Methods and Materials

Literacy development in the L2 classroom is a crucial component of second language acquisition, especially in regards to CALP. As studied this past semester, I have realized that in order to teach literacy development successfully, I must promote literacy not only to my students themselves, but also go beyond the classroom and reach out to their families and their communities. I must educate myself more in my students' L1 backgrounds if I hope to teach phonemic awareness and phonics successfully. If I have an understanding of their language, it might help me to help them understand the L2 language with more accuracy.

Phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary development, fluency, and reading comprehension are the key components in achieving literacy. There are many strategies that are available to meet the varying needs of ELL students; however, each classroom environment is unique and each student has his/her own varying level of English language proficiency and comfort in varying teaching methods.

In my classroom, I believe that in order to be successful, reading materials should be chosen wisely. They should be complimentary to language level, contain relevant vocabulary, and include content that is of interest to the student. In instruction, incorporating word building activities, writing prompts, and anticipatory guides that promote metacognition and demonstrate comprehension in the L2 language guarantee results. My students like to know that they are acquiring acquisition and that their language skills are progressing. Including organizers and building off background knowledge that help students come to new conclusions helps them to see that they are in fact learning. It is my responsibility as an instructor to create language learning strategies and to develop materials successfully for second language acquisition.

I have noticed that a lot of instructors who begin teaching English as a Second Language begin this journey naively. They think, "I speak English. This'll be easy." However, teaching ESL is one of the hardest subjects I have ever taught. It is more than standing in a classroom and lecturing on content area subjects. You can't do that with ESL students because first they have to understand the language with which you are using to communicate. Memorize the Theory of Gravity! That's easy to say, but not to an ESL student. You have to provide the structure and components to help the ESL student understand the sounds, the words, the sentence structure, etc. to comprehend that. Teaching someone a whole other way language system can be frustrating and exhausting. However, I say don't give up. The key is educating yourself in methods and strategies and learning how to do implement them successfully.

This course has been useful in teaching methods that facilitate to work along with the language backgrounds of ELL students. In the future, I plan to work harder to familiarize myself with other language structures while utitilzing multiple approaches of ESL instruction in my classroom. I plan to create guides that promote literacy that not only recall reading content, but which also call for more reflection from behalf of the student. Also, I plan to create materials promoting comprehension in a more visual style by using word maps and utilizing various types of graphic organizers.