In order for students to learn new words, it is important for them to build on their existing vocabulary. Jim Cummins remarks: "One of the most important variables with learning is a student's prior knowledge. By tapping into what students already know, teachers help with the learning process. This is because learning is relating the new information, or concepts, to what we already know. Activating prior knowledge is like preparing the soil before sowing the seeds of knowledge." Read more about: Activating Prior Knowledge on ESOL online.
A possible context based around grandmothers is discussed below.
Using stories as a starting point the focus for students' learning is to talk about story characters then use the elements and techniques of drama to represent their thoughts about them. It could be the characters from one book or the teacher could decide on a type of character.
It is important for the teacher to determine the ESOL student's listening skills in order for the student to understand the starter questions and participate in the activity.
The following topics are arranged in level of difficulty. The teacher evaluates the ESOL student's present skills level and decides accordingly which of these topics to pre-teach and whether students are ready to learn the vocabulary for all the topics below.
The suggested key words list can be expanded to accommodate students' needs.
Students who are very new to the English language might need to learn basic words to describe the human body. An easy way to teach these words is to use songs with gestures. The Hokey Pokey song is an easy little song to use. As an extension teach more difficult words that students will need to describe their grandmothers such as knuckles, wrinkles, bun.
In addition to stories, the teacher could invite children to bring photos (or draw pictures) of different family members. The teacher could label these: Grandmother, Grandfather, and Aunt, for example, and display them as a family tree on a classroom wall. Use the pictures to introduce descriptive phrases and sentences about people, such as "I wear glasses". Also, discuss the emotions depicted in the pictures.
Ensure that the students can name the articles before attempting to use them in the lesson. Discuss objects, using descriptive language. Short conversations and games around these objects can be intertwined during the day. The teacher might say: Look at Granny's lovely old hat. Feel how soft the felt is. It has a shiny ribbon all around the brim. Isn't this pink, fluffy feather on it lovely? At a later stage the class can recycle soft felt shiny ribbon and fluffy feather by playing: I see with my little eyes.... This is a good way of recycling the terms learnt.
Build on the terms used to name the body and discuss the family. The teacher might play a guessing game: Who am I?- Give the students a few descriptive phrases about a person they might have discussed when building the family tree. The teacher could begin with: I wear glasses and my grey hair is curly. I like to go fishing. Who am I?
In this unit it is suggested that children show and describe different emotions. The teacher would have to pre-teach the vocabulary needed for this activity first. The teacher models the terms by describing different emotions: This man looks quite worried. I think he doesn't know what to do next. Discuss and name emotions on pictures. There are many resources available online. Any search engine search for 'emotion clip art' will result in pages of listings.
Emotions could be discussed in other situations in class too. Some classes have the convention of a sharing circle in the morning. This could be a good time to recycle the terms. Expand their knowledge by using more advanced terms too, for example, content, despondent. (There are 14 synonyms for happy in your computer's thesaurus!) Children find it great fun to make a face and then ask other students to guess the emotion.
In order to describe and develop a character, ESOL students will need to broaden their vocabulary first.
The class could make their own: "Our favourite characters" scrapbook. Read stories with strong characters. The teacher models character descriptions by discussing the traits described in each story. The children add a photo (copy or drawn picture), to the scrapbook and they decide on a descriptive term for each character. The teacher can add little title cards with phrases on them to describe each picture, for example, He is reliable, She is optimistic.
Suggestions:
Texts in Pasifika languages available from Learning Media. Search the Tupu readers by using language "group" in the Essential Learning Areas.
Published on: 09 Jan 2018
