A case of Effective Language Teaching

The teacher is an ELD English Language Development specialist. There are 11 students in her class and they come from many different countries five of them speak Russian, three of them speak Karen, and the rest of them speak Spanish, Arabic and Ethiopian.

All of the students are learning English as a second language, and most of them understand it and speak with some difficulties, but we can undersatand them without problems.

The teacher technique is teaching English through content and in groups, in fact she is teaching them about Native American people.

One of the problems that she has been dealing with is that it is very difficult for students to keep quiet and follow her instructions, so she used the Guided Language Acquisition Design (GLAD) is a model of professional development which is tied to English Language Development (ELD) standards, the model trains teachers to use local district guidelines and curriculum in providing instruction in multilingual classrooms. It consistently results in teachers with a renewed commitment to high expectations and high standards for all students.

According to GLAD, there is a technique called Narrative, which consist in reading a book together with the students, so the teacher was showing some pictures about the story, then she asked the students about the book; and after that she gave them pieces of paper which contains some sentences about the story, so the teacher read the book again, and every student have to listen to her and stick the paper in front of the correct picture. In this case, the book was about Native Americans, and the students were very quiet and interested listening to her, everybody participated woth enthusiasm during that activity.

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I believe that this was effective because they were engaged with the story, they had to think, analize, and comment about the book, and they worked together as a group, they helped each other, and they were always sharing information beteween them.