EnglishClub

Teaching ESL students how to read, analyze information in stories, and make sense of what they’ve read can be one of the most difficult things you’ll encounter as a teacher. It can be an even more difficult situation for your students, especially when they’re simultaneously learning both English and reading comprehension skills. However, one method that can be particularly effective for both you and your students is story mapping, and in this guide, we’ll be going over what this is and how to apply it to your lessons with success.

What is story mapping?

Story mapping is using graphic organizers, known as story maps, to document and detail the different aspects of a story to improve reading comprehension and retention. When students create story maps, they’re detailing things like the setting, the plot, the main characters, and even more minor details, which can be done both during and after reading a story.

Story maps are usually created by students by filling out a particular type of worksheet known as a story map template. You as the teacher should provide these templates to them and explain the process before delving into a reading activity.

Story mapping templates normally have boxes, circles, or other areas on the page that are designated for specific details. When it comes to which story mapping templates you decide to use for your lessons, you have the choice of either creating them from scratch yourself or sourcing pre-made templates from online and printing them out.

5 steps to applying story mapping

1. Identify suitable reading materials

Your first step in creating a story mapping activity is to identify reading materials that are suitable for your students and this type of activity. Here are some suggestions to keep in mind when doing so:

Consider complexity
Think about your students’ grade level, proficiency levels, and ages when choosing appropriate reading materials, so you’re not choosing something that’s too complex for them. You’ll want to find a mix between something that’s not too difficult for them to understand but that still challenges them a bit so that learning can take place.

Keep things diverse
Once you carry out your first story mapping lesson, you’ll likely use this technique in future lessons, which is why you should always ensure that you’re diversifying the reading materials used. Don’t just provide your students with the same genres, topics, or text types every time, as switching things up every now and then helps to keep their interest.

Adapt when necessary
As a teacher, you’re probably already familiar with the concept of “adopt or adapt,” but if not, adopting is basically using reading materials, lessons, or other things as is without modifying them, while adapting means making modifications as needed. Know your students, know their interests, and know what objectives you’re trying to teach them, and, if necessary, adapt a story by making minor modifications to it so it better aligns with these three things.

2. Create or source story map templates

As previously stated, you can either create your own story map templates or source them from online:

Creating story map templates
If you choose to create your own story maps, you can do this easily in a program like Microsoft Word, starting with a box that you might decide to title “Characters,” where the student will list all the characters’ names from the story as they’re reading it.

Another box might be titled “Setting” where they will detail what setting the story takes place in, and other boxes detailing what happens in the story, such as “Problem” and “Solution,” can also be included.

It’s your choice what each box or area of the worksheet is designated for, as this will be based on what you want your students to remember from the story or what objectives you’re wanting them to learn.

Sourcing story map templates
Rather than create new templates from scratch for your students, you can instead download and print free story map templates from TemplateLAB, a convenient and completely free resource for templates of all types.

While this is one of the more popular sources for templates, there are many more that can be easily found online. You should simply consider what type of story your students will be reading and then find a template that matches whatever objectives you’re aiming to teach them.

Tip for teaching younger students:
If you’re teaching younger students who don’t yet know how to identify things like the setting or plot of a story, you can keep things simple by providing a template that only has boxes for “Beginning,” “Middle,” and “End,” where your students can detail what happens during these different parts of a story.

3. Model how to story map

Instead of simply starting a story mapping activity and expecting your students to know what to do, you should first model the story mapping process for them. Think of this as a practice run before the actual activity, which involves the following steps:

Step #1: Read a story aloud
Choose an appropriate short story to read aloud in front of your students or have everyone read it as a group. This should be a story that’s different from the one you’ll use for your main story mapping activity and short enough to be read in a matter of five minutes or less.

Step #2: Review and discuss
After reading the story, review and discuss the elements of the story with your students and ask questions such as, “Who do you think the main characters of the story were?” or “What was the plot of the story?” These questions should align with the categories shown on whatever story map template you’ll introduce to them in the next step.

Step #3: Model on the board
While you and your students are discussing the story, you should place an example of a story map template in a prominent place, such as creating one on a board or displaying it with a projector or other equipment.

After discussing and identifying particular elements of the story, such as the main characters, the plot, or other details, show your students where those details should be written on the story map template (e.g. writing the character’s names under the “Characters” section on your template).

Step #4: Provide other examples
To make sure your students fully understand the concept of story mapping, you should then provide examples of other types of story maps, where other concepts or details are covered.

4. Carry out the main activity

After modeling how to map out details from a story and ensuring your students understand what to do, you should then distribute another story to them, whether it’s printed on sheets of paper or something found in your students’ books. How long this story should be will depend on how much time you have available in your lesson or how much information you think your students can retain and make sense of.

You should also distribute story mapping templates allow your students to have these on their desks while they’re reading, so they can occasionally glance at them to remind themselves of what details they should be looking for while reading.

You can then read the story as a group with your students or have them quietly read it on their own. After finishing the story, your students should then complete their story maps, and this can be done either separately or within groups, whichever you feel is more appropriate.

While they’re filling out their story maps, you should provide any support they need by letting them know they can ask you questions or by walking around the room to see if anyone needs help. 

5. Assess your students’ work

After your students turn in their story maps, you can then assess how well they did by checking each category or section on their story maps to ensure the correct details were written down.

Questions you might ask yourself while assessing:

• “Were all locations in the story properly listed in the “Locations” category?”
• “Did they correctly name each character in the “Main Characters” category?”
• “Does the student have weaknesses in identifying particular types of details?”

Of course, these are just examples, but the point is to ensure that the templates are fully filled out and that you’re going over any mistakes you find with your students while referring back to the story each time when doing so.

Benefits of using story maps

• Boosts reading comprehension – students can see how parts of a story fit together to make sense
• Enhances memorization – writing down details helps students visualize and remember what they read
• Improves language analysis – while identifying details of a story, students notice language patterns
• Leads to English acquisition – English is acquired more quickly with hands-on activities like story mapping
• Adaptable to different lessons – Story maps are versatile and can be used with different text types and genres

Parting advice: use story maps as assessments

Story maps can serve as formative assessments, meaning that you should use them every so often to gauge how well your students are progressing with their reading comprehension skills. As your students become better skilled at reading, you can introduce more complex stories with greater details and more difficult story map templates. You should also always allow your students to take their work home after you’ve assessed it, as they can review it from time to time to keep track of their own progress.

Teaching ESL students how to read English texts can be difficult for many teachers, especially new ones who haven’t yet learned all the helpful strategies for doing so. When starting out as a teacher myself, one such strategy that proved to be a gamechanger for me was guided reading, which I continue to use in my everyday teaching practices. If you’re just now learning about this highly effective teaching strategy, here’s how it works and how you can apply it in the classroom.

What is guided reading?

Guided reading is a strategy that you can use to teach your students how to read in English more effectively. Rather than simply explaining parts of a text or story to students to help them understand it better, you can teach them different cognitive approaches that they can then use to enhance their reading skills and comprehension.

This normally involves some level of basic support in the beginning, known as teacher-scaffolding, where you’ll use some subtle techniques of your own to help students apply their newly learned reading strategies to what they’re reading.

Steps to implement guided reading:

To implement guided reading in a lesson, you can follow these recommended steps, which are the exact steps I use whenever taking a guided reading approach:

1. Warm-up (introducing the topic)

You should start your lesson with a basic warm-up that’s typically anywhere between five to ten minutes in duration, depending on your time constraints. You’ll begin by introducing the topic that you’d like your students to learn about.

This is different from the reading strategies you’ll be teaching your students later. The topic is whatever broad concept you’ll want your students to read and learn about, whether it’s outer space, animals, transportation, culture, or virtually anything else.

You can introduce the topic quickly using virtually any medium, such as:

• A short video
• A song or story
• A board drawing
• A quick discussion

The point of introducing the topic is simply to get students comfortable and excited about what they’re about to learn, as the strategies themselves can be a bit complex. So you’ll want to choose a medium and topic that is age- and level-appropriate and that will generate interest. This interest then translates to intrinsic motivation, where the students will want to use the strategies you teach them to read about the topic and understand more about it.

2. Teaching guided reading strategies

Next, after your students have had at least five to ten minutes to learn about the topic and become interested in it, you’ll then introduce some of the cognitive and reading strategies they can use to make reading easier for them while explaining these in the simplest terms possible.

It’s up to you which specific strategies you’ll introduce to them, but the following are some of the core strategies I recommend going through with them:

Activation of prior knowledge

It’s well-known that one of the best ways to learn something new is by activating prior knowledge, which essentially means that you’re using things you’re already familiar with to make sense of concepts and things that are new to you.

This is a cognitive strategy your students should be familiar with, and you can teach them this by simply having them ask themselves things like, “What do I already know about this topic?” By asking this, they’re filling in some of the blanks if there are any things that they’re already familiar with that they can connect to the topic before learning more about it.

Objective self-questioning

Once students have activated their prior knowledge, they can move on to self-questioning, another cognitive strategy. To self-question, you’ll have your students think about the text and ask themselves questions about it before, during, and after reading.

For example, students might ask themselves, “Am I understanding what I’m reading?” or “What other questions of mine has this text answered, and what else would I like to know?”

This helps teach critical-thinking skills, which your students will need when reading more advanced texts, and it also helps them identify what they’re learning by drawing their attention to it, leading to better retention and recall of this knowledge later on.

Chunking into smaller parts

Chunking is a reading strategy that refers to breaking down the text into smaller, manageable sections or chunks, reading small portions, and then using self-questioning to ensure that you understand those parts before moving on to other sections.

With larger texts and older students, the sections chunked are normally a paragraph or two at a time, but for younger students who are reading smaller texts, you may want to teach them how to chunk sentences first, then whole paragraphs later. This focuses their attention on what they’re reading, prevents them from getting overwhelmed with too much information all at once, and leads to better comprehension.

Summarizing what was read

Once your students have applied the previous strategies while reading, they can then summarize what they’ve read after they’ve finished reading the whole text. This serves as a way of double-checking their comprehension to ensure that they understood what was read. It also enhances memory by encouraging students to recall what was read and further ingrains this into their knowledge base.

Summarizing involves condensing the main ideas and key details of a text into a concise paragraph or statement. You can simply ask your students to write down what the central theme of a story was and what some of the important details in it were. Students can then discover if there are any gaps in their understanding and can then review the text to see what they may have missed.

Other suggested strategies:
While the previous strategies are all core elements of the guided reading process, the following are some other strategies you can teach them as part of your lesson:

• Making connections – connecting what is being read to things students are already familiar with in real life.
• Using visualizations – Imagining what is being read, whether its actions, characters, or places, as mental images in the mind.
• Drawing inferences – predicting what is being said or where a story is headed based on contextual clues.
• Self-monitoring – recognizing when something is not being understood or read correctly and going back to re-read something as necessary.

3. Model the reading strategies for students

Simply explaining strategies often isn’t enough for your students to understand how to practically use them, especially with younger students. For this reason, you’ll want to model the strategies by showing students exactly how they can apply them in their reading.

How you go about doing this is up to you, but I’ll typically consider whether the strategy involves mostly internal or external processes. Something that’s occurring internally, such as self-questioning when reading a text, I’ll demonstrate by asking myself questions out loud in front of the students.

While something like chunking is meant to be performed internally as a cognitive process, when first teaching this concept to students, you can demonstrate it externally by underlining or circling parts of a text that you’d normally be chunking in your mind.

Students can then perform this externally as well while reading, which will eventually lead to the ability to do this internally. The same goes for summarizing, which can be demonstrated externally by simply writing a summary of a text directly next to it on the board in front of students.

4. Carry out a guided reading activity

To ensure your students can apply the strategies they’ve learned to their reading, you’ll now have your students read a story, and you’ll walk around the room offering support (teacher-scaffolding) if you see any students struggling.

Ask them to use all the strategies you taught them and provide them with a sheet of paper or somewhere where they can write down notes or summarize what they’ve read. It’s important that you guide them while encouraging them to make sense of what they’re reading using the strategies, as this is a guided reading activity, and don’t just provide answers to them if they have questions.

Tip: use Socratic questioning
An effective way to assist your students when they have questions is by using Socratic questioning. If a student asks you about a specific detail in a story, instead of giving them an answer, you can ask them questions that encourage them to discover the answer on their own, which is a strategy known as Socratic questioning.
Example:
Student: “Why does the astronaut need to wear a helmet outside the shuttle?”
Teacher: “Well, how might the conditions in space be different from earth?”

5. Evaluate your students with an assessment

After the reading activity, I’ll normally carry out an assessment, such as a worksheet or quiz, to make sure that the students understood what they read. While it’s difficult to ensure that they’ve used the strategies I’ve taught them, I’ll usually make sure that there are sections on the assessment that address this.

I’ll typically include one section that asks about the main concept of the story or theme, one where they’ll write down important details from the story, and another where I’ll ask for a summary of the story. This, along with multiple-choice questions, usually helps cover all the bases to make sure they understood what was read and used the learned strategies to at least some degree.

Remember: guide but don’t lead

The point of using guided reading is to guide your students into the reading process by equipping them with strategies that they can use on their own. This is similar to the analogy of teaching someone how to fish rather than catching a fish for them.

By providing scaffolding support to your students but not directly providing answers to them, they’ll gain confidence as they learn how to analyze texts, think about them critically, and eventually learn the skills to lead themselves to any answers they’re looking for.

Learning English can be difficult for some, though one technique, mind mapping, has proven to be an effective way of boosting this process. This technique can help you both visualize and organize information in a way where your brain can make better sense of it while memorizing things more easily. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the concept of mind mapping and how you can easily use it to quickly improve your English reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills.

What is mind mapping?

Mind mapping is a technique where you take new information learned during your English lessons and organize it by looking for connections between things while mapping these out on paper or somewhere else where you can easily reference it.

It always starts with a central concept or topic, and as you think about this, you should also be thinking about other details that relate to this. These other things can then be placed into sub-topics or categories, which can then be further expanded upon.

Mind map example

To give you a better idea of how mind maps work, the illustration below is a basic example of one. The different types of sentences (sentence forms) serves as the central concept, and each of the five forms (declarative, interrogative, optative, imperative, and exclamatory) are represented as categories. Branching out further, examples of sentences using these forms can be found next to their respective categories.

What are mind maps used for?

To memorize new concepts more easily

Mind maps can be used as a tool to help you memorize information, such as new English vocabulary words, phrases, or grammatical concepts. By mapping things out on paper or elsewhere, you can return to the maps at any time to study the words or material and remind yourself of previous thoughts, ideas, or what you’ve learned about something.

To gain a better understanding of English

When you’re putting information in front of you as a visual representation and can see how words or concepts either connect or differ from each other based on their categories, sub-categories, or finer details, this can give you a better understanding of this information. Sometimes we may observe similarities between things, but how they fully connect or relate to each other may not be as obvious until we map things out and look at the big picture.

To demonstrate and share knowledge

You can also use mind maps to demonstrate your knowledge of the English language to others by presenting them in front of a class or to a teacher. In business scenarios, mind maps are often used as presentations during meetings to not only show someone’s knowledge of a topic, but to share that knowledge with others, and this can be used in the same way for you as an ESL learner.

How are mind maps created?

You can make a mind map in various ways, depending on your preferences and resources. Some learners simply create and write down their mind maps on a sheet of paper, while others use software, like Microsoft PowerPoint. There are also many online websites and apps for making mind maps, such as Canva, as well as downloadable templates at sites like Pinterest.

What are the benefits of using mind maps?

• Allow you to visualize connections between things
• Improve memory by encouraging active thinking
• Quickly organize notes, thoughts, and concepts
• Help to identify areas where knowledge is lacking
• Can strengthen all the core English language skills

How to use mind maps for specific skills

Mind mapping for better reading comprehension

To sharpen your reading comprehension skills, you can use mind maps with stories and texts with these simple steps:

1. Identify important details

When reading stories, you should be looking for key points and details within the text that are important to the story itself. Make note of who the characters are, what the overall plot or theme is, and what events, actions, or places are mentioned in the story. You should be writing these down somewhere where they can later be organized.

2. Categorize and connect

As always with mind mapping, you’ll first write down the central topic. Then, begin to branch out with all of the other details you notated. As an example, the popular German fairy tale Hansel and Gretel could be mapped out where the central or overall topic is “two children becoming lost in the woods and encountering a witch.”

You can then branch out with a category called “settings,” and within that category you could write “woods” and “the gingerbread house.” Going back to the central topic again, you could create another category called “plot,” and in that category you could write down all of the important plot details that you can think of (e.g. “Hansel and Gretel are abandoned in the woods,” “They find a trail of breadcrumbs to follow home,” etc.)

3. Recycle the information

Simply creating a mind map and then looking at it isn’t always enough to memorize information, which is why you should actively re-engage with it afterward by re-using it in other activities. To do this with things you’ve read, you can write your own story or simply summarize what the original story said by referencing details outlined in the mind map.

Mind mapping to improve your writing skills

You can also use mind mapping to refine your writing skills or make writing tasks easier, and here are two ways that you can do this:

Brainstorming writing ideas

When practicing your English-writing skills, there will undoubtedly be times when you’ll need to be creative or come up with ideas on how to explain or articulate things. When glancing at a mind map, ideas often come to mind when you start to look at the connections between its many parts.

Say, for example, you need to write a paper where the focus is “the benefits of learning English as a second language.” While this would be the central topic, you could branch out from it by adding the following details as categories:

• Better job prospects in Western-based companies
• The ability to communicate with English speakers
• Easier assimilation into English-speaking cultures

By simply looking at your mind map, you can then brainstorm new ideas that might fit within these categories as sub-categories. For the first category, “better job prospects,” you might then come up with related sub-topics, such as “higher pay as a bilingual speaker,” or “greater versatility when working with international clients.”

Outlining a writing structure

Before writing a story or anything of considerable length, good writers normally outline everything first, so they have a better idea of how the story will go and where all the details should be placed within the story.

Once your mind map is created and well-organized, you can use it as a reference to create an outline for this purpose. By simply glancing at your mind map, you can see which details might be more important to a story and which ones should be mentioned before others.

When writing formal texts, you can look at the categories you’ve created in your mind map as ideas of what headings and subheadings you should be using or which details might be more appropriately referenced with bullet points or discussed in paragraphs.

Mind mapping to enhance speaking and listening

Practicing speaking with phrases and responses: to improve your speaking skills, you can make mind maps that include common conversational phrases and responses that one might use in different scenarios.

Example: mind mapping a shopping scenario

Central concept: shopping for clothing
Categories: sizes, colors, brands

In the example above, the categories that branch out from the central topic of “shopping for clothing” include “sizes, colors, and brands.” For sizes, you could then branch out further by adding conversational phrases, such as the following:

“Do you have a smaller/larger size?”

 “Is this the only size you have?”

“What sizes do you have?”

“This size is too big/small for me.”

You could then expand out even further by adding the clerk’s possible responses to these questions and can then follow suit by adding conversational phrases to the “colors” and “brands” categories as well. This would give you a full overview of a conversational mind map that you could practice your speaking skills with, and you can always make a copy of it to take turns playing the roles of customer and clerk with a partner.

Organizing what you’re hearing

When listening to a teacher or lecturer, you can carry out a mind mapping activity simultaneously by taking notes and writing them down as a mind map. This can help you quickly organize your notes during different parts of a lesson, where topics discussed can be organized as categories and then the smaller details about these topics can serve as sub-categories and side notes.

You can easily improve your listening skills this way because you’re learning how to pay more attention to details while noticing which ones are more central to a topic and how the different concepts connect to each other.

Mind mapping: a skill that builds other skills

As a versatile technique that can be applied to just about any situation, mind mapping is a quick and fun way to organize your thoughts and new information. Although mind mapping can be quite easy in its most basic form, you should challenge yourself when first starting out by seeing how many categories, branches, or concepts you can add, which can improve not only your English skills, but your mind mapping skills as well.

Einstein once said that instead of teaching his pupils, he simply provides them with the right conditions for learning to take place. This is the essence of inquiry-based learning, a powerful tool that you can use to set the stage for learning without actually standing on that stage yourself as the teacher. If you haven’t been using this effective approach in your lessons, here’s what you’ve been missing and how it can easily benefit both you and your students.

What is inquiry-based learning?

Inquiry-based learning, which has also been called exploratory learning, is an education approach where students can learn English by researching topics and concepts in a self-directed way. Instead of directly teaching English directly to your students, you can simply provide them with materials and then encourage them to research things on their own while supporting them with any assistance they might need.

How does this approach work?

When using inquiry-based learning in an ESL classroom, your students will typically think about a topic, come up with questions that they have about the topic, and then cooperate with others to research the topic in an effort to answer these questions.

While doing this, they’ll be immersed in the English language through the materials you provide to them, and if you choose your materials carefully, this can be a great way to teach virtually all the essential skills they’ll need to know (i.e. reading, writing, listening, speaking, etc).

The three questions of inquiry-based learning

Whenever implementing any inquiry-based learning approach in a classroom, there are three main questions you’ll want your students to ask themselves: “What do I know?,” “What do I want to know?,” and “What have I learned?”

“What do I know?”

What students already know is called prior knowledge, and you can’t have them carry out an inquiry-based learning task until they have a base to start from. Their prior knowledge serves as that base, and this can be knowledge based on things they’ve learned before either your lesson or course or it could be something that you teach them at the very beginning of a lesson while introducing a topic.

“What do I want to know?”

The core question your students should be asking during any inquiry-based learning endeavor is, “What do I want to know?” Your students will ask this question and then conduct research to find the answer.

“What have I learned?”

It’s always a good idea to have your students review and reflect on what they’ve learned after completing their inquiry-based learning tasks. “What have I learned?” is the question they should be asking themselves at the end of the process.

Tip: utilize KWL (Know-Want-Learn) charts
While you can provide guidance to help your students ask these questions, most of it should be self-directed. A KWL chart is a tool that’s commonly used that allows your students to ask these questions and then write down the answers. This is not only useful for your students by helping them keep track of their thoughts and progress, but it also allows you as the teacher to observe both of these things as well to ensure that they are learning what you’d like them to learn.
Download a free KWL chart

Steps to promote inquiry-based learning in ESL classrooms

1. Introduce the topic

With an inquiry-based learning approach, you’ll start by introducing the topic to your students. This should be a topic that is appropriate for your students’ level and age, as well as something that will generate their interest.

Regardless of whether your overall goal is to teach grammar, new vocabulary, or other English-language concepts, you’ll want to introduce these within a general topic. How you go about doing that is your choice, as just about any topic will work, such as a discussion about planets, a video about animals, or a quick read-along story about any other topic.

2. Pair or group students together

The next step is to pair or group your students, though in some scenarios you can have students work alone if you feel that’s more suitable for your class. There are, however, some clear benefits to placing them into groups, such as peer-to-peer scaffolding, which is where your students can share information or ideas and learn from each other.

When creating groups, it’s your choice how large you’d like each group to be, and this will normally depend on how many students you have and your classroom layout.

3. Allow students to pick a problem or question to answer

Based on the topic that you introduced earlier, you’ll now allow your students to pick a problem to solve or a question to research, and this can be done through the following steps.

Discuss students’ prior knowledge

You should guide your students in a group discussion by getting them to talk about the topic and what they already know about it first (their prior knowledge or a review of what you taught them during the introduction).

Leading into the inquiry process

You’ll then start the inquiry process (hence, “inquiry-based learning”) by having them discuss what they’d like to know about it, and you can normally initiate this process by simply asking the entire class, “OK class, now that we’ve talked about what we already know about (topic), what else would you like to know about it? What questions do you have?”

While your students may have many different questions, you’ll want to identify some of the more commonly asked ones that all or most of your students are curious about and choose one or more of these for them to work on.

A few examples of problems or topics:

If your topic is about modes of transportation, you could ask “How were the ways we traveled in the past different from how we travel today?”

If you’re trying to teach your students about animals, you might ask, “What animals live on land, and what animals live on water?”

4. Supply your students with materials

The research phase comes next, though your students can’t carry this out without having the proper materials to do so. You should provide materials that allow them to work together (or independently if you’re unable to put them into pairs or groups), and the types of materials you provide will depend on the topic, how you want your students to research that topic, and what skills you’re trying to teach to them.

Example 1: reading comprehension skills

If you want to improve your students’ reading skills, you could provide them with books and encourage them to find specific vocabulary words or analyze the context in which specific words are used to guess what their meanings might be and provide them with paper to write down their thoughts or the words themselves.

Example 2: speaking, listening, and writing skills

If you want your students to get in lots of speaking practice, as well as listening and writing practice, you can provide them with surveys, where they can ask each other questions about a particular topic while recording responses.

Example 3: listening, reading, and observation skills

You can provide your students with videos to watch and can ask them to pay attention and write down things they observe or hear in the videos if you’d like to help them sharpen their reading and observation skills.

Some material suggestions:

• books
• videos
• surveys
• KWL charts
• worksheets
• computers

5. Support, observe, and provide feedback

While your students are working together to investigate their inquiries, whether they’re writing down responses, reading, watching videos, or doing something else, you’ll want to walk around the room to observe them, so as to make sure that they’re carrying out the tasks in a productive way.

