To make academic vocabulary and concepts explicit and visual, we encourage our teachers to use Step 5, use visual and vocabulary strategies, to make content material comprehensible for emergent bilinguals by building context for vocabulary and incorporating supporting visuals. Some of the strategies that I recommend using with our EBs in math classes are:ġ. We equip teachers with instructional strategies that will allow all students to have access to content. We use the sheltered-instruction research from Seidlitz Education, The 7 Steps to a Language-Rich and Interactive Environment as our framework. We need to provide a language-rich and interactive learning environment for our students to have enough background to make sense of what they are learning. When we don’t connect and scaffold instruction for our EBs, we are setting them up for failure. Our emergent bilingual students come with limited background knowledge, cultural and linguistic differences, and they bring diverse learning experiences, which makes learning math too challenging for them. Math itself is a second language to many, due to the number of new terms, concepts, and process that need to be learned. When we teach our emergent bilingual students math, we do need to understand that we are teaching another language. This second-language acquisition method is implemented within all grade levels and content areas to ensure that emergent bilinguals are fully engaged in meaningful and rigorous learning. I do this by promoting the sheltered-instruction approach as a learning framework for best practices that offers students equitable opportunities to develop content and language. In my role as the sheltered-instruction facilitator, I serve as an active and passionate advocate who seeks to provide an equitable learning environment for all learners. She is a passionate advocate for emergent bilingual learners:Īs an educator for the past 28 years, I have seen firsthand the impact we make in the learning process of our emergent bilingual students by only providing the right supports, and scaffolds, to make content comprehensible and meaningful for them, even if they are at beginning levels of English proficiency. She was born in Bolivia and has been an educator since 1992. Isabel Becerra is the sheltered-instruction facilitator for the multilingual programs department in the Garland ISD in Texas. Today’s post begins a three-part series on teaching math to English-language learners.
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