According to Larry Ferlazzo, ESL teacher, on Edweek, we can support ESL students in a variety of ways which include fostering intrinsic motivation, promoting autonomy, competence, positive relationships, engagement, and making information relevant to students (Ferlazzo, 2021).

To do this, we can promote student choice in learning activities and encourage self-directed learning where possible. We can provide clear, achievable goals (think SMART goals) or help students to form their own goals. We can help foster positive relationships between students even as we promote collaboration. We can provide materials that are engaging and relevant, and use those materials to promote interest in English. 

As an ESL tutor (online) myself with over 550 hours of experience, I prioritize conversation during lessons and believe that spoken language output is one of the most valuable tools in promoting fluency. Outside of lessons, I encourage students to engage in English in other ways by using materials they are personally interested in such as TV, books, or video games.

 My goal is to always get students talking as much as possible during their lesson time and to make it interesting for them, and I am always looking for materials that align with my student's needs and interests. I recommend utilizing a variety of tools, including books, games, websites, news, and video to both get students reading and listening in English and provide something interesting to discuss. Online news such as Engoo Daily News can be very helpful to faciliate conversation, and they even include a preview vocabulary list and discussion questions at the end to help faciliate discussion. 

It's important to meet students where they are. Engage their interests and get them engaged socially to promote language learning. 

My number one tip: Study a language yourself!

It's so much easier to empathize and understand the struggle when you've been there, too. If you choose to learn a language used by many of your students (in the US, Spanish is especially common), it can sometimes be useful to overcome obstacles. I find Japanese extremely helpful from time to time when working with my Japanese students, even though the goal is to use English as much as possible. 

As a Japanese language learner with about 4.5 years of study behind me, I've reached about a mid-intermediate level where I can have fairly broad conversations, primarily limited by vocabulary as I've internalized much of the grammar and ways of thinking in the language. I can read at maybe a 4th or 5th grade level, limited again primarily by vocabulary and also by my knowledge of kanji, of which I've only really learned about 700 out of the minimum 2000 I need. Learning a language is WORK under the best circumstances but imagine being required to learn on the fly while also being expected to keep up with all the social and academic demands of school and life in a new place. 

 My existing prior knowledge on various topics is an advantage I have as an adult that many children learning a new language will NOT have, however. Because I already have some context on the various topics I'm learning from studying them in English, it's easier to make new connections and to understand the meaning of the text. Students who are both learning new content knowledge AND the language to describe it will struggle far more than a student who already has the content knowledge already. 

 Luckily, for nearly any subject, there are materials available targeting both younger native speakers and beginners in a language, which could be used to scaffold for more advanced grade-level materials, and there are a variety of ways to help students understand new vocabulary. For English in particular, focusing on the various roots can be very helpful in teaching students to guess the meaning of new words. This could be especially helpful for Spanish speakers, as Spanish shares a lot of common Latin roots with English, but it's important for learners no matter what their native language is. Once again, visuals (graphic organizers, photographs, and drawings) can be helpful, as well as videos related to the topic you are teaching. If you are learning about the water cycle, the words "evaporation," "condensation," and "precipitation" might seem difficult, but when shown along with diagrams that visually demonstrate what is happening, students are far more likely to be able to comprehend the meaning. 

----On the subject, check this out for a great example of the kinds of useful, FREE resources you can find online, often on government-owned websites or nonprofit organization websites: USGS.gov has free water cycle diagrams in the public domain in a VARIETY of languages Water Cycle Diagrams | U.S. Geological Survey 

Use of bilingual materials can also be incredibly helpful. For my Japanese studies, I've really enjoyed bilingual readers about Japanese folk tales, which provide an English and Japanese text along with vocabulary lists and pronunciation guides. The English story ensures I understand what the story is about, making it possible to put together and comperehend even a more difficult text in Japanese. There are a large variety of bilingual readers on nearly any subject for most languages. 

To help your students, you can encourage students to pursue better language learning strategies outside of the classroom as well. 

If the only time they are using English is at school, it will take far longer to become fluent. 

However, comprehensible input is the difference between successful exposure and unsuccessful exposure (Krashan, 2017). Stephen Krashan is a polyglot of high repute who has extensively studied language learning and a major proponent of comprehensive input, a concept which may make sense intuitively if you observe how children learn their own native language, slowly building upon concepts little by little. 

if you are only engaging in content too high above your level, you really can't absorb anything. There is nothing to connect any of the information to, and none of what you hear has any meaning. That's why it's important to start with lower-level material and build up from there. ESL students who are sitting in school all day listening to difficult English above their level, they won't just naturally absorb it like people may assume. That's also why we need to scaffold our lessons by doing things like previewing new vocabulary in advance and using simpler English sentence structures and vocabulary where needed for our students. Incorporating visuals is also a must to aid comprehension. 

For adults learning a second language, comprehensible input may mean watching children's TV shows or reading "easy" news and listening to "easy" podcasts for quite some time before more interesting materials start to make sense, something I've found incredibly helpful for my studies in Japanese (TV shows like Cardcaptor Sakura have a lot of really useful daily-life vocabulary and easy sentences structures, and while it is a children's show, it's quite good, so don't dismiss all children's media out of hand). 

A good children's show like Octonauts (Netflix) or other children's shows could be helpful ways to both supplement content knowledge (Octonauts is ecology-focused) and get some more comprehensive input, even for older students. You can also use materials targeted at a younger audience in your classroom. For science, for example, NASA Space Place or National Geographic Kids are potentially really helpful websites with great resources with easy-to-understand content that could provide the scaffolding they need for the grade-level lesson on your topic.