You’ll want to provide some basic support if they have any questions, though it’s good to encourage independent thinking by leading them to answers with clues rather than directly answering them when possible.

If you see them doing something that’s either counterproductive or leading them astray from the task at hand, you should provide feedback, though it’s better to do this in a suggestive way rather than simply saying they’re doing something wrong. (e.g. “You’re doing good, but what if you were to do things this way instead of this other way.”)

6. Wrap up and review

After your students have researched the answers to their questions, you can wrap up your lesson by holding a class discussion where you’ll ask them what they learned and how they went about researching the topics or concepts.

If you provided KWL charts during the lesson, the students should have completed at least the first two sections (“What do I know?” and “What do I want to know?”) by the end of the lesson, and you should now ensure that they complete the last section (“What have I learned?”) if they haven’t already done so.

What are the benefits of this style of learning?

Inquiry-based learning helps students learn English by:

• generating interest in topics through self-discovery
• motivating students by making it fun to find things
• fostering independence through research and inquiry
• improving critical-thinking skills through questioning
• strengthening the comprehension of specific content
• enhancing peer-to-peer learning through collaboration

Parting advice: always guide but never show

Inquiry-based learning can be extremely effective at harnessing your students’ natural desire to learn new things, but it’s crucial that you provide them with enough space to be self-directed in their learning. Always remember that your role as a teacher in this approach is to guide the way and support, but you should also do your best to resist the natural inclination we all have as teachers to jump into the process and show them things.

When working with second language learners as an English teacher, there may be times when you’ll be teaching other subjects in English, such as Math or Science. Even if you’re only teaching an English course, there will likely be instances where you’ll need to teach content to your students while also teaching English vocabulary. This concept of teaching English through content is known as sheltered instruction and knowing how to apply it to your lessons through learning activities can help both you and your students.

What is sheltered instruction?

Sheltered instruction means providing English instruction in a way where everything that is being taught is being done so within context and alongside relevant content. Instead of simply teaching a word to your students and having them repeat it, you can teach them something where the word is used within context, such as how to solve a math problem while teaching them the word “multiply” or teaching them the word “ecosystem” while going over the many different habitats that animals live in.

Because sheltered instruction involves teaching both content and English simultaneously, it can be used while teaching many different subjects in English, not only in English language courses.

How is sheltered instruction applied?

Sheltered instruction activities can employ many different tactics, but at the heart of all of them, your goal is to present English vocabulary and other concepts to your students in a way that’s easy for them to understand.

When new information is more digestible, meaning easier for your students to process, it’s called comprehensible input. You can make information more comprehensible with various techniques. Scaffolding, which means providing support in different ways, is usually the most effective way to do this.

Sheltered instruction is made possible with:

• Comprehensible input – content or information that is presented in a way that’s easy for your students to understand or relate to. 
• Teacher scaffolding – adapting your teaching style to the needs of your students, such as by speaking more slowly or reducing the number of vocabulary words you’re presenting to them during lessons.
• Material scaffolding – using a particular type of material to make content and concepts easier for students to understand, whether it’s images, videos, diagrams, or something else.
• Prior-knowledge scaffolding – considering what students already know and then presenting new information in a way that connects to this prior knowledge.

Example sheltered instruction activities

1. Words within context

If your students are at a level where they can read and understand full sentences, this is a perfect activity that uses flashcards and allows them to find meaning in words based on contextual cues.

Steps for carrying out this activity

1. Provide students with cards that have a sentence on one side with a target vocabulary word underlined and also provide three to four possible synonyms for the word as options on the other side with only one option being the correct one. You can create these cards yourself from scratch or create and print them online for example using this resource.

2. Have students guess which of the words on the card’s backside means the same as the underlined word in the sentence on the front side.

Example

Card’s front side reads:
“The task I was given was uncomplicated, so I was able to finish it quickly.”

Card’s backside shows:
A) difficult
B) lengthy
C) simple
D) heavy

Once your students guess the meaning of each word correctly, you can have them move on to the next card and repeat the process.

Tip: make a game out of this – It’s a good idea to pair this activity with some type of board game or points-based system so they can track their progress or work towards some type of goal or reward, whether it’s a tangible or academic one.

2. Semantic mind mapping

Mind mapping involves connecting words or concepts to associated words, concepts, images, or virtually anything else that you can find common links between. While all of these things can work great in an ESL context, semantic mind mapping, which is purely word-based, can work well for students of all ages and typically involves less explanation on your part, so it’s easier for students to understand the concept.

Steps for carrying out this activity

1. Provide a central keyword or topic to your students and have them write this inside a bubble or square in the middle of a sheet of paper.

2. Have your students think of words or details that may be associated with this main keyword, and have them write these words in smaller circles or squares as they come to mind while connecting these new circles or squares to either each other or back to the central keyword or topic.

3. As more words are being thought of, your students can then create more branches or lines between words based on their associations, and while not every word needs to be associated with every other word, each word should connect to at least one other, and you should be able to trace your path back from the most distance word on the paper to the central one, even if the path isn’t a direct one.

Tip: use worksheets – Instead of having your students draw their semantic mind maps from scratch, you can provide them with a printable worksheet from this resource and then simply ask them to write words in each box. However, while this can work perfectly in some scenarios, you should use discretion as it also restricts the structure they’re working with, as they can branch out even further with more details when making mind maps from scratch.

3. Words within groups

This is a technique that you can use to teach just about any subject to your students, whether it’s Math, Science, or something else while teaching English vocabulary words. It involves grouping items based on their similarities and putting an emphasis on both the words of each group and the words of the items within each group.

Steps for carrying out this activity

1 First, you’ll choose which topic you’ll be teaching, and then organize the words associated with that topic into groups. For these steps, the topic of healthy food in an English-based health class will be used as an example.

2. Show your students a pie chart that represents healthy foods. You can do this by drawing it on the board or in a PowerPoint presentation if you’d rather go with a digital approach. This chart should show not only the word “healthy foods” directly under it but should also contain smaller subcategories of healthy foods inside the chart itself.

So, your chart might contain the words “fruits, vegetables, lean meats, grains” or other smaller categories. It’s a good idea to also include a translation of the English word in your students’ native language (their L2) directly next to the English word, separated by a forward slash symbol or inside parentheses.

Example (with English words and their Thai translations)

3. Elsewhere on the board or in your presentation, you’ll want to then break down the subcategories into specific items. For example, you’d show your students another pie chart or graphic that shows specific items that would fall under the category of fruits, such as bananas, apples, and pears, and include both the English and L2 translation for these as well.

4. Teach this lesson just as you would for any other topic, but make sure you’re having your students repeat the English words aloud as you’re going over them. As you break down each category, subcategory, or word by explaining them to your students, you can then add in other vocabulary words as details to explain characteristics of the items (sour, sweet, ripe, sugar, protein, dry, moist, etc.)

4. Detail discrimination

With this activity, your students are using a comparison chart to learn how to contrast and compare items based on details that may or may not apply to each one. This is a good hands-on activity that’s perfect for concluding a sheltered instruction lesson, as it checks for understanding and whether the information you provided was comprehensible or not.

Steps for carrying out this activity

1. Have your students draw a comparison chart, which is a grid-based table on a sheet of paper with both vertical and horizontal lines and areas for headers or words to be written on both the left side and first row at the top, similar to how a Microsoft Excel document appears (and for older or more advanced students with tech access, you can even use Excel for this if it’s easier). When possible, create this layout yourself as hand-out worksheets for your students or print them out from the resource below, which can save everyone some time.

Download a comparison chart

2. Write or have your students write target vocabulary words in the first boxes that run vertically along the left side, one on each line, and then write different details that may or may not apply to these words in each header space at the top.

3. Your students should then notate which details up top correlate with the vocabulary words on the left by writing a checkmark or using some other type of symbol. This allows them to later look over the table and analyze the differences and similarities between the vocabulary words.

Parting advice: get creative with comprehensible input

Always remember that sheltered instruction revolves around providing comprehensible input to your students, so don’t be afraid to get creative in making content and materials more comprehensible. Think about the culture your students come from, their interests, their backgrounds, and look for ways to incorporate these things into your lessons to make topics more easily understandable for your students.

The number of words in the English language is growing each year, and while there are over 600,000 words defined in the Oxford Dictionary, the average adult knows around 20,000 or more. So when you’re teaching English to second language learners, where do you start, and how do you get them to eventually learn and memorize so many words?

The New General Service List (NGSL) is a resource that every ESL teacher should be familiar with, as it can help you teach English to your students much more quickly when used correctly.

What is the NGSL?

The NGSL is a comprehensive list of 2,800 words that have been put together and published to help ESL learners learn and memorize the most frequently used words in the English language. It’s an updated version of the 1953 General Service List, which researcher Michael West created, and although this older list had a similar purpose, it was much more limited in scope and based on fewer words.

A group of linguistic experts first created the NGSL in 2013 by using software to analyze the Cambridge English Corpus, which is a massive data collection of billions of English words that have been compiled for research purposes by Cambridge University Press. Download NGSL

What are the benefits of using the NGSL?

• English skills are acquired more quickly by students
• Teachers can teach English much more productively
• Faster results mean satisfied clients and stakeholders
• Materials are easier to create with a ready list of words

How to incorporate the NGSL in your lessons

For your students to acquire the words listed in the NGSL, you should be using activities that not only incorporate these words but do so with lots of repetition. A learner must be exposed to a word anywhere between six to 20 times for it to sink in and stay memorized, depending on the complexity of the word, the learner’s cognitive abilities, and other factors.

Many of the activities that you can use for this are simple, tried-and-true methods that you might already be familiar with, though you’ll be ensuring you’re using NGSL words with each of these activities and they’ve been proven to lead to enhanced English language skills.

NGSL flashcards

Flashcards, also known as vocabulary cards, are the most commonly used method of directly teaching the NGSL to students. There are many activities that you can perform with your students using these cards, and they typically have target English words on one side of the card and either a picture or a translation of the word in the student’s native language on the other side.

How you carry out flashcard activities is up to you, as some teachers directly show the English words and/or pictures to students and ask the students to say the words aloud before flipping the card over to reinforce what the word means in the student’s L1 (their native language).

Others show the students the words in their L1 first and ask them to guess what the translated English word is before flipping the card over to show if they answered correctly or not.

Steps for creating flashcards on your own
1. Create evenly shaped squares on a sheet of paper (it may be easier to use resources that offer online printable flashcards, which are listed below).

2. Put the English word on one side of the card and a translation of the word in the student’s L1 on the opposite side of the card

3. On the side with the English word, you should also write the meaning of the word and a sentence or two in simple wording to show how the word is used in context.

4. Place a picture with each word whenever possible next to the word on the English side of the card, and it’s best to use cartoon images with younger students to maintain interest.

Tips for using NGSL flashcards

• Only introduce and use 15 words or less in each lesson, as students often can’t retain more information than this

• Provide words that are not similar to each other regarding both spelling and meaning, because this can confuse students by giving them more things they’ll have to contrast and compare

• Change the order in which you show the cards each time so that students are memorizing the words and their meanings instead of memorizing the words based on the sequence in which they’re shown

Resources:

Canva – a site that allows you to design and print your own flashcards and add words, images, or anything else you’d like to add to them.

Brainscape – another site that allows for flashcard creation but also has many pre-made flashcards which likely use words found on the NGSL.

Quizlet – a fun way for your students to access digital flashcards online and practice with them on their phones or computers at home.

Games

Any ESL vocabulary-based games that allow you to incorporate words from the NGSL into them can be highly effective at teaching these words to students. You’ll want to first introduce words from the NGSL to your students with a warm-up lecture, video, or another approach before playing any games. Below are some examples of classic games that you can use with NGSL words that are appropriate for all learner levels:

Word search

Create a traditional word search worksheet where a grid is filled with words and the letters are individually placed into grid squares, though, of course, you’ll want to use words from the NGSL list for this activity. To the right of the grid, you’ll want to provide a list of these words and try to keep it minimal to around 10 to 15 words.

Students will then search the grid looking for these words, and while they’re looking, they’ll probably occasionally glance at the word list repeatedly, which gives them a lot of exposure to the words with repetition. You can easily create your own word search worksheets online using NGSL terms, and when you’re ready, you can simply download them and print them out.

Pictionary relay

Pictionary is both a classic board game and one that you can play with your students in class using two different tables on opposite sides of the room. With Pictionary race, you’ll split your students up into two groups and assign them to their respective tables. You’ll then ask each group to nominate one student from their group to play the role of the artist, who is typically any student who can draw well or quickly.

