During the PDP June Institute ‘Teaching Fairly in an Unfair World’, I was fortunate to visit an ELL class at Lambrick Park Secondary School on three separate occasions. Prior to our first visit I realized that I had very little (practically zero) experience working with English Language Learners (ELLs) and I hadn’t taken the optional ELL course titled ‘Principle of Teaching English Language Learning’ in the winter term. During my six-week practicum I had a couple international students in my classes, but they were all relatively advanced in their English language skills and I never had to help them with any language barriers, answer any questions related to language, or provide extra time for them on quizzes or worksheets. Reflecting now though, I was probably just unaware and not expecting these international students to be faced with issues or lack of understanding due to language barriers and/or confusion – though I should have been more aware and mindful of this. Now I feel more capable, informed, and like I have the tools and resources to teach ELL and international students.

At the beginning of our first visit to Lambrick we sat amongst the class of grade 12 students and received an introduction and instructions from their teacher. I liked that the UVic students sat scattered throughout the class of high school students so that we were all intermingled and their wasn’t a great divide between the two groups. I imagine that this could have eased or minimized some of the nerves the ELL students may have felt. If the UVic students were to have stood at the front of the classroom beside the teacher for the introduction, the general vibe/tone may have been ‘there are now a dozen or so teachers present in the classroom – observing and assessing you’, but it was instead ‘theres another group of older students in the classroom now that are here to help us’ as we sat alongside the ELL students at tables.

The assignment that we were working on with the ELLs was writing a poem and then creating a video reciting the poem with relevant photos and/or videos. The poem was to be titled ‘I Am From…’ and included various metaphorical statements that described each students personal life and past with details about their family, hometown, family traditions, culture, memories and stories from their life before moving to Canada. The teacher provided a couple exemplars and a template that the students could follow if they needed or for inspiration and ideas. This was super helpful and motivating for the students to understand the format of the poem and begin writing after they understood the expectations for the assignment. I imagine in a non-ELL English 12 class the teacher wouldn’t provide both exemplars and a template to work with at the beginning of an assignment like this. There might even be some hesitation with providing this amount of “help” in an ELL class as well, fearing that every student will follow the template word-for-word, line-for-line and every poem would end up the same. But this wasn’t the case at all in this class as every poem ended up being unique and personal to each student.

I think it was very beneficial to provide exemplars and a template to generate ideas and creativity, which motivated these students to complete their best work. It was a great way to help students understand the assignment better and it allowed ample amount of work time (as the teacher didn’t have to repeat the instructions and intentions multiple times and in different ways to make sure every student understood – the resources did this on their own). Providing thorough exemplars to ELL students was discussed as a very useful strategy in the readings we have completed in class, for example “By displaying simple examples… and prompting students to follow the template when speaking or writing, STEM teachers can explicitly teach STEM language without taking time away from content instruction” (Hoffman & Zollman, 2016). Although directed towards STEM subjects in this article, this can relate to all subjects and is exactly what I observed during my first visit to this class.

Featured Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash