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Using visuals and gestures is crucial to making language and content comprehensible for ELLs. Luckily, this strategy can be easily implemented into any lesson, and benefits all learners, not just ELLs. As you look through the examples below, think about ways in which you can add more visual representations and physical responses to your specific lessons and content areas.
In this video an ESL teacher, Carol Salva, interviews her high school Newcomer student about strategies that were most helpful to him. He demonstrates specific gestures that she uses to aide in the students' comprehension. They also discuss how the use of visuals benefits all students. Salva has also written several books that we recommend for more tips on working with ELLs, and manages a blog with a lot of great resources, which you can find here.
This presentation was created to teach adverbs of frequency and food vocabulary to beginning level ELLs. The first six slides are used in combination with the Total Physical Response (TPR) strategy, which incorporates actions with vocabulary to make concepts more comprehensible and engaging. For example, with this lesson the students used different hand signals to physically represent each adverb (thumbs down and shaking heads for 'never'; hands moving side to side for 'sometimes', etc.). We will upload a video of this strategy being used in our classroom in the future. The last slide features sentence frames that are used to facilitate and support speaking and writing.
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