You’ll then provide one of the words from the NGSL list to the two students playing the artist role and instruct them not to tell the other students what the word is. These two students will then return to the tables where their groups are and illustrate the word by drawing it on a sheet of paper as quickly as possible.

The other students in the group will simply watch and try to guess what the word may be based on the drawing, and the first group to guess correctly wins a point. The game is then repeated with the next word from the NGSL list.

Hangman

Here’s another classic (albeit morbid) favorite that students love with a focus on using words from the NGSL. Assign a word from the NGSL to a student who is standing at the board and ask them to draw several blank lines corresponding with the number of letters in the word.

Ask the other students to take turns guessing which letters are contained in the word. If a student guesses a letter correctly, then the letter is written on the blank line where it belongs.

For every incorrect guess, the student standing at the board draws one segment/body part of a hanging man. If a student (or team) guesses the word correctly before the hanging man is fully drawn, they win and the game is over, though if the hanging man is drawn first, nobody wins.

NGSL words within context: reading

Simply having your students read a story will often cover many of the words found in the NGSL, regardless of which story you choose. Keep in mind that the NGSL contains the words most frequently used and encountered in English-speaking contexts, and books are no exception to this.

To see this in action for yourself, you can choose any text that you’d like your students to read, and if you can find an online version of it that allows you to copy and paste it elsewhere, you can paste it into the following word frequency tool.

This tool will show you just how frequently specific words appear in the text, so not only can you verify that the text includes many NGSL words, but it can also help you plan your lessons around the stories themselves.

As you introduce new stories to students, you can then get an idea of what words you should focus on for each lesson with vocabulary flashcards and other supplemental activities.

Tips: whenever possible, allow your students to choose which stories they’d like to read, as this can motivate them more for reading. Also, if you want to ensure that the texts your students are reading are appropriate for their age or learning level, you can use Oxford Graded Readers, which have been designed with these factors in mind.

What’s next after teaching the NGSL?

While your students are learning words included in the NGSL, you should be assessing them along the way, which you can do with NGSL-focused quizzes. Once they’ve learned all 2,800 words included on the list, the next thing they should then learn are words that have special purposes, such as those used frequently for academic or business purposes.

To do this, there are three other lists available that you can then incorporate into your lessons and activities:

1. The New Academic Word List (NAWL) – 960 of the most frequently used words in academic English contexts. Download NAWL

2. The TOEIC Service List (TSL) – 1,200 words which, when combined with the NGSL, cover most of the vocabulary used in TOIEC study materials and tests. Download TSL

3. The Business Service List (BSL) – 1,700 words that cover the majority of words used in business English materials and scenarios when combined with the NGSL.

Why these three lists?

The linguists who created the NGSL believe that special purpose words are the next most logical thing that students should learn because although there are billions of more words in the English language, many of which may be used more frequently than these special purpose words, the next few thousand words after the initial 2,800 high-frequency ones may not be quite as useful to students in practical scenarios as these special purpose words are likely to be.

Further reading

• New General Service List (NGSL) website
• New General Service List (NGSL) Wikipedia

If you’re teaching Business English to ESL students, media literacy is one of the most important yet overlooked skills that you can teach them. Not only can it add value to your course that your students will appreciate, but it can also help them perform better in English-speaking business scenarios and can be profitable for you when offered as an additional service.

What is media literacy?

Media is any form of mass communication of information, whether it’s a post on the Internet, an advertisement on TV, or something that’s read in a newspaper. Media literacy is the ability to not only understand this type of information, but to analyze it, question it, and determine whether it’s probably true or false.

Teaching your students this skill can help them better understand the business culture in Western societies and how English is used in business contexts, such as advertisements, where persuasive wording and subliminal messaging are regularly used. Your students may even eventually work in media-based industries where they’ll need a deeper understanding of these things to be successful.

Why teach media literacy?

Improved reading comprehension – when students develop media literacy skills, they’re improving their reading comprehension skills by learning how to read actively instead of just passively.

Enhanced critical-thinking skills – as your students learn how to more easily analyze and decipher what they’re reading, they’re developing key critical-thinking skills, which can help them use Business English more effectively in the real world.

Stronger cultural awareness – by having an understanding of how messages are communicated in Western media, your students gain nuanced insights into Western culture and how it differs from their own.

More productive self-learning – teaching your students how to question the messages they see, hear, and read in Western media sources, such as videos on YouTube, allows them to choose higher quality, more authentic sources to learn from and practice English with at home.

Media forms are ever-evolving – while your students may have media literacy skills toward older forms of media, like printed advertisements or TV commercials, newer forms, such as digital media, are constantly evolving.

Additional income opportunities – by offering media literacy lessons as a supplemental service that’s separate from your Business English course, you’ll have more opportunities to make money as a teacher.

Activities for teaching media literacy

Before starting any of the activities below, you’ll want to introduce the concept of media literacy to your students with a brief lecture or demonstration and explain how English is used in the business world to persuade audiences to believe something, purchase something, or otherwise respond in a certain way.

During the lecture, you’ll want to show students different forms of media, both digital and printed sources. Have them focus on how the style, syntax, and tone differ between varied sources and how these different things might affect the audiences who read or watch the media.

Question and answer

This activity involves watching commercials while both analyzing them and deciphering everything that’s being communicated, whether overtly or subliminally.

Steps:

1. Watch and analyze

You can start this activity by showing your students commercial advertisements, and YouTube is a great resource for finding these. While your students are watching the commercials, you should instruct them to carefully analyze what they’re watching while taking notes about anything they’re noticing. This might include a particular type of syntax, wording, tone, or anything else that stands out to them.

2. Questioning phase

The next phase during this activity is the questioning phase, where you’ll stop the videos and ask your students critical questions about the commercials they just watched. They should refer to their notes while answering your questions, though this isn’t necessary, as your questions may bring up details about the videos that they hadn’t thought of while watching the ads.

Examples of questions you might ask:

• “What product or service is this advertisement trying to sell to you?”
• “Who is the person pitching this product and why they are doing so?”
• “Is what this person is saying believable or do they seem disingenuous?”
• “How likely are you to buy this product based on what they’re saying?”
• “What are some other reasons why this person may be saying these things?”

While the vocabulary used in these examples is intended for adult business English students, you can use simpler wording for those who are younger or less proficient with English. This activity  helps your students learn how persuasive English can be perceived by others and what types of terms, phrases, or tones should be avoided when working in business scenarios.

Sell me this pen

Sell me this pen is a classic activity that’s often used in business scenarios, and some interviewers use it to gauge the selling skills of prospective new hires, so it’s a perfect activity for you to use with your Business English students.

Steps:

1. Pair your students together

This is a paired activity, so the first step is to pair your students together, and while it’s not necessary, it can be helpful to pair students who are at similar English skill levels to each other.

2. Have your students roleplay

Have the students take turns alternating between playing a salesperson role and a prospective customer role. In these roles, the salesperson holds up a pen and describes all the benefits of using it and why the customer should purchase it. The student playing the salesperson role should be as convincing as possible when arguing why the customer should purchase the pen.

3. Review and description phase

After both students have had an opportunity to play the role of salesperson, you should then hold a class discussion where you ask each pair of students what persuasive tactics they used to try to sell the pen to their partners.

4. Analyze the tactics for ethics

Putting your students back into pairs, you’ll now want to have them discuss their tactics with each other and analyze them on an ethical basis. They should be asking each other whether the tactics used were honest or dishonest and provide them with a blank worksheet where they can answer these types of questions in written form so you can review it later.

This activity will help them learn how to better analyze the information that they’re exposed to through the media, but it also has the advantage of teaching students how others might perceive them when they’re pitching a product or highlighting their skills and experience during a job interview.

Tweeting pitches

Twitter has become one of the most popular sites worldwide for creating public messages or announcements that others see, and many companies use it to pitch their services and advertise products. What makes this site unique from many of the other popular social media sites is that users’ posts and comments are limited to 140 characters, and these messages are referred to as “tweets.”

In this activity, your students can practice Business English while learning just how persuasive messages in the media can be, even when they’re limited to fewer words. This activity teaches higher-level English skills because, as researchers at Cornell University pointed out, a message can be more persuasive when it’s simply said in different ways.

Steps:

1. Introduce the concept

Explain to your students how Twitter works, for those who are unfamiliar with it, and ensure that they understand the concept of creating messages that are limited to 140 characters. Show them some examples of business-related tweets that include both a pitch and a call to action (CTA).

2. Create tweets

Have your students create their own tweets, which should also include a pitch and a CTA so they’re business-oriented. If all your students have smartphones or other devices with Internet access, you can have them use mock Twitter tools, like this one at ClassTools, which allow them to create their own fake tweets without signing up for a Twitter account.

If this isn’t feasible, you can simply create worksheets that ask students to write down what they would tweet in 140 characters or less (which is typically around 36 words).

Rewriting media messages

This is a great activity because it not only helps improve your students’ media literacy skills but also allows them to get some hands-on practice with reading, writing, and speaking Business English.

Steps:

1. Analyze a media piece

Show your students an advertisement, a newspaper clip, or any other form of media that uses English business lingo, then ask them to read it and analyze it for a few minutes.

2. Rewrite the piece

After your students have had a chance to read it, ask them to rewrite what they read but with more effective wording. If it was an advertisement, then you’ll want them to use more persuasive wording, and if it was a newspaper article, such as from the finance section of a paper, you’ll want them to write it more concisely or clearly.

3. Read the piece aloud

Once your students have finished writing, you can have them read what they wrote in front of the class. Through peer-to-peer scaffolding, which is where students learn from each other, this can help teach new persuasive wording, business jargon, tones, or other aspects of the media to some students, as they won’t all be at the same level in terms of Business English vocabulary or media literacy skills.

Parting advice and media literacy tools

When teaching media literacy, you should always make an attempt to find out which specific industries your students are interested in entering once they complete your course, and then try to tailor your activities around that to provide more relevancy for them. One great resource that you can use to find more activities is the The News Literacy Project, which is a nonprofit that has many media literacy-focused tools and activities specifically for educators.

As ESL teachers in today’s modern world, we have many technology resources available to us, though few are arguably as useful as podcasts. Not only can they help improve your students’ listening, speaking, and writing skills, but they can also simplify lessons for both you and your students. So, if you haven’t already tapped into this helpful form of media while teaching, here’s how podcasts work and how to use them in your ESL lessons.

What are podcasts?

Podcasts are audio recordings that are either pre-recorded or broadcast live to an audience, and while they’re normally found online on various websites, they can also be found elsewhere, such as on standard or satellite radio stations. The person who records audio during a podcast is known as a podcaster.

Topics discussed during a podcast can vary and can include anything from informational discussions about world events to fictional stories that are read aloud by a podcaster. Some podcasts are even geared specifically toward teaching English, though these may not always be the best choice for your students if you’re trying to expose them to authentic conversations. Podcasts may be recorded by a single podcaster or may involve more than one person, and discussions between two or more people are quite common.

Benefits of using podcasts in ESL lessons

• Enhances listening – listening comprehension skills are enhanced by listening to podcasts

• Improves writing – dictation and writing skills can both be improved according to research

• Real-life authenticity – students hear new words and phrases within authentic contexts

• Accent recognition – accent differences can be heard and distinguished from one another

• Quicker fluency – creating or listening to podcasts can lead to quicker fluency in English

• Builds knowledge – podcasts build background knowledge by providing context around words

• Inspires motivation – students are often more motivated to learn when doing so with podcasts

Podcast activities for your lessons

To immerse your students in the English language with podcasts, you can use any of the following activities below. Just remember to keep your class time in mind when choosing which podcasts you’d like your students to listen to, as many can be quite long and might not meet the time constraints of your lessons.

Pronunciation modeling

Podcasts can be a very effective way of teaching your students about pronunciation or different types of accents. There are many different ways that you can use podcasts to do this, though the following are two of the most common approaches:

Direct pronunciation lessons
With this approach, you can have your students listen to English-focused podcasts that specifically discuss pronunciation (or accents) and provide different examples of how to pronounce English words. There are many podcasts available for free online that teach pronunciation in this way, as well as those that focus more on teaching the differences between accents. 

Pronunciation differentiation
If you’d like your students to learn pronunciation or accents in a more authentic way, you can play different podcasts that are recorded by podcasters from different geographic or regional areas. As an example, you can first play a podcast recorded by someone from the United States, and then play a different podcast recorded by another person who’s from England.

Even better, you can play a single podcast that has two or more people from different places discussing something, whether it’s two people from different countries having a conversation or two people from the same country but from different regions and with different accents.

