ENGLISH FOR INTERMEDIATE STUDENTS

Intermediate English-language learners have a variety of skills in the English language. However, many teachers may confuse their abilities in basic language skills to transfer into the academic scenery as easily. For intermediate level ELs, purposeful alignment of language and academic instruction is necessary while at the same time differentiating instruction to make content comprehensible to their level of language needs.

ENGLISH FOR INTERMEDIATE STUDENTS

It is essential that when we are developing lessons and using instructional strategies, we develop a variety of tasks that provide intermediate level ELs with the content-level skills for them to continue to progress when they reach higher levels of their language acquisition. One of the strategies that I feel is necessary for teachers of intermediate language-learners is differentiation. Using differentiation as the basis of your instruction is important because intermediate-level English-language learners can be intermediate in all areas of the language-acquiring process, or it can be in a targeted area. For example, some language-learners are intermediate only in reading and writing, and their listening and speaking skills have been progressing.

The first type of differentiated skills that I prefer to use are tiered or differentiated sentence stem and paragraph frames. Intermediate-level writers struggle with writing sentences in the past tense and complex sentence structures. By providing a variety of stems that can support their writing of complex sentence structures and with a variety of verb tenses, this can support intermediate students with exemplars to strengthen their language. These same stems can also be used to develop lessons for the correct use of verb tenses when speaking and writing.

Paragraph frames support students to develop organizational structures of writing associated with content-level standards so that they can strengthen their writing skills by learning how to maintain their focus on a specific topic. Paragraph frames can be added to a model as students improve their writing skill in the language to guide them to develop an essay.

Lessons that make a great impact on intermediate-level students are those that are giving them a basis of the language structures to help them be successful. For example, providing students with the academic language of the grade level they are at can provide them with the content connections through language that they need to support their acquisition and their academic growth.

Intermediate students are at a crucial stage in their language-acquisition process. These are just bits and pieces of best practices that have been successful in my classes. All our students are different, and we need to see them as so. It is essential that we work to evaluate each of them as individuals in the process of language acquisition to support them accordingly and to make a true impact on their skills.

These students need as many opportunities as possible to hear good English models and use the English they are learning, and that means a classroom where they are expected to talk with each other. A silent classroom with students working individually at their desks does not provide adequate chances for listening and speaking.

With the students, too, start with familiar topics like video games, favorite foods, or family events before moving into academic topics such as why characters did what they did, what characters might do in the future, or how to solve a math problem.

Now that the expectation has been set that students should ask and answer these questions aloud, we can begin to think about making classroom talk equitable. Naturally, there will be students who are happy to be the first to talk about their thinking and reasoning, but how do we get 100 percent participation?

After some practice with choral responses, have students talk with each other in pairs. Pairs provide more opportunity for all students to be included in a conversation than groups of four. Again, prompt the students with an open-ended question without any wrong answers to help them explain their thinking and reasoning.

Luisana González is currently serving dual-language students in Illinois in a 5th grade classroom. She is in her 17th year of teaching and has previously taught K-5 MLs in a resource position, 2nd grade sheltered, and 2nd grade DL:

When working with intermediate multilingual learners, or MLs, it is important to consider how to simultaneously challenge and support language development for all language domains and purposes. Learning must be multimodal and collaborative. Developing oral skills is essential in developing literacy skills. Therefore, oracy plans need to be created in order to help students grow in communicating effectively for a variety of purposes like talking to build relationships; talking to play with ideas; talking to clarify, analyze, and argue; and talking to report.

Creating opportunities for students to practice oral skills through games, inquiry, speculation, and peer affirmation are good ways of empowering students to talk about learning. Language skills must be explicitly modeled and practiced within familiar content. This can be accomplished via think alouds, constructing meaning, and writing routines from mentor sentences and close reading.

It is equally important to provide guided and independent practice to reinforce concepts and skills in varied ways since this will foster engagement and favor different learning styles. Something that has worked particularly well in my classroom is allowing students to explore mentor sentences by deconstructing and constructing the text repeatedly to closely examine the language patterns or structures featured.

Students manipulate phrases and sentences cut up on strips to play with language both collaboratively and independently. Each student is able to participate and showcase their language assets, while manipulating and revising the modeled language. Students must engage in collaborative conversations about language and should be encouraged to imitate the mentor text as they are provided with appropriate language scaffolds in order to produce strong imitations. Later, students apply language imitations into their own writing and gain confidence as authors.

All of this provides an opportunity to assess and value background knowledge, while planning to support and challenge students as they grow in their ability to deconstruct and construct familiar text to analyze, compare, and contrast. When they are able to imitate and revise, they are given the chance to celebrate themselves as authors.

All of these strategies allow learning to be student-centered and structured to meet their needs. The following resources have provided me with valuable input and growth experiences to enrich learning events in my classroom, and they will allow you to dig deeper into what I have recommended for teaching intermediate ELs.

Many drama and improv games and activities not only encourage fluency and language play, but they also help students undertake critical reflection with social-justice orientations. There are so many ways in which performance activities can engage L2 learners in connections between language, identity, status, and power.

Instructional strategies for intermediates depend largely on the particularities of your teaching context. Who are your students? What are their goals? How did they come to be in your classroom? What curricular or institutional guidelines frame your work with your students? Working with multilingual children in U.S. public schools and working with adults learning English in Japan may call for different techniques, tools, and approaches.

That said, one of the wonderful aspects of teaching intermediate learners is that they already have considerable foundational knowledge of the target language to build on, and they still have so much you, as a teacher, can help scaffold them toward success with. I believe the best instructional strategies harness what learners already know and help learners stretch themselves to achieve new milestones in their language learning. This means, first and foremost, learning about your learners.

While you get to know your learners, as people, through Getting to Know You games and activities, you also have the opportunity to conduct formative assessments with your students by observing their interaction in the target language and building off of that observational assessment to tailor your lessons to their needs.

As our English-learners or emergent-bilinguals, as they are now called in Texas, start to progress in their English-language proficiency, their needs change. Students at the beginning stage of English acquisition need more linguistic support than those in the intermediate stage. Those in the advanced stage have different needs from those in the intermediate stage. We have to make sure that we are continually adjusting our linguistic supports and instructional strategies to best meet the changing needs of our English-learners.

I love using the PWIM and structured-conversation strategies because they provide intermediate English-learners with multiple opportunities for speaking and writing throughout the instructional day and will help them to continue to develop their oral English-language proficiency. In the process, they will gain more confidence in themselves because they are getting the support from you, their teacher, and their classmates.

Candice Benjamin is an English teacher with more than 6 years of online teaching experience. Candice has taught English to children and adults alike of various levels, ensuring that each achieves their respective goals. Candice specializes in the IELTS, TOEFL, and Cambridge exams and creates courses and strategies specific to the needs and goals of each student, to help them achieve their desired grade. Candice is patient and determined to produce significant results for her students.

The ICAL TEFL site has thousands of pages of free TEFL resources for teachers and students. These include: The TEFL ICAL Grammar Guide. Country Guides for teaching around the world. How to find TEFL jobs. How to teach English. TEFL Lesson Plans.... 041b061a72