Supporting students with their English language learning

Today our school had ESOL verification and I being an ESOL coordinator was under a lot of pressure as we have this new way of completing the matrices for all four strands in English. I am so delighted to see that the efforts of our team have brought in excellent results for us.
The whole process though very tedious has brought a lot of learning with it.
Having gone through the process has definitely made us analyse student work more deeply. One very good thing about the ELLP folders is that we can use these to inform our teaching on a daily basis  because we have all the WALTs ready for us and it is extremely easy for us to look at the next learning steps and plan for them. So from now on I would frequently visit the ELLP folder to inform my teaching of English language.

Click here to view ELLP Modules

Academically Productive Talk in Classrooms

This weekend my professional reading was an article on 'Academically Productive Talk: Supporting Students' learning in Mathematics' by Suzanne H. Chapin and Catherine O'Connor.
The article has great ideas on how to make a Learning environment for academically productive talk that will support both Language Development and Learning in class. It emphasis on the fact that all classroom talk needs to be respectful where each person's ideas are taken seriously and no one is ridiculed or insulted. The article also explains the 5 Discourse- Based Instructional tools that help in student learning. I have summarised these 5 tools in the presentation below.