Without an array of ESL/TEFL teaching strategies at your disposal that you can quickly call upon at any time it can be very difficult to make consistent progress with your ELL students.
Basic ESL/TEFL teaching strategies that a competent teacher should have mastered include the ability to plan and follow a standard ‘presentation, practice, and production lesson’, use visuals effectively and be accomplished at modelling the exercises and work that students are expected to produce.
Concept checking questions, drilling/chanting and effective feedback should also be made use of continuously. Further to these strategies the teacher needs to take into account group size, dynamics ability levels, interests , length of study and motivation levels in order to select to most appropriate teaching strategies. Let’s dive into them a bit more deeply.
7 Highly Effective ESL/TEFL Teaching Strategies
#1 Get The Delivery Right
As part of my job, I get to train teachers in how to teach their own subject to ELL students. They are already excellent teachers of their subjects but often they don’t have these basic ESL/TEFL teaching skills and without having these skills pointed out to them they can really struggle. However, with just a bit of thought and practise they do just fine.
Here is the basic delivery strategy for delivering to ESL students:
- Don’t talk to the board.
- Moderate your rate of speech so that students can follow you.
- Write neatly and clearly on the board.
- Keep your board work in the same layout each lesson i.e. keywords in the same place.
- Allow plenty of thinking time for students when you ask questions.
- Try to minimise teacher talk time so that they are using the language and are being as productive as possible.
- Recycle vocabulary often in starters and plenaries.
- Model the language you expect of the students.
- Point out key features of the language
- Make use of activities where all students are required to participate.
- Provide a non-threatening environment where students feel safe to try new language without being criticised or embarrassed by mistakes.
- Tailor target language into areas of interest to the students.
- Provide plenty of praise and reward for positives.
These can all become second nature rather quickly if you jump into ESL teaching full-time. You will quickly realize what you are doing wrong from the blank faces in front of you and the chances are paying attention to the above may well help things.
I go into the above strategies in much greater detail here in my detailed article: How To Support An ESL Student In The Classroom.
#2 Use DARTS Activities
No, not the ‘180’ type of darts but the Directed Activities Related to Texts type of darts. These types of activities include activities where an original text is modified in some way.
For example, cloze activities where students need to fill in the missing nouns, verbs, adjectives to focus on a certain grammar point, sentence/paragraph ordering where students need to read for understanding to complete it successfully, segments of a text may need grouping according to a certain categories.
Students can also be asked to write comprehension questions for other students about a text or convert a text into a flow chart, diagram, or table.
The beauty of DARTS activity is that you can change the topic to whatever the students are interested in so long as you are prepared to do a bit of preparation beforehand. You can also easily select text and grammar points at the appropriate level for your students quite easily.
Personally, I use these approaches as starter and plenary activities but they can also be developed into an entire lesson or series of lessons. You just need to make sure that their are sufficient support and extension activities to ensure that more able students don’t race through the exercises.
Overall, DARTS is an awesome strategy to make use of.
#3 Allow Native Language ‘Cheating’
We were all probably encourage to make sure learners benefitted from an English only environment but most practitioners no agree that allowing ESL/EFL students to use their own native language from time to time can be very helpful.
On a related point, I dive into the rather divisive topic of whether an ESL teacher needs to be bilingual or not here which you may find interesting.
#4 Structure Exercises From Closed to Open
This strategy essentially promotes the idea that students should at first attempt exercises where they are going to experience a high level of success with new target language.
They can then move on to slightly freer activities that are quite structured but allow greater room for student freedom. Finally, students are given completely free opportunities to use the target language in situations that should be as close to real life as possible.
Generally, this is done through role plays and barrier activities which provide plentiful opportunity for students to use the language independently. Incidentally, this is the approach endorsed by the excellent Cambridge CELTA course, read more about the highly rated CELTA certificate here.
#5 Provide Comprehensible Input
The idea with this is that whatever level of language learner you are teaching you provide them with input that is one level above where they currently are. For example, if they are low intermediate then you would provide them with intermediate level material.
The reason for doing this is two fold, firstly, the input, articles, texts, listening exercises, or whatever it may be, whilst being higher than they can comfortably understand will still be at a level they can make sense of.
There will likely be words and phrases that they do not know, but because it is not so far over the student’s heads so as to be demotivating, they can then start to use natural language acquisition strategies to help them understand the text.
The natural acquisition strategies might be strategies such as, guessing the meaning of words from their context or inferring what the writer is actually trying to say. According to the language acquisition theorist, Krashen, natural language acquisition which is done more subconsciously is a more effective way to learn a language.
Of course, this is great if you have a small group of students of a similar ability but if you have a larger group of mixed ability language learners then your are going to have to produce different versions of the same text to match to the needs of the students, this can be hard to do although I have found these breakingnewsenglish.com and newsinlevels.com both to be worthwhile with this..
#6 Consider BICS and CALP
Basic Interpersonal communication Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency are acronyms based on the work done by Jim Cummins. Essentially BICS takes 6 months to 2 years to develop and these skills help us to get ELL to get by in everyday communications.
Whilst BICS can be developed in a reasonably short space of time this can mislead a teacher or a student’s peers into thinking that their English is actually better than it really is. The danger of this is that they will then not receive the support or comprehensible input that they need to progress.
CALP on the other hand takes 5-7 years to develop and essentially refers to language that is more academic in nature. It is language that is used to describe more abstract topics and theories that we do not use in everyday life.
This language is generally harder to acquire as it is not context embedded, i.e. there are less visual cues surrounding the topic to help the learners. For example, a lecture on gravity, or a multiple choice test, neither of these are going to contain any clues to help the learner.
Compare that to a role play activity where the teacher sets up an area of the classroom as an airport with check-in desks and a waiting lounge, how much easier will it be for language learners to pick up the language and understand the concepts being taught when they can guess the meaning of a lot of words, or sentences from the environment and from gestures of the other people they are acting with.
The overriding strategy therefore is to provide context embedded activities as much as possible, especially for lower level students where context is king.
#7 Get Learners Out Of Their Own Way
Krashen also purports the view that low motivation, low self-esteem, introversion and inhibition can create a mental block in a student’s language learning progress. Therefore the strategy we need to adopt as ESL teachers is to breed the opposite character traits to those.
Of course, we are not miracle workers but we can provide a curriculum containing topics that they are interested in and motivated by.
We can also deliver our material in as inspiring a way as possible, and we can set-up the classroom environment and individual activities so that students do not feel under pressure to get everything right, i.e. they feel comfortable to fail. And of course we can provide plenty of positive reinforcement and praise to encourage our students
So, guys, there we have it, an assortment of ESL teaching strategies for you to dwell on and see if they make sense to you, and even more importantly to see if they work in your classrooms.
You might also like to read: 10 Research Proven Ways To Teach Vocabulary