ESOL STRATEGIES FOR WRITING/ LANGUAGE ARTS!!! Strategy 16

ESOL students can be at various levels of English acquisition, so it is important for the teacher to observe their level of development in order to ask the appropriate type of questions in a manner that they can understand. This will enable to teacher to accurately record the students performance and understanding in the content area.

Next Generation Sunshine State Standards: 

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L A.3.1.7.2 The student will identify the author's purpose (e.g., to inform, entertain, or explain) in text and how an author's perspective influences text; 

Common Core Standards
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.1 Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers
ESOL Standards
10) Analyze student language and determine appropriate instructional strategies, using knowledge of phonology, morphology, syntax semantics, and discourse.

Strategy 16: Leveled Questions

STEP BY STEP

• Observe and document students' language levels- Observe your students to determine their current levels of interaction in English. On a class list, indicate whether each student is at the pre-production stage, early production stage, speech emergent stage, or intermediate fluency stage.
• Choose and gather materials- Determine which visuals, artifacts, or gestures you will need to make your meaning clear to the students whose understanding of English is limited. Gather these support materials to use during the presentation of the lesson and your questioning. Remember that English language learners feel more comfortable participating when they have ways to demonstrate their understanding with visuals and support materials.
• Plan a hierarchy of questions- Plan a series of questions that will help you involve your students and determine their levels of understanding of the material you will be teaching. In the beginning, it is helpful to plan a series of questions at different levels so that you can move around the room and use appropriate levels of questions for individual students without too much hesitation or confusion. 
• Involve all students- Use the list of students and speech levels as a checklist to make sure that you are involving all the students in discussion and questioning and that you are adapting the levels of your questions to their changing language acquisition levels.
• Assess student progress and understanding- Use the checklist you have created for observation purposes. Observe a few students each day until you have examples of the verbal responses typical for each student. Write these responses into an anecdotal record to include in the students individual portfolio documenting periodic growth in their abilities to respond to questions in class. 
• Add technology- Copy and print related visuals from the internet. Provide them to individual student during the lesson. They can use them for reference and for responding to questions.