Classroom Recommendations
المؤلف:
Jane D. Hill Kathleen M. Flynn
المصدر:
Classroom Instruction that works with English Language Learners
الجزء والصفحة:
P33-C3
2025-09-05
360
Classroom Recommendations
We recommend using rubrics to provide feedback on declarative knowledge (information) or procedural knowledge (processes and skills). This practice produces many benefits when used with ELLs in a mainstream class. When rubrics are tied to a student’s work, the student better understands expectations. Rubrics also allow grading to be less subjective and more comprehensible to the student.
If ELLs can be involved in the development of their own rubrics, all the better! When rubrics are jointly constructed, there is a clearer understanding of what constitutes an acceptable performance, and the rubric score becomes far more meaningful than a traditional letter grade or even a teacher-created rubric.
Teachers should also be sure to provide feedback on assessments. Some of the best feedback you can give ELLs is letting them know what was correct or incorrect in their use of written English. You will need to walk a careful line when correcting errors, as you want to identify essential corrections but not overwhelm or discourage students by identifying all of the errors you see or hear.
When giving feedback on written language, you should make sure that students understand a system of correction symbols, such as those presented in Figure 1.
As a student’s English proficiency progresses, errors can be marked in ways that require more and more of the student’s attention. Earle-Carline (n.d.) recommends the following approach to marking errors for ELLs, in which the teacher scaffolds learning by making the student work harder to identify the error as her English proficiency increases:
1. Circle or underline each error and write the correction symbol above it.
2. Highlight the error without supplying the symbol.
3. Write only the symbol in the margin of any line with this error.
4. Put only a check in the margin indicating that there is an error of some sort. (p. 1)
Classroom Instruction That Works also recommends student-led feedback, in which students explain to each other—in pairs or small groups—what is correct or incorrect in a product. However, peer feedback never means that students score each other’s papers or issue grades to each other. Fathman and colleagues (1992) report that, for ELLs, peer feedback can be more beneficial than teacher feedback because the students may feel less self-conscious receiving corrections or recommendations in a small group.
The Word-MES formula can help you to match oral and written corrective feedback to your ELLs’ stage of language acquisition as follows.
Preproduction
Students will benefit from help with vocabulary and word selection. These students can respond by pointing or gesturing. Instead of asking a question requiring a verbal response, prompt with “Point to” or “Show me.” After students point, give feedback by saying, “Yes, that is a (name of item).”
Early Production
Students need you to provide feedback by modeling correct English whenever possible. For example, if a student says or writes, “Goed the game,” model the correct utterance by offering, “Oh, you went to the game.” The key here is subtle modeling. Overt correction can inhibit a student from using language.
“Syntax surgery” is a useful strategy for helping students to see differences between the word order in English and the word order in their primary language (Herrell & Jordan, 2004). First, you identify a sentence the student has said or written incorrectly. Then you write the words on a sentence strip, cut it apart, and reorganize the words into correct English order. When students see the sentence rearrangement and hear your explanation, they are more likely to use the correct syntax in the future. For example, placing the adjective after the noun is a common mistake for Spanish-speaking students when learning English, as this is the correct word order in Spanish. To perform syntax surgery, you would select a phrase or sentence (e.g., “dog brown”) and rearrange it in the correct order (“brown dog”) while explaining why you did so.
Speech Emergence
Students can use your assistance focusing on finer points of grammar by expanding a sentence verbally or by writing an expanded sentence for the student. If the student says or writes, “The boy wore a coat to school,” the teacher can expand the sentence by adding an adjective: “The boy wore a warm coat to school.” A student in this stage could also be exposed to using coordinating conjunctions (e.g., and, but, or) in compound sentences. You can therefore expand what these students say or write by joining two simple sentences.
Intermediate and Advanced Fluency
Students should be using language to compare, describe, debate, persuade, justify, create, and evaluate so they can sound like a book. The structure of their sentences, the use of vocabulary, and the overall organization of their written work should be approximating the writing of their English-speaking peers. Thus, you can provide feedback that is similar to the kind you would offer native English speakers. It is important for these students to be exposed to a more sophisticated form of language.
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