Five strategies for supporting second-language learners in an early childhood classroom which I have found to be successful are as follows:
Children love to watch television. Turn on the classroom television but turn off the sound and turn on closed captions, thus forcing them to read English. After about five minutes, turn off the television and ask students to write two sentences about what was going on in the cartoon. Ask questions of the plot or characters to get them thinking about how to formulate more than superficial answers. It becomes very competitive between the ESL students to see who formulates more answers to simple questions. This is successful with early childhood education through remedial high school.
On 3x5 colored index cards, write the names of objects in the room (table, chair, desk, light, book, sweater, jacket, wall, shoes, jeans, shirt, phone, etc.) as suggested by students. Often there are as many as fifty named objects. Shuffle the cards and put them in a box, students blindly choose a card and tape or pin the card on the object in the classroom. As each name of the object is chosen from the box, students individually write a simple sentence using the object in that sentence. After each student has pulled a card and appropriately placed the name with the object, the simple sentences they have written will be turned in for grading.
Create a buddy system between two students--an ESL learner and a native English speaker. Only English will be spoken between the two. One of the activities they do together is simultaneous aloud reading of the same book which encourages correct pronunciation and visually encourages correct spelling. This works for early childhood education through remedial high school.
A large wall map of the world in a classroom encourages students to read and learn geography using the weather page of a newspaper to compare geographic locations. When asked where a random city is, Black students look in Africa, Hispanic students look from Mexico down to the tip of South America, Asian students look in Asia! They learn the Equator, Arctic, Antarctic, Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the major oceans of the world, continents, major cities of the world. Longitude and latitude; International Date Line. This really fascinates the younger learners as it makes them look outside of just their immediate existence and start to look at the big picture of the world. Of course younger students begin with just the continental United States, their capitals, mountain ranges and major rivers. Auto Club is a terrific source of maps for individual states.
Older students are rewarded by choosing three lower-grade appropriate reading books, and going into classrooms of the younger students (kindergarten, first, and second grades) once a month and reading aloud to small groups of these younger students. At no time are they allowed to speak anything but English.
How would I respond to someone who says that if we allow children to speak their home language at school, they will not learn English? I am a firm believer in total immersion. The more we coddle them in their native language, the less they will be willing to try another language. I have traveled to Mexico and Italy with knowing only simple questions. After listening for weeks, I finally felt confident enough to attempt simple sentences, and native speakers were kind enough to gently correct my pronunciation and grammar. I became more confident to wander out alone without a translator, ask questions, read maps, and get to where I wanted to go. But I would not have done it if I had not be in a total immersion environment. No, I sincerely believe children should not be allowed to speak their native language at school.
As an early childhood caregiver or teacher, how might you go about assessing the language development of a bilingual child? Much of the process of evaluation is heart-felt from a teacher’s point of view, and a lot of observation of each individual child while unaware of the evaluation, and act in their natural capacity. In certain areas some students will excel and in other areas they are far behind their peers, which addresses the necessity of smaller classroom sizes to guarantee greater success for ESL learners. Often students who are functioning illiterate in their native language are even worse in English. Non-English speaking parents are poorly equipped to help their own children with English acquisition, and students rely more heavily on their peers.
I am not currently working with young children.
