Planning for Accommodations & Scaffolds:
Many instructional strategies that benefit newcomers are excellent strategies for all learners. Emerging bilinguals, especially Newcomers, do need access to additional accommodations and scaffolds to make content accessible.
Newcomer students are actively trying to understand the lessons that are being conducted in the classroom. They want to participate and have some work to complete, just like their peers. Here are some ideas to encourage newcomers to have a finished product for each day:
Allow them to copy your work
Provide opportunities for discourse about the content with a peer that speaks the same home language.
Provide a newcomer a copy of your graphic organizer and let them fill it in using the exemplar.
Allow newcomers to show their sequential thinking through drawing.
Allow newcomers to write their daily thoughts about the content objective in their home language. Writing helps them consolidate and process some of their learning. As a teacher, you can use google translate to translate it for your own understanding.
Students do better in school when they see their own culture reflected in the learning and when they have an opportunity to draw upon their prior experiences and knowledge. Here are some ideas:
Provide an experiential engagement activity at the beginning of the unit and take pictures. Use these pictures to connect the new learning to that experience.
Use examples or pictures of examples of the content that connect to a student´s culture.
Allow students to preview a set of visuals about the content to be taught.
Watch a video about the content 2 times. The first time without sound and the second time with the narration.
Read more on how to connect to a students Background Knowledge:
"Once (a teacher) chooses translation as an instructional strategy, it quickly becomes the only strategy." DLENM
Translate when talking to parents or when there is an emotional or health concern. However, for instruction, rely primarily on co-constructed anchor charts, interactive word walls, graphic organizers, visuals and repetitive language.
Translanguaging is the mental process a student uses to try to make sense of a situation using all of their linguistic repertoire. This includes all of the languages that a student knows or is learning.
You can instruct students on how to be more strategic with this by:
Connecting content to students’ prior knowledge or experiences.
Showing students where to find and use resources on their own, including Google translate, as well as how to use it strategically.
Allowing students to work with other students who speak their home language.
Encouraging students to explain the content to one another in their home language and then English.
Is accommodating an assessment fair? Students in the beginning stages of language acquisition cannot be assessed in the same way as their monolingual English speaking peers, and it is inequitable to do so.
Accommodating assessment is not cheating; it is providing students with the scaffolds they need.
Use this English Learner Formative Assessment Checklist to help you plan.
Summative Assessment Accomodations: Consider side by side assessment with teacher, fill in the blank sentences with a word bank, matching pictures to content, and reduction of assessment volume
Additional Tool: Using Informal Assessments for English Language Learners
Do you remember the Weekly Newcomer Knowledge Newsletter from SY 2023-2024? Find those archives here.