Differentiating Instruction for ESL College Students

ESL students enter the mainstream with a variety of backgrounds, personality, temperament, world knowledge, level of intelligences and learning styles as well as social and cultural issues and maturity. Teachers at the college level need to differentiate instruction for ESL students who usually need more linguistic support than their native English speaking peers.

All Students are Different!

Based on the premise that students learn at different paces and ways and have varying interests and motivations, teachers can vary their approach and adjust the curriculum and the presentation of the material to give students access to multiple paths to the same goals or outcomes.

Differentiation meets each student where he is and maximizes his opportunities for success.

Create a Learning Community Within Your Classroom

There are many strategies teachers can use to create a classroom environment to maximize opportunities for students to interact and share thinking and ideas. Since all classrooms are different and unique, teachers have various tools and strategies to obtain this information.

Use pre-assessments to gather and utilize information about individual students

Teachers can use the results of pre-assessments to determine the best way to deliver instruction so all students have opportunities for success. Pre-assessment will give you information in the following areas: need for support, need for enrichment and learning styles and interests.

ESL students who need support

For ESL students who need support, teachers can use the following strategies: modified directions, listening centers, modeling, reading buddies, manipulative's, graphic organizers, leveled reading materials, adjusted questions and flexible grouping. For example teachers have a wide variety of group options whereby they can organize their students according to level of instruction in terms of whole class, ability and readiness groups, cross ability or heterogeneous groups, student selected groups, topic interest groups and students working independently.

Adjusted Questions

Some ESL students will be challenged at the knowledge and comprehension levels, while others will be challenged by questions that require analysis and interpretation.

A differentiation strategy here is to use student readiness as the basis of the kinds of questions you ask.

Once you've determined the readiness level, develop sets of questions for activities, class discussions and homework at the varying levels of challenge and difficulty.

To support learning styles and different intelligences and interests, you can use flexible grouping, product choices and adjusted questions.

Differentiating instruction to meet the language learning needs of ESL students in the mainstream college classroom can help make teaching maximally effective.Differentiating instruction helps teachers arouse and maintain interest, respond to heterogeneity, keep learning active and open-ended and make teaching more meaningful.