Cloze podcasts

Cloze exercises are those where students are provided sentences with specific words or phrases missing, and they must complete the sentences by filling in the blanks with the parts that are missing. Cloze podcasts is an activity where your students are doing the same but either during a podcast or after listening to one.

1. Choose a podcast that has its transcript available where all the sentences spoken in the podcast can be easily viewed and then altered. Many podcasts online come with available transcripts, though you can always make your own transcript by listening to the podcast beforehand and writing or typing out each sentence as you hear it.

2. Remove a word or phrase from each sentence that you use from the podcast by omitting it from lines on a worksheet or on a blackboard.

3. Ask your students to listen closely while you play the podcast for the class. You can either have students write down the omitted words as they’re listening to the podcast or ask them to wait until the podcast has finished to see if they remember the words and the sentences in which they were used.

Vocabulary recognition

Podcasts can also be a great way to teach new vocabulary words to students, as they’re an opportunity to hear target words used in real-life contexts, such as dialogues. To carry out a vocabulary recognition activity, you can follow these steps:

1. Find a podcast that uses vocabulary words throughout that you’d like your students to learn and write down the words.

2. Review the list of new vocabulary words with students by writing the words on the board at the start of a lesson while having the students repeat each word aloud after you’ve done so first.

3. Play the podcast that contains the target vocabulary words so that students can hear how the words are used within context, and it might help to replay the sentences that contain these words multiple times. During this step, you should simply ask your students to listen for the words and how they’re being used.

4. Open up a discussion about the vocabulary words that the students heard in the podcast. Ask your students what they think the words might mean now that they’ve heard the words used within context. Provide the meanings of the words to students if they’re unable to guess the correct meanings on their own.

Podcast bingo

An excellent activity for students of all ages, and particularly younger ones, is podcast bingo. This is similar to a regular bingo game, though instead of listening to someone calling out words or numbers, your students will be listening to a podcast instead. This can help develop their English listening skills and can also teach them the meanings of new vocabulary words by learning them within different contexts.

Follow these steps to set up your first podcast bingo game:

1. Choose any podcast that includes key vocabulary words that you’d like your students to learn. Create and provide your students with bingo scorecards that are made up of 25 squares and include these vocabulary words on them. You can create your own bingo cards and print them out in batches of 30 for free here.

2. Play the podcast for your students and have them listen carefully for the vocabulary words. When they hear a word that’s also on their bingo cards, have them either mark it with an X or place a marker piece, such as a colored bingo chip, over it.

3. When a student has marked five squares in a row, they should call out “bingo!” When this occurs, it’s up to you whether you’d like to give them a prize for winning or simply congratulate them on winning, depending on your students and resources.

Create a podcast

If you’re teaching older students, such as those in high school or higher levels, then you can have them create their own podcasts. This is a great way to get them to practice most of the core English language skills they’ll need to use in the real world, including reading, writing, and speaking.

Below are the steps for carrying out this type of activity with your students:

1. Have your students listen to podcasts to get them familiarized with the concept and how podcasting works. For this activity, it’s best to use podcasts that involve more than one person, or podcaster, because this is a group activity.

2. Provide your students with handheld recording devices if possible. If they have their own smartphones in class, then the simpler way of doing this is to have them download free recording apps to their phones.

3. Place your students into groups of two or more students per group, depending on how many podcasters were involved in the earlier recordings, and ask them to work with each other by first writing down the dialogue that they’ll want to discuss. A question-and-answer format where one student asks the other questions is often the best approach for this, as it’s easier for students to understand.

4. After your students have finished writing down their dialogues, have them record podcasts similar to the ones they heard by taking turns reading their respective lines of dialogue. Regardless of how long the original recording was, each group should record a podcast that is typically no longer than two to five minutes long so they don’t feel overwhelmed.

Tip: for ESL lessons, it’s often best to provide your students with a short list of vocabulary words used in the original podcast they’ll be listening to. Similar to the vocabulary recognition activity previously mentioned, you can tell them to listen for these specific words while listening to the podcast so that they can understand how the words are used within context, then ask them to include these vocabulary words in the dialogues they write.

Resources: free podcasts for you to use

English News Weekly
A long-running podcast produced by associate professor Jaime Selwood, who works at Hiroshima University and speaks in a slow manner to assist English learners listening to his podcasts.
Listen now

The English We Speak
A podcast focused on teaching listeners common expressions, phrases, and even slang, which is produced by the BBC. These are perfect for lessons where you have time constraints, as each recording is typically only two to 15 minutes long.
Listen now

Slow English on Deezer
Regularly updated podcasts from a slow-speaking Australian English speaker. These recordings are free during the first month of listening, though there’s a paid membership required after that if you enjoy them.
Listen now

Find your own podcasts
To search for your own podcasts based on the topic you’re teaching, you can use the Google Podcasts service, which features a search bar at the top of the page.
Find one now

Parting advice: keep it authentic

While using podcasts in your ESL lessons, you should never forget the value of authenticity that podcasts provide. As you’re choosing which activities you’d like to use, you should try to provide as much of an authentic experience as you can for your students by allowing them to listen to podcasts without too many interruptions. You should also carefully select podcasts that match both the skill level of your students and the types of conversations or environments where they’ll later need to use their newfound English skills.

When teaching younger ESL students, some may occasionally have behavioral issues that can disrupt your lessons, leading to distractions in the classroom that can affect other students. Classroom management techniques are therefore important, and one of the most useful yet underutilized ones is the use of teaching proximity to maintain control of a classroom. If you’re not already familiar with this technique or using it in your everyday lessons, here’s why you should be.

What is teaching proximity?

If you’ve been teaching for some time, then you’ve likely encountered a scenario where students in the back of the class are misbehaving or otherwise not paying attention during lessons. This is often because of the large amount of distance between you and these students. As you approach them by walking toward the back of the room, their behavior will normally change, at which point you’ll have their attention once again.

This scenario demonstrates the effect that teaching proximity has on students’ behavior. As you get nearer to students, they usually become more well-behaved, and as you move further away from them, they often see this as an opportunity to misbehave. Understanding this concept and using it to your advantage can help to keep your lessons on track without any disruptions or students falling behind because they’re distracted.

What are the three zones of proximity?

The concept of teaching proximity as a technique to control students’ behavior isn’t a new one, as experienced teachers have been using it for quite some time now, though it wasn’t until 2007 when psychologist Fred Jones identified and described the three zones of proximity in the book Tools for Teaching.

The concept of the three zones is simple: students closest to you are located in what’s called the “red zone,” those just outside of this zone are in the “yellow zone,” and those much further away from you in the back of the class are in the “green zone.” Which zone a student is located in will change as you move around the room, as the zones are based on your location and your distance from students.

Red Zone
Think of the red zone as a circular area that surrounds you while you’re teaching and one that extends approximately 8 feet outwards from your location. Students anywhere within 8 feet of you are considered to be in the red zone.

Students within this zone are often better behaved or more focused on tasks than those outside of this zone, though, of course, this isn’t the case with every student. The red color represents STOP, where students within this radius will normally stop misbehaving because you’re within close proximity to them.

Yellow Zone
The area just beyond the red zone, about 8 to 14 feet away from you, is the yellow zone. Students in this area are typically well-behaved, though some may feel more comfortable misbehaving than they would if they were in the red zone.

In the yellow zone, you may find more students not paying attention to what you’re saying or not focusing on activities, and turning your back on students in this zone can easily lead to disruptive behavior. The yellow color represents CAUTION, as students in this zone may be prone to acting up but they’ll be more cautious and observant of your movements when in this zone.

Green Zone
The area in the classroom that’s furthest away from you is the green zone. This is anywhere that’s 15 feet or further away, and it’s the area where a power exchange takes place. Instead of a teacher having control over their students in this zone, it’s the students who are controlling the situation, as they often figure out how to use this area to misbehave without consequences.

Those seated in this area gradually learn how long it takes for the teacher to walk from the front of the classroom to this area. They often become comfortable with misbehaving while in this zone because they know that they have plenty of time to conceal this behavior once the teacher starts to walk to the back of the classroom to investigate where a disturbance is coming from. The green color represents GO, meaning students see this area as a green light to misbehave.

How to use proximity to control a class

The following tips can help you manage disruptive students using proximity.

Apply the three rules of movement

In addition to the three zones of proximity, Jones also suggested that body movement should be used in three ways to take control of the zones. These three “rules of movement” can be broken down as follows:

1. Change proximity zones
To keep all students engaged in your lessons and to minimize classroom disruptions, you should constantly be moving around the room, which changes the proximity zones for students.  Those sitting in the green zones should not remain in these zones long enough to become comfortable with misbehaving. It would be ideal if you could have every student seated in the red zone, but this obviously isn’t possible with large classes, so you should always be moving around the classroom and between rows whenever possible. 

2. Change the fields of view
When students are looking at you while you’re in front of the class, this can become boring for them and lead to distractions and poor behavior. Visual-spatial attention is the attention your students selectively give something that’s within their field of view.

If you’re staying put while lecturing and not moving at all, students may then choose to focus their attention on something else that’s more interesting, such as their classmate sitting next to them or random people they see walking past a window outside.

Instead of staying within the same field of view, move around as much as possible to give your students some variance in what they’re seeing and to keep their visual-spatial attention on you. 

3. Use movement as camouflage
If you notice students misbehaving, other students may not notice this, but if you walk over and say something out loud to the misbehaving students, it could become a distraction for other students. This is why you should use movement as camouflage to carry out corrective actions.

When you move near a student who is talking, playing with a toy, or not paying attention to you, they will likely stop these behaviors once they notice you nearby. More importantly, other students may not even notice that you’re doing this, so you’re replacing your voice with movements to correct actions in a quieter, more subtle way.

Rearrange the classroom layout

The arrangement of the desks and chairs in a classroom plays a significant role in classroom management, as a poor classroom layout can obstruct students’ fields of view or lead to misbehavior. It’s more difficult to move about the room or change proximity zones for students when there’s not a clear path to do so.

Your goal should be to create an interior loop, which is an unobstructed, looping path around the desks that allows you to constantly walk around while shifting students’ proximity zones with every few steps. To create an interior loop, you should choose a classroom layout that permits this by leaving plenty of room between rows or desks for you to freely move about.

Examples of desk arrangements

• Traditional – desks are in straight rows and face the front of the class with plenty of space for the teacher to walk between each row.

• Roundtable – desks are used to form a circular arrangement where students are facing each other, allowing the teacher to walk in a straight circle behind students’ backs.

• Horseshoe – desks are placed side by side in a U-shaped arrangement that allows the teacher to quickly approach each desk from the front of the classroom.

• Groups – desks are used to form groups of four with two pairs of side-by-side desks in each group, which leaves large areas of space between the groups for the teacher to circle the room.

• Stadium – desks are put into rows that are angled so that they’re all facing a focal point in the front of the classroom, and similar to the traditional arrangement, this leaves space for walking between the rows.

Parting advice: don’t overdo it

Now that you’re familiar with the concept of teaching proximity and know how to use it effectively, you should be mindful when using it and take care to not stand too close to your students. Constantly hovering over students or spending too much time near them can make some feel uncomfortable, which can make it difficult for them to concentrate. If you apply the techniques and rules mentioned in this article, such as walking around the room, then this shouldn’t be an issue.

For an ESL teacher, classroom management means not only managing student behavior but other things as well, such as the amount of time spent explaining new concepts. The flipped classroom approach is one of the most useful ways I’ve found to free up classroom time, and it can be an absolute game-changer if you’re not already using it. For a clearer picture of its many benefits, here’s how this innovative approach works and how you can start using it in your teaching practices.

What is a flipped classroom?

The flipped classroom, which is also called an inverted classroom, is a teaching approach where the traditional classroom format is reversed. Its purpose is to allow students to study and learn new concepts at home, so time in class can be better utilized and spent on problem-solving activities or assessments.

The traditional vs. flipped classroom

Traditional classroom
In a traditional classroom, the teacher teaches concepts to students by going over content with them, and any work assigned to the students as homework is typically problem-solving work (e.g. worksheets based on content that was covered in class). An example of this would be if a teacher were to spend a significant amount of class time explaining a concept or reading a story with students, and then following this up by providing a written task to be completed at home.

With this approach, there’s less time in class for students to work on activities that may require a teacher’s support, whether it’s something that students might have a question about or might otherwise need additional assistance with.

Flipped classroom
In a flipped classroom, classroom time is dedicated to both problem-solving activities and assessments, as these may require a teacher to provide support to students, clarify questions, or observe student behaviors. Students are given content to learn on their own outside of class, and they’re then expected to carry out activities relating to this content in class.

