Supporting Newcomers in English Language Arts
By Eliana Belle, K-5 ELD Specialist
As an English Language Development (ELD) Specialist at an Elementary School with a student population of 50% English Language Learners (ELL), and with a growing number of newcomers, supporting our multilingual students is incredibly important. We are constantly reevaluating how to best serve our students. These conversations involve many key faculty, including general education (Gen. Ed) classroom teachers, ELD specialists, literacy and math specialists, and administrators. None of us felt comfortable about students essentially having to ‘pause’ their education because they couldn’t access the content in English. However, we had to balance that with the fact that we are not a dual language school and therefore don’t have the resources to teach content in another language. A majority of the options available to us to aid our language learners are digital programs that keep students in front of a screen for long periods of time. We wanted to find an alternative to this.
We decided to focus our attention for now on English Language Arts (ELA). For our core literacy instruction, our school uses the Wonders curriculum by McGraw Hill. After questioning if they have resources available in Spanish during one of our meetings, and quickly searching and finding out that they do in fact have an entire Spanish program to mirror Wonders called Maravillas, we decided to use the remainder of this year to look into a few of these resources and see if they could be a solution to some of our struggles for the subsequent school year. While some of the steps we’ve taken (described below) are specific to using these programs, alternative suggestions will be given when needed as well if you are utilizing other programs.
Small Groups
Our first step was creating a schedule so that ELD teachers or instructional assistants could work with small groups of 3–4 newcomer students at a time, 3–4 times a week. We focused our resources on providing these groups for grades 3–5, as students in LK-2 naturally have more language supports present in their classrooms (many visual aids, for example). Our newcomers all have varying levels of literacy in their home language so that is something to take into account as well when creating your groups. Do you want homogenous groups so you can provide specific supports to your entire group or heterogeneous groups so students can offer each other support during the lessons? My group has three students, all with varying degrees of proficiency in reading and writing in Spanish, and I find that to be very useful. Let’s be honest, they enjoy learning from one another more than they do learning from me!
Frontloading Content: Beginning with Vocabulary
This is how we begin our weekly lessons. We have worked out a schedule so that I can preview with my group in Spanish the text that they will be seeing in their Gen. Ed. classroom the following week. Going through each vocabulary word, we use graphic organizers to list the word, its definition, and its synonyms and antonyms (in Spanish). I am able to find the vocabulary cards (the word with a related visual aid) in the Maravillas curriculum and am able to do this activity with students using some minor aid from a Pocketalk Translator. At the start of every lesson, every day, for the entire week, we review the same handful of vocabulary words (it’s usually 5–7 words), and we practice saying them in English.
Listening to the Stories in Spanish
Maravillas has this integrated into their program, so it’s easy to pull up the texts, click the audio button, and have it read aloud to students in their home language. This allows them to get the same content that their grade-level monolingual peers are receiving, opening up their access. We focus first just on listening, with no other academic demands. If you’re using a different program, there are websites you can find via Google that will do text-to-speech in Spanish. AI tools like ChatGPT are also providing a lot of options in this area.
Help Students Identify Cognates
After listening to the text at least once, I help students go through and find cognates, the words that appear very similar from Spanish to English. This is a skill that can help them pick out some key details or information, even when they aren’t fluent in reading text in English yet.
Answering Prompts
Finally, Wonders and Maravillas have questions or prompts that accompany their readings. I work with students to search the text evidence to answer these questions (in Spanish), and then we convert simple sentences and main ideas into English. We do this in their Wonders Reading/Writing Companion, which goes back to class with them. Now they have the notes from our small group, as well as the knowledge from listening to the text in Spanish, to prepare them for whole class discussions. If you’re using a different program, I suggest giving students a notebook to keep with them where they can keep cognate lists and do their question-and-answer responses; that way, they can reference these in class.
Conclusion
Doing these small groups and frontloading the key content before our newcomers see it in class allows them time to become comfortable with the content and gives them a leg up on the key vocabulary terms they will hear their classmates using. It also allows them to build up the language needed to make their own contributions to the discussion and to feel confident and supported in doing so. Additionally, this builds class community, as students are able to participate and engage more throughout their day. We all want to give our students the best chance to succeed and to build strong relationships.
As educators, we are not strangers to trial and error. Here’s to trying new things and learning from our mistakes.
Let’s keep problem-solving and finding solutions to promote a supportive and academically rigorous environment that keeps students continuously curious about the world around them while always validating their unique place within it.
Eliana Belle is a passionate educator who has explored many different areas in the field. The majority of her experience has been as a general education classroom teacher for grades K-2. Her current role is as an ELD Specialist for grades K-5. Additionally, she teaches part-time as an adjunct instructor for two local colleges, teaching courses on math instruction, diverse children’s literature, and elementary science. Outside of the classroom, she enjoys working on curriculum and course development, as well as creating and facilitating teacher professional development.
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