English Language Learners

It is important to include non-linguistic representations for students to assist with communicating curricular content. The use of non-verbal communication strategies such as drawings, images, maps, graphs, and charts assist with increasing connections to the content. Educational materials must meet the diverse language levels of the students, and appropriate reading level materials be provided. Additionally, a variety of supports for these students are provided as options for assessments and teaching tools.

Multimodal teaching and performance strategies are strongly incorporated in ‘May The Forest Be With You’. Videos, presentations from experts, field trips, and the use of additional technological supports are all used as teaching strategies throughout the lesson. Further, students can demonstrate their learning through a variety of ways including geographical representation, graphing, oral discourse, written discourse, art-based artifacts, or media-based presentations. The use of reflective journals is an additional strategy that is used to assess the growth of English language literacy (Alberta Education, 2010, p. 148) (Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat, 2009, p.7).

References

Government of Alberta. (2010). Making a difference: meeting diverse learning needs with differentiated instruction [PDF file]. Retrieved from https://education.alberta.ca/media/1234045/makingadifference_2010.pdf

Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat. (2009). ELL voices in the classroom. Secretariat Special Edition #8 [PDF file]. Retrieved from http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/inspire/research/ELL_Voices09.pdf