Downtime Do-Nows: Easy-to-Implement Language Rich Strategies for Those In-Between Moments

by Dr. Lora Beth Escalante

What do students do right away when they walk into class? Are there a few minutes when they sit idly while you take attendance or get papers and materials organized from the last class? Maybe the lesson ended early, and you find your class with a glorious 5-10 minutes of “free time.” Maybe you read your audience half-way through a lesson and realize you’ve lost them due to too much sitting. How can we utilize these in-between moments to provide students with low-stress opportunities for meaningful language practice?

Continue reading →

Learning to Read as a Secondary ML: How ’bout Them Phonics?

by Natalia Heckman

It happened about 17 years ago. I took home some decoding cards to prepare a lesson for ESOLI class. One of the pictures showed a watermelon with the letter S at the bottom. And there I was, staring at a watermelon like a deer in the headlights, trying to figure out the connection between the watermelon and the sound the letter S makes. The best I could come up with was S is for sweet and S for slice.”

My 10-year-old daughter (a native English speaker) ran up to me, looked at the picture, and said, “Mom, S is for seed!” She pointed at the picture and added, “This is called a seed!” Of course, I knew the word seed, but that word would never naturally occur to me, and I doubted any of my newcomers knew that word. They probably knew student, sleep, and Sonic, but …seed? Truth be told, I wondered if any of my students would find those cards truly helpful. I knew from personal experience as a language learner and a language teacher that learning to read as a secondary ML was different from learning to read as a native speaker of English or an elementary student.

Continue reading →

Short Structured Role-Play

by Dr. Lora Beth Escalante

My son’s favorite page, and also his favorite voice to do (Mama Worm).

Have you read Diary of a Worm (Cronin, 2003)? I have enjoyed it, possibly a hundred times, with my kids. It’s one of our favorites. I have even eyed it across the couch and picked it up to thumb through by myself. Yep. I find it endearing and whimsical, imagining what life could be like as a worm. I have no legs, yet my best friend is a spider with eight of them! I was cozy underground but forced to abandon my home in haste when a torrential rain threatened to drown us. Seeing the nuances of how a worm uniquely performs everyday tasks, such as holding a pencil (with a tail), sleeping (with leaves as bedsheets), and dancing the hokey pokey creates a silly connection with my everyday tasks as a human. There are other books in this series and countless other titles written from unique perspectives. (I often choose my own books based on the perspective from which they are written, too. When narrators shift each chapter, I look forward to how each character reacts internally and externally to the events in a story.)

Continue reading →