For example, if students are already capable of reading on their own, a teacher might have them read a text at home instead of in class, which leaves more time for the students to practice or demonstrate what they’ve learned in class through activities, such as group discussions, presentations, or written tests.

What are the benefits of using a flipped classroom?

• Greater autonomy – students learn to take control of their learning by carrying out activities on their own and without supervision.

• Flexible schedules – students can study on their own time and at their own pace, creating a more relaxed environment for reading and studying.

• Enhanced motivation – when students are given activities that require self-initiative, this can enhance their motivation to complete the activities.

• More production time – students have more time to produce in class what they’ve learned at home, so there’s more time to practice what’s been learned in front of a teacher who can provide feedback.

• Quicker acquisition – by dividing the workload by learning English at home and practicing it in class, students have more time in class to carry out activities that lead to English acquisition and fluency.

Practical steps for setting up a flipped classroom

1. Sell the concept

Before getting started on setting up your flipped classroom format, you’ll need to sell the idea of it to your stakeholders. These are the people who have a stake in a student’s learning, whether it’s a younger student’s parents, the school administrators, or, in the case of adult students, the students themselves.

Outline the benefits

Some stakeholders may assume that you’re wanting to take this approach because it means less work for you. You’ll therefore need to outline the benefits that this approach can provide to students and how it can help them learn English more quickly and effectively.

Detail your role

Stakeholders should also understand that you’ll be spending a fair amount of time setting up this format for the students, so this approach doesn’t just simply let you off the hook as far as your teaching responsibilities go. You should clearly explain to all stakeholders what you as a teacher will be doing when implementing this approach.

2. Curate resources

Once you have your stakeholders on board, you’ll next need to curate all the learning resources that you’ll want your students to access outside of the classroom. You’ll need to present content to them while they’re at home, and the resources you use to do this should be easily accessible at any time.

This can include physical or online materials, as well as digital documents that don’t require an internet connection to be accessed. This is not only a curation phase but also a creative one where you’ll be creating any content that you’ll need and thinking of the different resources you’ll use to present it to your students.

Examples of content resources:

• Physical resources (e.g. books)
• YouTube or other video sites
• Google Slides/PPT presentations
• Portals (e.g. Google Classroom)
• PDFs/Microsoft Word documents

If you curate your content resources carefully and provide detailed instructions, then your students shouldn’t require any assistance when learning on their own. Careful thought should be put into each source of content you provide and how accessible it will be to students.

However, any experienced teacher knows that you should always be prepared for unpredictable scenarios, such as students struggling to access a resource, having technical issues, or forgetting how to do something.

You should therefore provide your students with assistive resources as well so students can get assistance from you or their peers when they need it. If your students are younger, ensure that their parents or guardians have access to these resources as well.

 Examples of assistive resources:

• Your email address
• A class chatroom
• A private forum
• A Facebook group
• Technical guides

3. Inform your students

After you’ve curated your resources, you’ll need to inform your students of what they can expect as far as their workload with at-home assignments, and you should ensure that they understand what you expect from them and what they will be asked to do once they return to class.

While you may have already explained the overall approach to older students during the first step (the selling phase), you may not have informed younger students. Plus, this is a more detailed process, as you now know what resources you’ll be using and how your students should use them.

There should be no confusion as to what your students are expected to do once they’ve been provided with content and are outside of the class.

Set clear expectations, and if you identify an issue with something you’ve curated, such as students not understanding something or not having access at home to a particular resource, remain flexible and be willing to modify or adapt your resources to better accommodate your students based on their feedback during this step.

4. Provide technology training

If you’re simply using books or physical resources for your content, you can skip this step, as your students likely already know how to read a book or find specific pages within it.

If you’re using technology resources, such as YouTube, Google Classroom, or other sources for content, you’ll need to ensure that your students understand how to access these resources and what to do if they encounter problems.

Dedicate some class time to showing your students how to use the resources that you’ll provide to them, and make sure that every student will still be able to access these resources once they’re at home.

5. Assign at-home content

Your next step is to assign the actual content, just as you would with traditional homework or any other assignment. If you’re using reading materials, provide these to your students and explain what pages should be covered.

If the content will be delivered through technological resources, now is the time to provide YouTube links to your students or upload materials to whatever online platform you’ll be using. For example, if you have a PDF document you’d like your students to download, you can upload this to Google Classroom or any other site that provides a means for sharing documents.

6. Create and provide in-class activities

You’ll next need to think about what activities you’ll have your students carry out while in class. Once they learn concepts at home, you’ll then have them demonstrate what they’ve learned by engaging in problem-solving activities or participating in assessments while in class.

Some activities or tasks, such as worksheets, can either be performed at home or in class, and you’ll need to use your better judgment to decide which environment is more appropriate.

Examples of in-class activities:

• Worksheets
• Discussions
• Group work
• Tests/quizzes

Parting Advice: incorporate peer instruction

The point of using the flipped classroom approach is to utilize classroom time in the most efficient way possible. However, some students may still struggle to grasp certain concepts on their own. Peer instruction, which is where knowledgeable students help explain concepts to struggling ones, has been shown to be quite effective as part of a flipped classroom approach. When feasible, facilitating group activities in class or arranging for students to meet online or in person outside of class can work great for this.

If you’ve ever read a story and had trouble understanding what it was about or couldn’t recall important details afterward, then you know how it feels to struggle with reading comprehension. Luckily, there’s an approach that you can use to help your students develop these skills and it’s known as reciprocal teaching. Not only is it effective at refining reading comprehension skills, but it also increases engagement, motivation, and interest, making it a must-use approach in virtually every ESL classroom.

What is reciprocal teaching and how does it work?

Reciprocal teaching is a cognitive approach that helps to build students’ reading comprehension skills by encouraging them to focus on what they’re reading. It accomplishes this by teaching students reading strategies where they either summarize, question, clarify, or predict things related to what they’ve read as part of a group discussion.

It’s referred to as reciprocal teaching because the teacher first explains how the strategies work and models how to use them during initial discussions, while the students then carry out discussions themselves afterward by using the strategies without support. The teacher’s role is, therefore, simply as a mediator to explain how the group discussion process works and to help students understand how to analyze text using the strategies.

What learner levels will benefit from reciprocal teaching?

This approach can be effective for virtually any learner level that has basic reading comprehension skills, and research shows that even learners at a second-grade level can benefit from it. However, while it may be suitable for younger learners, it can be much more effective for older students in secondary school or beyond because it involves abstract thinking, which many younger students struggle with. 

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development argues that children develop abstract thinking skills in their formal operational stage. This stage typically begins when they’re 11 to 12 years old, so students who are these ages or older are likely to respond best to this approach.

The four strategies of reciprocal teaching

During group discussions, students will be asked to carry out the following strategies as part of their roles:

Summarization – a student using this strategy will give a general summary to the group of what they’ve read.

Questioning – this strategy can be used by a student to ask specific questions about the reading text.

Clarification – after a student has asked questions about the text, another will attempt to clarify their questions by answering.

Prediction – the last student, who is asked to predict, will elaborate on what they think will happen next in a story or text.

Five steps for carrying out reciprocal teaching 

To carry out your first reciprocal teaching activity, you can follow these five steps in three phases (introduction, modeling, and production phases):

Introduction phase

1. Grouping and explaining the concept
Reciprocal teaching is a bit unique among cognitive teaching approaches because it’s one where you’ll explicitly describe how it works to your students beforehand. This is the first step, and you’ll explain to your students that there are different ways to analyze a text (summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting) and you’re going to show them how to do this.

You’ll then put your students into groups of four so that there’s a student available to cover each analysis strategy, and while this is ideal, you can form larger groups if necessary.

Tip: explain the concept in both L1 and L2
When possible, explain the concept of reading analysis strategies first in the student’s L1 language (their native language) or, if you have a teaching assistant who can speak the L1, ask them if they can do this for you. Then, explain it again in the L2 (English) so that there are no misunderstandings. While this isn’t necessary, research shows that explaining this concept in both languages beforehand can be quite effective.

Modeling phase

2. Read a section of the text aloud
After introducing the concept to your students, you’ll read a section of the text aloud in front of the class from your source reading material and will have students read along. It shouldn’t be too large of a section, as you’ll want your students to be able to remember important details from the text that you’ve read. However, it will need to be a large enough section where you have enough content and details to analyze.

3. Demonstrate the strategies in use
Once you’ve read the section of a text, you can now demonstrate to your students how they should carry out their roles later based on the strategies they’re given. You should model each of the four actions below, one after another:

Summarize
You should start modeling the strategies and roles by summarizing the text you read. To avoid confusing your students, use the same vocabulary words that were used in the text, meaning don’t paraphrase. Also, make sure to cite some of the text’s key details so students understand that summarizing is based on important details.

Question
You’ll then model the strategy of questioning in which you’ll ask questions aloud about the text, and this can be about anything, such as a character, an event in a story, the meaning of a vocabulary word, or even grammar used in the text.

Clarify
Next, you’ll clarify the questions by answering them yourself aloud with as many details as possible, and you should ensure that your students understand that the roles of questioning the text and clarifying are two separate roles that will be carried out later by two different students.

Predict
Lastly, using cues within the text, you’ll predict in front of the students what you think will occur in the next section of the text. The cues you use will be the details gleaned from the text, and rather than simply predicting what will happen next, you should make those cues clear to your students so they understand how you reached this prediction.

4. Rinse and repeat the previous step
After you’ve modeled all four strategies in front of the students, you’ll need to ensure that they understand the different strategies and roles. You’ll answer any questions they have about the process, and then repeat the modeling activity by reading the following section of the text with the same actions again. Do this as many times as it takes for the concept to sink in so that your students can understand what they’re expected to do.

Production phase

5. Assign roles and provide scaffolding
Once your students start understanding how the group discussion works, you’ll assign them roles based on the four strategies of summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. If you have more than four students in a group, you can assign more than one student to each role, and the roles should all be rotated so that every student gets a chance to use each strategy.

One of the students should also be assigned the role of group discussion leader, which is the role you previously filled as the teacher. This role involves reading the text and then allowing students to use the strategies to analyze it and discuss it within the group.

While this is taking place, you should be monitoring the reading and discussion so that you can offer support (teacher-to-student scaffolding) as needed, but you’ll also want to gradually remove that support by allowing knowledgeable students to start assisting others in this role.

What are the benefits of using reciprocal teaching?

If you’re not already sold on the concept of reciprocal teaching, here are some of its many benefits:

• Improves comprehension – when students are encouraged to actively analyze the texts they’re reading, this leads to better reading comprehension skills, as they’re learning the metacognitive strategies that they need to make sense of what they’re reading.
  
• Boosts engagement – students are more focused on what they’re reading when they’re given a purpose and a reason to read a text. This can boost their engagement and lead to improvements in both interest and motivation as well.  
  
• Builds independence – by first supporting students in group discussions and then allowing them to carry these out on their own, reciprocal teaching helps to build students’ sense of independence.
  
• Utilizes peer scaffolding – one of the most effective ways to teach students a concept is to allow their peers to do this instead when it’s appropriate to do so. Students can learn different techniques for carrying out reciprocal teaching roles by first observing their peers in these roles.

• Enhances awareness – as students develop better reading skills through this approach, they will not only notice this but also become better at recognizing where improvements still need to be made.

Reciprocal teaching resources

While you can carry out this approach on your own and with your own materials, the following resources, a bookmark and a graphic organizer, can be referenced or printed out. These images can help your students when it comes to remembering how to carry out reading analysis strategies:

• Reciprocal teaching bookmark
• Reciprocal teaching graphic organizer

Always provide a comfortable learning environment

Reciprocal teaching leads to student independence, but some students may struggle to reach that level if they feel insecure about their reading abilities and are afraid of taking risks. To address this, you should always pay attention to the learning environment that you’re creating for your students. They’ll be more willing to participate and less fearful of taking risks when in a warm, comfortable environment where you show them that it’s okay to make mistakes.

When teaching English to non-native speakers, your students are often coming from different backgrounds and with different prior experiences. This can make it very difficult to teach anything if you’re trying to provide the same teaching instruction and materials to all students. Differentiated instruction has become a popular way of teaching ESL because it simply works, and if you’re not already utilizing it in your classroom, here’s why you should and how to do so.

What is differentiated instruction?

Students have variable learning styles, skills, and strengths, and they respond to different teaching styles and content differently. Differentiated instruction is an approach to teaching that considers all of this. A teacher who uses differentiated instruction is thinking about the different methods that they can use to design content, present it, and assess student performance. 

What areas can be differentiated?

