When Erin Sucher teaches her third graders about measurement, she draws a big rectangle on the board and marks it end to end. Then she stretches out her arms like two ends of a measuring tape. “Show me length!” she says, and the students stretch out their own arms and call back, “Length!” From here she teaches width, height and weight, taking care to represent the vocabulary verbally, visually and kinesthetically (with body movements). It may seem like overkill to the casual observer, but this sort of multidimensional teaching is critical in Sucher’s class—more than one third of her students don’t speak English as their first language. 

When Erin Sucher began at Sharonville Elementary 14 years ago, teaching English vocabulary to speakers of Spanish, French and Uzbek wasn’t part of her lesson plans. Over the past five years, however, southwest Ohio has seen a 250 percent increase in its English Language Learner (ELL) population. Cincinnati Public Schools has close to 2,000 students identified as ELL. Princeton’s population is smaller, but its more than 1,000 ELL students constitute nearly 20 percent of the student body.

“About six years ago, we got a girl from Uzbekistan. It was the first time we ever had an ELL student, and we really had no idea what to do with her,” Sucher says. “We gave her a kindergarten assessment just to see if she knew her letters, but in a flash we found out that she could do things like multiply and divide fluently. I thought, ‘We’ve just insulted her intelligence.’ We were amazed at what she could do.”

Some students come into Sucher’s classroom at the initial, “silent period” of language acquisition. Others have been in the school system since kindergarten and have a more advanced handle on English. Sucher’s ELL students are just as capable of grasping the lesson material as native speakers, but the trick is making the content comprehensible.

“I find it very interesting and it’s an added challenge to what I teach,” Sucher says. “It takes a little extra preparation, really drilling down to those core concepts I want them to know, checking into vocabulary and finding ways to make it comprehensible using pictures, motions and constantly discussing.”

One of the ways Sucher does this is with a method called “Think-Pair-Share,” in which students take time to think about a concept, and then talk it over with a partner before finally sharing with the class. She has found that with ELL students, providing time to internalize new vocabulary and then practice it in informal interactions with classmates helps bring them up to speed linguistically.

LEARNING TO TEACH

Until recently it’s been up to Sucher to discover these kinds of techniques on her own. This year, however, she…

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Photo credit | Measuring Tape by James Jordan on Flickr