Teaching English Language Learners: It's not all fun, games and flashcards.
In this article from Edutopia, author Carly Berwick describes her encounters with English Language Learners (ELLs) as a Saturday afternoon volunteer at an ESL tutoring session in Jersey City, NJ. Despite Berwick's many years of classroom experience as an English teacher, she admits that teaching English as a second language to students with varying levels of preparedness is complex and stressful (Berwick, 2018). The students she teaches are mostly Syrian. She describes the students as eager to learn, but faced with many challenges including skipping grade levels, unstable incomes, and inconsistent educations. This is the new face of American education. One in every ten U.S. students is now an ELL, and it is the fastest growing population of students in the nation (Berwick, 2018). Speaking slowly, using visuals, games, and flashcards are the obvious tactics to those who never taught ELLs before. Other solutions for educating this diverse group of students mu...
