Forty-One ESOL Strategies

1. Read aloud to students. This motivates students to read for pleasure, acquire knowledge about books, and encourages interaction.

2. The Language Experience Approach. What the student say can be written down and then read by both teacher and student. Students learn how language is encoded. Oral language is put into print. This strategy investigates familiar language, language structures, sight vocabulary, letter-sound correspondence, spelling patterns, and conventions of print.

3. Shared Book Experience. Effective literacy developmental approach for students functioning at different levels. Students learn about predictability, rhyme, rhythm, and repetition.

4. Silent, Sustained Reading (SSR). Students spend time reading books they enjoy and become better readers.

5. Teaching Story Structure. Teachers help provide the students with literature they can comprehend and help the students acquire the necessary background and schemata of written English. The teacher selects reading materials that reflect the children's cultural background, subjects that are familiar, predictable picture books, and wordless picture books. The teacher uses cueing strategies (changes in voice for various characters and changes in facial expression). Diagrams, charts of the story map, and props "realia" are also used.

6. Process Writing. Students write in these steps: Prewriting, drafting, sharing, and responding to writing, revising writings, and editing and publishing (according to each child's individual writing level).

7. Repetition. Words and sentences are repeated.

8. Substitution. The students substitutes "his" or "her" instead of a person's name. Or, students fill in a missing word to complete a sentence.

9. Question-and-Answer Drills. The student answers the teacher's questions.

10. Demonstration. The teacher models a word, sentence, or action.

11. Representation. The teacher uses a picture to represent a general word (e.g. mother, father, etc.)

12. Modeling. The teacher models language patterns and structure used in a natural course of classroom conversation.

13. Utilization. The use of pictures and dittos, etc.

14. Description. Describing an action or object.

15. Introduction. The teacher introduces a new concept.

16. Pantomimes. Silent actions and imitations which show emotions and feelings.

17. Samples. A sample of a completed project or paper is shown to the student.

18. Verbal clues/pictures. The teacher shows several pictures or words to choose from in response to a question (e.g. Which picture shows Christmas?).

19. Directions. The teacher gives the student directions or sequential steps in order to complete an action.

20. Dramatization. The teacher dramatizes a story or allows the students to act out a story. Choral speaking, singing, puppetry, dance and movement are also ways to dramatize.

21. Vocabulary. The introduction of vocabulary through pictures.

22. Participation. Students participate in group activities.

23. Comparison. The use of pictures and objects to help students make comparisons (e.g. big, bigger, biggest; good, better, best, etc.).

24. Interrogatives. The students answer questions: who, what, when where, why, and how.

25. Visuals. Pictures, overhead projects, filmstrips, videocassettes, DVDs, television, magazines, and objects.

26. Discrimination. Determining whether things are the same or different.

27. Role-playing. Students represent situations.

28. Oral conversation/dialogue. Oral conversation between students and teachers.

29. Labeling and categorizing. Objects in the classroom are labeled or categorized into groups. Students are also able to see the names of objects in written form (e.g. desk, door, window, etc.).

30. Peer tutors/Buddy system. Students are paired together. One student helps another by acting as a teacher.

31. Dialogue journal. The student writes down conversations between the teacher and student on any topic.

32. Sequencing. Students put pictures of objects in proper order.

33. Semantic webbing. Students learn how to perceive relationships and integrate information and concepts within the context of a main idea or topic.

34. Cooperative learning. Students work together in small groups or pairs.

35. Total Physical Response (TPR). A language teaching strategy which introduces new language through a series of commands to enact an event (student responds to command with actions).

36. Elicitation. Structure interactions that elicit as elaborate a response as the student is capable of producing.

37. Chunking. Use "chunks" of language in meaningful, appropriate, and playful contexts (e.g. pop songs and read aloud poems).

38. Directed Reading/Listening/Thinking Activity (DRLTA). Establish background, allow for oral or silent reading and study, follow-up activities, SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review).

39. Problem solving. Students learn to restate the problem, brainstorm, look at the problem in different ways, identify models, state possible cases, determine hypothesis, and draw conclusions.

40. Classroom correspondence. Two participants converse in writing. This is achieved through a message board, mailboxes, interactive journals, or letter writing.

41. Creating a writing classroom. The writing of each student is valued, students write for an audience, the environment is language- and literature-rich, and students write in many modes.