ESL teachers often find themselves teaching not only language, but also the academic concepts and strategies to help English language students use their new language more effectively for learning.
Jodi Crandall, a professor of Education, Co-Director ESOL/ Bilingual Program in Language, Literacy and Culture, University of MD Baltimore丆US, believes that the role of the elementary ESL teacher is expanded in the three goals for ESL instruction: to use English to communicate in social settings; to use English to achieve academically in all content areas; and to use English in socially and culturally appropriate ways.
Goals 1 and 3 are important, but in second language contexts, students are likely to be able to achieve these through social interaction with peers. It is Goal 2 which is increasingly the core of elementary ESL: to help English language learners use English to obtain, process, construct and provide subject matter information in spoken and written form in content areas across the curriculum.
Content-based language instruction focuses on the language of academic content areas, as well as core concepts and strategies for learning these. It provides a means of achieving the integration of ESL instruction with the curriculum. In a 30-minute class, an ESL teacher might survey students on their favourite foods, colours or pets and have them construct a graph recording their results, integrating learning the language of numbers and comparisons with an important mathematical concept. Or, over the course of a semester or year, students might plant seeds and chart their growth, noting the effects of sunlight or darkness and water or drought. In discussing and recording their results, students might use the future tense to predict the outcome, the past tense to confirm or disconfirm their predictions, and appropriate measurement vocabulary as they chart their plant's progress.
To integrate key vocabulary and learning strategies from several content areas, the teacher might build an instructional unit around a theme such as "Families" "Animal Babies" "Fossils and Dinosaurs" "The Planets" or "Food". Thematic teaching also provides opportunities for a number of different activities. Games, songs, role plays and stories are still part of the elementary ESL teacher's instructional repertoire. But in a thematic unit, these activities are all integrated and interconnected through an interesting and motivating theme.