The three areas of instruction that can be differentiated are:

• Content – what students should be learning during a lesson
• Process – how students should complete learning activities
• Product – how students demonstrate what they’ve learned

As a teacher, you should be asking yourself how you can provide fair but different accommodations for students in each of these three areas based on their differences and needs.

Why should I use differentiated instruction?

Every teacher should be using differentiated instruction, regardless of what subject they’re teaching. Research shows that it can improve students’ reading, writing, and math skills, as well as student behavior and teacher morale.

Another study showed that students in a differentiated group demonstrated a greater understanding of math concepts than those taught with traditional instruction. So, if you aren’t already using this approach, it’s probably exactly what you need to help your students learn English more quickly while making your job as a teacher much easier.

When should I use differentiated instruction?

This approach should not be used during every lesson, as whole group instruction still works very well in some circumstances. Differentiated instruction is a powerful tool, but one with a very specific use. While every teacher should be using it frequently, it does not need to be used in every scenario, as you would only use it when you anticipate or notice students struggling with traditional group instruction.

Examples of when to use this approach

You would use differentiated instruction in the following scenarios:

• A student doesn’t have as much prior knowledge about a topic as others and you notice this.
• A student is knowledgeable about a topic but can’t demonstrate that knowledge well on tests.
• A student has a disability that makes it difficult for them to complete tasks as quickly as others.
• A student exhibits lower-level reading skills while all their peers are operating at higher levels.
• Some of your students are unable to comprehend a concept that their peers easily understand.

Strategies for differentiating content

1. Differentiating content 

Provide content in different formats
We know that students’ learning styles differ, as some learn best by reading things, while others benefit most from hearing things or experiencing them. This is what separates the four primary learning modalities (visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic).

While it would be ideal to learn which style each of your students uses and then provide them with individualized materials that appeal to this style, this obviously isn’t practical, as it would take too much time when teaching large classes. Instead, you can design your content to appeal to as many styles as possible, so every student is having their learning style accommodated. 

Rather than simply handing out a book and having the whole class read it, you can have students read in groups, so both the reading and aural styles are being appealed to, instead of just the reading style. When showing videos, they should be accompanied by text subtitles, and whenever possible, realia and other hands-on material should be used to accompany other types of materials.

Match content to students’ needs 
Because your students are operating with different knowledge and skills, your content should match that so no student is asked to complete content that is beyond their current skill level. Bloom’s taxonomy is a framework that details the different skill levels that students are able to operate at. Some students may only be able to remember and understand things they’ve learned, while others may be more capable and can also apply and then analyze what they’ve learned.

Using this framework, you should observe your students to determine their different skill levels, then differentiate activities to meet their needs. You can have lower-level students demonstrate that they can remember and understandthings while having higher-level students show that they can apply and analyze things,

Worksheets, for example, can be variated to cover the same topic and content, though in different ways, with some students demonstrating lower-level skills and others demonstrating higher-level skills to match their needs.

2. Differentiating process

Create groups based on abilities

It can sometimes help to separate your class into smaller groups based on their knowledge or skill levels. Not only does this allow you to provide content specifically tailored to each group and their skill level, but it also helps students feel more comfortable with the learning process itself.

Peer scaffolding is when two students are working together on a task and knowledge is transferred from one student to another. When students are “on the same page” and understand each other because they’re at similar skill levels, then it can make the learning process much more comfortable for them, which can lead to greater learning.

When explaining things to each group, you’ll also be able to explain at a level that all students in a particular group can understand, since they’re all at similar skill or knowledge levels.

Set aside time for struggling students

When planning out your lessons, you should always set aside some time within each lesson for helping struggling students. Some of your students will likely breeze through tasks, while others may need additional support to complete them.

When you’re designing tasks for your lesson, you should design them to be finished a bit earlier but have some extra activities ready for those who finish early. You can offer an extracurricular activity, such as an additional worksheet with an incentive for finishing it, or you can have a fun activity that keeps advanced students engaged while you walk around the room to assist those who are struggling. 

3. Differentiating product

Use a rubric that considers all skill levels
Rubrics, if you’re not already familiar with them, are tools that can be used to assess proficiencies. They typically appear as tables or grids where all the varying proficiency levels for a particular skill are shown. Here’s an example of a speaking and pronunciation rubric. They can help you gauge how skilled your students are and identify which students may be struggling to learn a specific skill or concept.

Example: writing proficiency levels

To assess your students’ writing skills, a typical rubric might show the following proficiency levels:

• Poor – student can write some words but misspells others
• Fair – student can write most words but not full sentences
• Good – student can write full sentences with some errors
• Excellent – can write full sentences that are free of errors

In the example of writing proficiencies above, instead of simply requiring words to be written to be considered at the fair proficiency level, you could also consider how well the student uses punctuation or whether it’s only certain types of words that they are struggling with (e.g. struggling only with big words while writing all small words correctly.)

Allow skills to be demonstrated differently

While tests and worksheets are the most common types of assessments that teachers use to assess skills, they don’t normally allow room for differentiation. When you’re providing all your students with the same type of assessment, whether it’s the same test or observing students in the same way, you’re not considering that students have different ways of expressing themselves. 

You should therefore provide your students with choices when it comes to assessments. For example, for students who are struggling to finish a multiple-choice test, you could instead conduct a face-to-face Q&A session and ask them similar questions through that format.

Rather than having students come up to the board to write things, which might make some nervous, you can give them a choice of either writing on the board or at their desks, and then simply observe what they’ve written while at their desks.

Question list for differentiating instruction

Always ask yourself the following things when differentiating instruction:

• Does every student have the same prior knowledge?
• Do all students have the same reading/writing skills?
• What different learning styles do my students have?
• Are there any behavioral issues affecting learning?
• Are any of my students disabled or special needs?

Differentiated instruction works best proactively

While differentiated instruction can be useful to address issues in the classroom, it’s best to use it proactively rather than reactively. This means that you should always try to predict scenarios where differentiated instruction will be needed, rather than waiting until some of your students are already struggling before using it. By gauging your students’ prior knowledge and skills before designing your lessons, you can have a better idea of when and how to use this approach.

When teaching ESL, every teacher wants their students to learn English quickly, so it makes sense when new teachers try to provide their students with as much information as possible during lessons. However, regardless of how ambitious you are as a teacher, your students can only remember so much of what you teach them. One way to get around this obstacle is to use cognitive load theory to your advantage. By presenting information in strategic ways, you can make life easier for both your students and yourself.

What is cognitive load theory?

Cognitive load theory (CLT) is based on the concept that your students have two different cognitive functions: one that processes new information, which is called working memory, and one that stores information as long-term memory. The brain can only process so much information at once between these two functions, and new information can be lost and not stored in memory if the brain is overloaded and processing too many things at once.

Working memory vs. long-term memory

Working memory – this is short-term memory where your students briefly remember information they’ve just learned minutes before but haven’t yet stored that information as long-term memories to recall it later.

Long-term memory – this contains the information that your students can remember long after a lesson, even days, weeks, months, or years down the line. The brain has organized this information, which allows your students to store it for longer periods.

The brain can only take in as much as the seat can endure

W.S.Churchill

How can CLT help me as a teacher?

CLT argues that your students have a limited amount of working memory (short-term memory) available and a limited capacity to store long-term memory as well. Using this theory, you can change how you present your information to your students so that they don’t experience cognitive overload, which is when their brain stops storing information because it’s overloaded with too much already.

CLT can be used to help your students use both their working memory and long-term memory more efficiently. This means that you’ll be spending less time repeating things and wondering why your students aren’t remembering what you’ve taught them and more time moving on to the next topic, as your students can learn and remember new concepts more easily and quickly.

What are the benefits of reducing cognitive load?

Reducing your students’ cognitive load can help in the following ways:

• Improves memorization of new concepts 
• Enhances comprehension of information
• Maintains student interest in new topics 
• English taught is acquired more quickly
• Makes your job as a teacher much easier

Using schemata to reduce cognitive load

When your students receive new information, they use schemata to then convert that new information into long-term memory. Schemata are the different ways that the brain organizes information, which makes it easier for it to be recalled later. This also helps to reduce cognitive load, as your students don’t have to think as hard about something to remember it.

An example of this would be if you were to store and recall the word “toad” by remembering that it rhymes with a word you already know, such as “road.” Another example would be how your brain might remember the word “blue” by associating it with the sky or water and thinking about these things when trying to recall the word.

Strategies to reduce cognitive load

As an ESL teacher, you can use the following strategies to reduce your students’ cognitive load:

Use chunking to present new information

Chunking is taking bits of new information and putting them into groups so they’re easier to remember. Think of these groups as categories, which helps to break down information into smaller bits while creating associations between words.

An example of this would be if you were teaching your students about modes of transportation, and instead of simply naming different modes, which can be difficult to remember, you group them based on their characteristics.

You would group land modes (e.g. cars, trains, etc.) by presenting them first and purposely telling your students that they all use land. You would then present modes that use the air in a group (e.g. airplanes, helicopters, etc.), and then aquatic modes (e.g. boats, submarines, etc.).

Research shows that chunking helps students retain and recall new information more easily, though it also shows that learners can only recall about three to five chunks at a time, and knowing this can help you predict student mistakes if you know that they’ll have to recall more than three to five groups at a time.

Tip: use broader categories as chunks

You should therefore consider chunking all information you present to your students and plan your lessons out to include only three to five chunks. If you have a lot of information to cover that won’t fit in three to five chunks, you should consider using larger chunks instead.

Categorize the information into larger, broader categories if you need to, and always remember to explain to students why each word or concept falls into a specific category (e.g. “The car goes in the land category because it has wheels.”)

Activate prior knowledge

Students learn better when they can use what they already know as support to better comprehend new concepts. Long-term knowledge of information, also known as prior knowledge, lasts longer than the type of short-term knowledge that’s stored temporarily in working memory.

You’ll therefore want your students to activate and use this as much as possible, and the best way for you as a teacher to do this is to build associations between new information and older, stored information.

You should think about what your students already know, whether it’s something you’ve taught them in a previous lesson or something they’ve learned in their everyday life. A simple example of this would be if you were to carry out a discussion about a previous topic and then use similarities between that topic and a new one to introduce the new one.

Benefits of activating prior knowledge
Activating prior knowledge offers two main benefits:

Helps build associations
Schemata help your students remember and recall information, and by building associations between what students know and what they’re currently learning, you’re giving them a framework that they can use to build schemata (e.g. recalling something more easily by thinking about something associated with it.)

Reduces cognitive load
The cognitive load of having to remember new information can be lightened by making it easier for the brain to retrieve that information. Prior knowledge is easier for your students to recall than new information. Once stored information is associated with new information, your students will expend less cognitive energy trying to remember the new information.

Use imaginative activities

To strengthen long-term memory, you should teach your students to remember things using schemata in their brains rather than simply relying on visual, auditory, or other associations. Students learn in different ways and things like text, audio, and video can all help support that learning in the beginning but should serve as temporary scaffolding that’s eventually removed. 

Your students need to learn to remember and recall things on their own, without being able to use these things for support. Long-term memories are strengthened through visualization and imagination, so simply asking your students to imagine things or think about them can help transfer information from working memory to long-term memory. This is a great way to develop automaticity in your students, which is the ability to recall or perform things without thinking much about them.

Tip: have students visualize concepts without support
To encourage your students’ imagination, you can slowly remove the temporary support they’re using, whether it’s text in a book or images associated with words. After your students can recall information with these supportive aids, remove them and ask your students to recall or use the information using just their memory. You can also use imagination-based worksheets to encourage this.

Eliminate extraneous cognitive load

The three different types of cognitive load can be defined as:

Intrinsic cognitive load – the amount of mental processing your students direct toward a topic or problem.

Germane cognitive load – the amount of mental processing your students use to turn working memory into long-term memory.

Extraneous cognitive load – the amount of mental processing your students direct to things not related to the topic or problem at hand.

Tips for eliminating extraneous cognitive load
Extraneous cognitive load can negatively affect your students’ learning, so your focus should be to remove it completely by presenting your information to students in a simpler way, giving them less to think about.

You can eliminate this type of cognitive load by doing the following:

• Make all instructions as clear as possible
• Ensure that students can access resources
• Leave out any non-essential information
• Write all words in an easy-to-read way
• Remove all distractions from the room
• Number steps to reduce students’ stress

Parting advice: always consider emotional load as well

When your students are worried about something or experiencing stress, this emotional load can have a major impact on their cognitive load because they’re thinking about things unrelated to learning (i.e. extraneous cognitive load). While numbering steps was suggested as one way of countering this because it can make certain processes less intimidating, you should continue to think of other ways that you can eliminate unnecessary stress in the classroom to reduce cognitive load and enhance learning.

