Quick Tip for English Language Development Teachers

• Download Quick Tip for English Language Development Teachers

Secondary ELD Teachers, check out this week’s ELD Quick Tip! This week you’ll learn a listening strategy that you can use in any ELD class and how to get rid of old assignments in Vista with a new term.

Strategy to Try: 5 and 2

To help your MLs develop active listening skills, chunk your instruction using a 5 minute/2 minute listening cycle. Instruct for 5 minutes and then have students respond to a prompt for 2 minutes, giving them a chance to immediately apply new language and learning. Here are some ideas for your 2-minute response time:

• turn and talk with a partner
• reciprocal teaching (students paraphrase what they’ve just heard)
• choral response (the teacher asks a question and the class responds in unison)
• notes review (students review the notes they’ve taken and highlight key ideas)
• written response
• questions (students write or ask questions related to recent learning)
• vocabulary sentences (students write or say sentences using academic vocabulary that they’ve just learned)

Examples

• Get Ready: Many of the units have a video for students to watch. Immediately after watching the video, have students imitate the language they’ve just heard. Provide sentence frames or word banks to support them.
• Bridges: The grammar lessons are a great place for students to listen and then practice! Teach the tutorial at the beginning of the lesson and then have students use the grammar rule in a sentence with partners.
• Engage: Each unit has a listening strategy lesson. Teach students the strategy, have them listen to a short clip and then practice the strategy with a partner or group.

Old Assignments in Vista

With a new term starting, you may want to unassign old Vista assignments completely, which removes them from your Vista gradebook and from your students’ to-do list. To unassign multiple assignments at once, go to Assign > Assignment Calendar and look for the due date of those assignments > Select the activities you want to unassign > Click Unassign.