Teaching Strategies for ESL
Cooperative Learning in English Language Classrooms
© John Byk
Sep 14, 2009
Cooperative learning projects for ESL students can be engaging as well as productive. Using multimedia or art in a classroom environment to augment standard textbook lessons will help to create a shared community of learners. If possible, teachers should insist that group members communicate in the target language while completing projects.
Teaching in Context
Incorporating target language skills into a project that capitalizes on student interests and real-world, functional situations is advised. For example, Students can create a brochure or chap book that advertises their hometown to the world. Not only will they be forced to think of their lives in an English-language context, but the project will inspire a shared sense of pride and effort. Adding photos or illustrations with explanatory text, similar to travel brochures, will be enjoyable as well as making the finished project more distributable.
Multimedia Strategies
Students can work together to create a script in English for a short video presentation. This can be a guided, structured project or the theme can be left up to the creative imagination of the group, depending upon the language skill level. Either way, the teacher should provide a clear set of criteria including key vocabulary words or grammar-usage items that need to be highlighted and used correctly.
Active Learning With Websites
If the technology is available, groups can work together to create an English website that profiles the individual members of their group. Popular social networking sites can also be used, but it's preferable to have a publication that stands alone and emphasizes that the project is ESL-related. Translation software that is widely available on the Internet can also be used, but the teacher must take care to ensure that the software accurately translate idioms.
Interview Strategies
Students can interview other teachers or accessible members of the community and compose a collection. Helping group members construct appropriate interview techniques and questions before going out in the field is advised. If listening skills are not at adequate levels, students might want to record their interviews and decipher them together at a later date.
Functional Approach
Unless students are living and immersed in an English-speaking environment, actual exposure to and use of the target language might be minimal. Language is essentially a communicative and societal function. Emphasizing these characteristics by involving students in meaningful projects that force them to interact with and to explore the world around them using English helps to internalize vocabulary and meaning.
Getting English language learners to fully engage with the target language requires creative strategies that simulate real world scenarios as much as possible. In additions, if students are working on projects and using English exclusively within their groups, they will acquire practical vocabulary in a safe environment. Risk taking is an essential element of learning English, or any target language for that matter, and cooperative learning tasks that force students to move from their textbooks to the world around them should be challenging and rewarding.
