Teachers Help ESOL/ LEP Students Succeed in the Classroom

Teachers struggle to meet the diverse needs of their students. To address this challenge, teachers can establish specific procedures and routines to enhance student motivation, engagement and learning. Here are some helpful tips which middle and high school teachers can incorporate for the new school year.
Employ All Available Resources
Teachers can feel like lone wolves prowling around their classrooms in the late afternoon searching for ways to better reach their LEP students. It can be overwhelming and frustrating at times, but if teachers recognize--and utilize-- the many resources available to them, this task diminishes to one that is both purposeful and manageable.
To begin, teachers could actively seek the assistance and professional expertise of their support facilitators. These teachers may be overwhelmed with a large caseload of students, so it's important to be respectful of their time and make the most of any contact you have. To communicate effectively with the support facilitator, classroom teachers can send weekly emails about students' progress. These updates should include specific progress made as well as areas of need for each ESOL student they are assigned. A list format is more quickly written and digested, so teachers can keep these communications short and sweet. If email is not preferable, voicemails or brief, scheduled conferences can convey the same information. Remember that you and the facilitator share the same goals--to help students succeed.
Another strategy is to connect with students' parents, using a translator when necessary. Brief communications that highlight positive behavior, class contributions or academic strides can work wonders to boost student confidence and motivation. Teachers should fight the tendency to only call home when there is a concern. Sometimes, it is best to ignore minor behavior infractions and notify parents of the one or two positive contributions students made that month. Finally, teachers can visit the parent resource center to gather materials or ideas to help educate parents on how to support their children's learning. Forging parent-teacher connections is essential when assisting students whose native language is not English.
Deepen Comprehension with Teaching Strategies
Here are some suggestions that teachers can incorporate into their daily interactions. First, when giving a lecture, arranging an activity or presenting a new unit, teachers should provide opportunities for frequent summary. The teacher can summarize a procedure or piece of a lesson, surely, but sometimes it is more effective if students provide the summaries. To facilitate this, teachers can provide a visual guide of how to summarize information. Students can then follow this guide, which will become second nature as the year progresses. Another student summary option is for students to pair up with a partner and develop a brief summary together. This can be done frequently and take as little as two minutes once students are accustomed to the procedure.
Teachers can also prepare an outline of lesson in advance and provide them only to students who request them; they need not be offered only to LEP students. Rather than an outline, teachers may incorporate realia into lesson--pictures, puzzles, manipulatives, video clips--to make a lesson come alive. All students are sure to appreciate these as they break up a lesson and encourage curiosity and active questioning. Teachers should consider shortening directions when possible and, in general, keeping instruction as succinct as possible without unnecessary tangential conversations which may muddle the lesson's purpose and confuse LEP students.
Teachers will feel the reward of deep satisfaction as their students with limited English proficiency build their confidence and develop a relationship based on trust and enthusiasm for learning. All of the above strategies, from contacting home to employing regular summaries of presented information will help ESOL students establish learning routines they can count on for the entire school year.