• mathematics (noun): the study of numbers, quantity and space
• maths (British), math (American): mathematics

When I first started teaching ESL in a foreign country, one of the first classes that I taught was a math class for ESL learners. This is quite common in schools that have an intensive English program (IEP) where many different subjects are taught in English to students who are learning it as a second language. Despite some initial apprehension, I learned the following strategies early on that greatly helped me, which I continue to use to this day.

Build on existing knowledge

When introducing math topics to your students, try to do so along with topics, words, or concepts that they’re already familiar with. Don’t just leap into teaching new math-based English words to your students without some background support.

Instead, start the lesson with the words they’ve already learned and are comfortable with, then slowly introduce any new words or concepts into the lesson.

This is known in linguistic circles as “activating prior knowledge,” and it can enhance both English and math skills in many ways.

Activating prior knowledge:

• Builds on what students already know: Students are learning how to connect things they know to new concepts, which teaches them how to use prior knowledge in different contexts.
  
• Improves vocabulary memorization: When previously learned vocabulary is paired with new vocabulary words, word associations are formed, which makes it easier to remember the new words.
  
• Makes new concepts less intimidating: Incorporating concepts and vocabulary terms that students are both familiar and comfortable with helps to make new concepts less intimidating.

Incorporate visual aids

When introducing new math concepts to your students, you should do so with visual aids. While math problems are typically written on a board in front of the class, which is a type of visual aid that allows plus and minus signs to be seen by all, it’s simply not enough when you’re teaching both math and English at the same time.

You should therefore use visual aids that not only show math problems and the signs that go with them (plus, minus, multiply, divide, etc.), but also the spellings of words. Both the numerical and the written forms should always be shown to ESL students since they need to learn both.

When showing a plus sign on the board or a flash card, it should have the word “plus” spelled out below it, and for younger students, you should be walking them through how to spell it by reading each letter aloud (e.g. “P-L-U-S, plus!”).

Example of a math problem with both numerical and written formats:

• 1 + 1 = 2
• One plus one equals two

Create English-based math problems

This approach builds on the previously mentioned one but is more appropriate for more advanced students. Once they’re able to write full English sentences, you can have them write sentences that incorporate both math problems and English.

Example: write 3 – 2 in a sentence and solve it.

1. You could demonstrate this to your class by first showing students the numerical math problem (e.g. 3 – 2 = ?).

2. You could then write a sentence on the board, such as, “Doug had three apples and ate two. Now, he has one apple left.”

3. Next, you would give your students a new numerical problem on the board, then ask them to create a sentence with it.

This activates many different skills, including critical thinking skills, and will help your students learn both English and math more quickly with a single activity that combines both. While the example given is a simple one, you can make it more advanced with multiplication, division, or just about any other type of math problem.

Use cardinal and ordinal forms

You should also always be showing your students both the cardinal and ordinal forms of numbers when there’s an opportunity to do so. Cardinal refers to amounts and ordinal refers to positions.

They should know that both “one” and “first” correspond with the number 1, and they should be able to spell these words while also understanding them when they’re used in math problems.

As a versatile teacher, there are many times when you’ll need to use ordinal words in both your English and math lessons (e.g. “What is the third word in the sentence?”).

Your students will therefore need to eventually know these words when speaking and reading English, so you might as well teach them this while it’s relevant to both the subjects of English and math, which can enhance the learning of both.

Warm up with vocabulary words

You should start every lesson with a quick five-minute warm-up activity where you write both new and old vocabulary words on the board and have students repeat them.

The words should all be math-based words, with a mix of vocabulary that you’ll be covering for the first time in the current lesson and some of the words that have already been taught in previous lessons.

Examples of math-focused vocabulary words:

• add
• sum
• plus
• times
• divide
• minus
• equals
• product
• subtract
• multiply

This helps to familiarize the students with new words while jogging their memory when it comes to old words so they don’t forget what you’ve already taught them.

This should be a traditional vocabulary listen-and-repeat exercise where you simply point at the words, say the word aloud, then have your students repeat. You can also spell out the word after saying it aloud and have your students do the same.

Utilize English-based worksheets

While most of the previous tips can be helpful in the classroom, you’ll still want your students to practice their English and math skills at home as well. In this case, you can use English-based math worksheets, which are those that are specifically designed to teach both English and math skills. 

You can find these types of worksheets on many sites online and then print and download them for free. ISL Collective is one such site, which offers plenty of pre-made worksheets specifically for this purpose.

If you want worksheets that incorporate a specific topic or concept that you can’t find in pre-made worksheets, you can always make your own. You can do this either from scratch using Microsoft Word or by using free online tools, like Canva or EnglishClub Worksheet Maker.

Require sentence frames

As a form of scaffolding, which is any type of temporary support given to students while they’re learning, the use of sentence frames can help teach students how to blend both math and English in a practical way.

When carrying out activities that involve speaking, such as posting a problem on the board and then calling upon students to answer with the solution in front of the class, you should provide a sentence frame for students to answer with. This is a type of template that requires the student to respond in a specific format using the English words that you’d like them to practice with.

Sentence frame examples (from basic to more advanced):

• “The sum of ___ plus ___ is ___.”
• “The total is _____ because we add _____ to _____.”
• “_____ plus _____ equals _____ because we add _____ to _____.”
• “The answer to the problem is _____ because we divide _____ by _____.”

As your students solve solutions and answer in front of the class, you should encourage them to format their answers by using a sentence frame that’s written on the board so that every response is not only an opportunity for the responding student to practice both English and math, but for those listening to them to hear a repetition of how these two topics can be used together.

Support with manipulatives

While visual aids can help to show students both math symbols and their English spellings, this can be enhanced by also providing some manipulatives, which are physical, interactive materials that correlate with the topics. Many learners are kinesthetic learners, which means they like to learn with hands-on activities.

While teaching your math lessons, you can incorporate hands-on activities, such as by providing students with items that they can use to subtract, add, multiply, and divide, whether it’s blocks, toys, or even pieces of candy.

Although this doesn’t directly teach ESL skills, it makes it easier for you to appeal to all types of learners, and helping your learners learn the math aspect of a lesson more quickly allows them to also maintain their focus on the language aspect.

Parting advice: challenge your students

While you’re teaching, your students are learning what math problems look like and how to solve them. You can always help them refine these skills by encouraging them to create their own math problems instead of simply solving the ones that you provide.

Once they can make their own numerical math problems and solve them, you should then challenge them to do the same by writing their math problems as words in English. By sharpening both creative- and critical-thinking skills, you’re enhancing their math and English skills as well.

What is the Montessori Method?

The Montessori Method was developed by Dr. Maria Montessori in the early 1900s as an alternative approach to teaching that allows students to learn English or any other subject in a self-directed way.

Traditional teaching methods normally require a teacher to direct students on which activities to perform and how to carry them out, while the Montessori Method allows students to have more choice in how they learn.

This type of independence is known as learner autonomy, and not only can it be a more effective way for your students to learn English, but it can make your job as a teacher much easier.

What are some of the benefits of the Montessori Method?

This approach can benefit students in the following ways:

• Builds self-confidence
• Teaches self-regulation
• Encourages cooperation
• Increases independence
• Inspires artistic creativity
• Enhances critical thinking
• Fosters overall well-being
• Sparks intrinsic motivation

How are Montessori activities carried out?

In a traditional Montessori classroom, you’ll set up tables, which function as stations, with different topics represented at each one and different activities. Montessori classrooms normally teach multiple subjects at once, so one table may be focused on Science, while another has a Math activity.

For English activities, you can offer minimal support by introducing them to students, and this may be done on a one-on-one basis as you notice specific students showing interest in the activity at the English workstation you’ve set up.

Montessori English activities

The following are three easy Montessori-based activities for teaching English to younger, beginner-level students one-on-one:

Activity #1: Sandpaper Letters

One of the many activities that Marie Montessori recommended is Sandpaper Letters, which is a perfect activity for younger ESL learners who are learning the English alphabet for the first time. With this activity, you’ll have two decks of large cards with all the letters of the alphabet on them.

These cards can be purchased online or you can make your own. They’re basically paper cards that have large letters on them, and the shapes of the letters are slightly raised above the paper, as they have sand or another material attached to them.

The letter shapes are therefore palpable, allowing your student to feel the shape of the letters as they run their fingers across the card. Consonants and vowels should be separated into two different colors, with red and blue being the two most commonly used ones.

How it works

To have your student engage in this activity, you should:

1. Take three letters out at a time and lay them on a table in front of your student.
2. Have your student choose which letter they’d like to learn first, and once they’ve chosen one, model an action for them by saying the sound aloud while following the letter’s shape using your finger on the paper.
3. Have your student do the same with their finger while you say the sound out loud.
4. Ask your student to choose another and repeat these steps, though in many cases they may then choose one on their own without having to be asked once their interest is piqued.

Tip: how to make Sandpaper Letter cards yourself

1. Use colored paper as cards by cutting each sheet of paper into a smaller square or rectangular shape.
2. Draw or trace each letter of the alphabet on each card, but make sure to make the letters large and wide to give them a recognizable shape.
3. Use a glue stick to go over the letter shapes, so you’re filling in any of the empty spaces inside each shape. Then, use sand, sugar, or any other gritty material by pouring it over each card until it sticks to the paper.

Activity #2:  Three-Part Cards

Three-Part Cards, also known as Nomenclature Cards, involves the use of three cards all associated with the same vocabulary word or concept. Using the word “dog” as an example, the first card would be an image of a dog with the word “dog” printed directly below the image.

The second card would only be an image of a dog without the word below it. The third card would simply be the printed word “dog” with no image above it. You’ll have many cards for this activity for all of the vocabulary words you’d like to teach, each with their three respective parts (image and word, image only, and word only). You can find these types of cards online on many sites, such as Teachers Pay Teachers.

How it works

Part 1: Model the word+image 
There are many different ways that you can prepare this activity for your students, but the most common way is to lay multiple cards on the table (e.g. dog, cat, bird, fish, etc.), but only the first card for each image (the card that has both the image and the word beneath it). To keep things simple, you should only place about 3-7 cards on the table.

Point at the first card, which in this example is the first dog card, and say “dog” while pointing at the image, then point at the word beneath it and say the same. If your student follows by either pointing themselves or saying the word aloud, that’s great, but you shouldn’t push them to do so, as speaking isn’t necessary just yet.

Part 2: Model the image only
In the second part of this activity, you’ll then take out the second card associated with the dog (the card that has the image but no word on it). You’ll then lay this on the table and say the word “dog” as you slide it toward the first dog card and place it directly next to it. This allows your student to see that you’ve matched the two images together while they’re hearing you say the word.

Part 3: Model the word only
The third step is similar to the last, and as you might’ve guessed already, you’ll now take out the third dog card (the card with just the word “dog” printed on it with no image). Like the last, you’ll say the word “dog” while sliding the card next to the other two dog cards. 

Your student then follows
Now that you’ve modeled how to carry out this activity, your student can do the same while you simply provide minimal support as you place the cards on the table and introduce them by saying the words aloud.

Activity #3: Discovery Basket

Discovery Basket is an activity that has many variations, though the most common and basic way to use it with young learners is to hide items in a basket and have your student discover them while you teach them what the items are.

You have virtually unlimited possibilities when it comes to the types of items you can use for this, as some teachers use only items that start with the same letter, while others keep the activity focused on items that all fall within the same topic or concept.

How it works

1. Prepare the basket
Gather different items and put them in a basket where they’re hidden under foam, confetti, a small blanket, or anything else that works to conceal them.

2. Student discovery process
Allow your student to choose an item from the basket by feeling around in the basket until they find one. Once they pull it out, say the name of the item out loud and have the student repeat this by saying it as well. One by one, allow your student to do the same with all the other items until they’ve all been pulled out of the basket.

3. Listen and find an item
To make this activity more fun for your student yet more difficult, you can call out the name of an item and have your student search the basket for the item. This activates their senses even more as they’re paying close attention to what they’re feeling while listening closely to what you’re saying.

Benefits
Similar to the first activity, this one is highly sensorial, as it’s hands-on and incorporates tactile, auditory, and visual senses. Students are more likely to remember things that they can see, hear, and touch.

Final advice: provide only the initial support

Being a Montessori-based English teacher differs from a traditional English teacher because you’re only providing minimal support while allowing your students to discover and interact with things on their own. This minimal level of support is known as autonomy support, and while you play a role in introducing and modeling the activities above, you should always allow your students to perform the choosing, thinking, and discovering aspects of the activities on their own.

Related links

• Maria Montessori
• Montessori schools
• What is Montessori? 7 principles of the Montessori Method