English Language Learners

With more than 62 nationalities represented here at Ignite School, we are familiar with teaching English to non-native speakers. Learn how we implement a variety of strategies in our teaching within this communication.

There are multiple strategies in place at Ignite to ensure that ELL (English language learners) students are being taught in a rigorous learning environment. The main way that we help ELL students is to differentiate activities according to their needs and levels. Everyone has the same learning objective but expresses it during independent activities in different ways.

another strategy that teachers use is TPR (total physical response) which means using a physical movement or gesture while learning new words. When we learn new words, we make sure we speak slowly so students can clearly hear the sounds in the words, then we make a gesture to go with the word so that students can know the meaning and remember it with a gesture. Students love doing this and it helps them learn new words in a fun and meaningful way.

Cooperative learning is where students work tother for a common purpose or goal. Recently, my students worked on a science project where we created models of the sun. This hands-on activity allowed them to learn language for sharing and helping each other as they took pieces of red, yellow and orange paper to symbolize the fire of the sun and scrunched them up into balls. They then dipped the paper in water until it was in the form of a ball and finally dipped them into flour to make the ball firm. My students really enjoyed the project and it allowed them to remember the characteristics of the sun, vocabulary to explain it and conversational vocabulary for working with each other to accomplish their goal of creating the sun models.

Another great strategy we use are games where they need to help each other. Recently, we played a spelling game where we practiced our spelling words in teams. Each team had to spell the word I said but each person on the team was required to write one letter of the word and then pass the pen and paper to the next person to write the next letter. They were allowed to help each other and talk about the spelling as much as they wanted. Everyone really enjoyed this activity and everyone was able to share their knowledge and encourage each other to get the letters down right. Again, the physical movement and team cooperation made learning the spelling words fun and memorable which ELL students really need.