Strategies to Improve ESL Students' Comprehension and Use of Spoken English

Whether you are teaching ESL students in a support group or in a mainstream class, reading is one of the more challenging skills for ESL students to acquire. Unlike speaking, which involves more interpersonal skills, reading involves to a great degree interacting with the text. There are multi-levels of understanding on the word, sentence, paragraph text level and all these contribute greater understanding and meaning.

For native English speakers, reading is a top down process. When they read, they focus on the text as a unit, an organizational whole. But because the language of ESL students is structured differently, their understanding takes longer. Some of them lack confidence. Some of them know more than one language or even 3 languages so there is mother tongue interference as well.

Strategy #1: Build Background Knowledge

Since ESL students tend to guess wildly at the meaning of a passage based on incomplete preconceptions because the topic is outside their experience or base of knowledge, teachers need to deliberately build background knowledge. Background knowledge is the background experience and knowledge that a student brings to classroom learning.

In a recent study, the text "It's a Mugger's Game in Manhattan" was found "scary" and "shocking" by advanced ESL Japanese readers but appeared humorous to the native-speaker teacher. Also, the concept of a "full moon" in Europe is linked to schemata that includes horror stories and madness. In Japan, it activates schemata for beauty and moon-viewing parties. (for ordinary people - not werewolves!). It's not that ESL students don't have schemata - they just have it in another language.

Strategy #2: Make It Visual and Physical

The strongest memories are tied to emotions. Students remember better when using "I" or "me" sentences because it involves them. One way to to bring to life the visual and physical experience is by bringing in a handful of pine needles and let the students break them open, smell them up close and feel the sticky sap as you read aloud from a story or reference text. It's a great way to add direct experience to the virtual experience of reading.

You can also use concrete objects to introduce a theme and to reinforce meaning. If the subject is the lottery, bring in a lottery advertisement. If you have a lottery ticket, that's even better.

Strategy #3: Build background knowledge using role-play.

Besides working on the language, there are several good educational values for using role play. It builds a sense of community and fosters interaction. It breaks a routine and helps students develop confidence. In mainstream groups, these ESL students tend to withdraw and can be silent but it's good modeling practice for them and they are processing the language even if they appear to be silent.

Some ideas include: Role-playing the especially important scenes, or providing sentence frames to pretest one another. For example, student A asks: "Do you know anything about topic? Student B responds: "I'm not sure, but I do know ___________" OR "I think it could be ____________ because I learned _______________."

By making the lesson physical and visual, it is possible to build background knowledge with your ESL students. This is the best way to help your students learn a new concept while connecting it with something they already know.