Effective Strategies for Improving Writing Skills of Elementary English Language Learners
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Preparing Students to Write
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Activating prior knowledge is one method in which teachers can assist ESL students before they even begin writing. Making sure students have the opportunity to think about what they already know before the task begins helps ESL students incorporate new information into existing structures of knowledge which activates long-term memory (Watt-Taffe &Truscott, 2000). Several strategies can be used to accomplish this including graphic organizers, cooperative learning, read-alouds, and group discussions. Graphic organizers can be used as visual tools for students to write or draw what they already know about a subject, for example in the genre of informational or persuasive writing. From this activity, teachers can then evaluate whether further instruction is needed. This is where read-alouds, cooperative learning, and group discussions come in to play. If needed, a hand-selected text can be utilized in order to provide additional background information, which can lead to group discussions. Cooperative learning is also a great strategy to help students gain more background knowledge especially for ELLs. This strategy requires students to collect information from books, the internet, or each other as they work together with another student or group of students, preferably students who are native to the English language. Through this strategy, ELLs not only gain additional information needed to complete the writing assignment, but it is also a great opportunity for them to develop language skills through peer led conversations.
The next step in preparing ELLs to write is a vocabulary pre-view. Pre-viewing vocabulary is an effective tool when asking an ESL student to attempt any genre of writing. Second language writers have a vastly different linguistic base than native English speakers who can instinctively manipulate the language (Pour-Mohammadi, Zainol Abidin, & Cheong Lai, 2012). Therefore, vocabulary is an enormous obstacle for English learners creating the need for teachers to provide both definitional and contextual information about keywords. Instructors
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should also allow students to actively elaborate on word meanings (i.e. physically acting out a word), as well as teacher led explanations (Stahl, 1985). Without this preview, most ESL students will not be able to move past the instructions of the writing task. Yüklə 0,51 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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