Working with English Language Learners in your Language Arts or Literature class
The focus of your class is reading and writing, so you should be a natural at working with an English Language Learner, right? And yet, the Language Arts or English/Literature class is extremely challenging for the student who is acquiring academic English. There are many reasons:
The good news is that the language arts class is one of the easiest academic areas to find helpful resources, as many novels and stories have "easy reading" helps to accompany them. Below are some links that may be helpful as you work with ELLs in your Language Arts or English/Literature classroom.
- Reading literature involves understanding the historic and cultural background of the stories, which may be unfamiliar to the ELL.
- Analyzing literature, even in elementary school, is a distinctly academic skill that has a lexicon and syntax that is not used in day to day speech.
- Reading fiction exposes students to unfamiliar idiomatic speech, slang, and dialects.
- Literary writing is a form that must be learned and is quite different from one culture to another.
The good news is that the language arts class is one of the easiest academic areas to find helpful resources, as many novels and stories have "easy reading" helps to accompany them. Below are some links that may be helpful as you work with ELLs in your Language Arts or English/Literature classroom.
Pages for students |
Content Strategies |
Research articles |