for schools to host literacy events, where the students and their families can attend. Making these literacy events cross-cultural is a way to invite English speaking and English learning families to participate. Presenting a bilingual read aloud is an activity that children of all ages and languages enjoy. My campus’ English language learners are predominantly Spanish speakers, so we choose a book that has been printed in both English and Spanish, but this activity could be done with any other language too. With two copies of the same story, just in different languages, two teachers alternate reading pages in each language. Families are captivated to hear a story being read aloud in their native language and to have their children immersed in a second language as well. Any opportunity to connect the school and home life is beneficial to these children and their learning. A literacy night with games and activities to be practiced at home in multiple languages, inviting parents to speak about their jobs in their native languages at a career day, and hosting parents as guest readers are all ways to tap into the funds of knowledge. Funds of knowledge are defined as cultural knowledge and skills that students gain from their family and household settings to strengthen the curriculum in their classroom settings (Cobb, et. al., 2011). These are skills and concepts that students can be experts in and share with peers that will enhance learning. English language learners will be more engaged when they feel their backgrounds and the knowledge they bring to the classroom are valued as a part of the educational process. 

Classroom Techniques

    Cultivating relationships and including the child’s family are the best ways to engage students in their own learning, but the following are best practice classroom strategies to aid English language and native English speaker learners alike in their learning. 

• Use visual supports. 
• Build in opportunities for group work. 
• Provide native language and English vocabulary labels. 
• Honor wait time, giving students time to gather their thoughts before speaking. 
• Pre-teach academic vocabulary and be aware of culturally unique vocabulary. 
• Use sentence stems for writing assignments. 
• Learn about the culture and background of the students. 

    An inclusive, engaged classroom is one of the most exciting places a child can visit each day. In what ways does your campus and classroom keep all learners engaged and reach the families of English language learners? 

References 

Cobb, J.B., Kallus, M.K., Moll, L.C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (2011). Chapter 17 Funds of Knowledge for           Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms. In Historical, theoretical, and                  sociological foundations of reading in the United States (pp. 270-283). essay, Pearson.