Today’s post is the latest in a series in which educators share potential challenges that might exist in teaching English learners and how to respond to them.

Differentiation

Irina McGrath, Ph.D., is an assistant principal at Newcomer Academy in the Jefferson County school district in Kentucky and the president of KYTESOL:

Teaching multilingual learners involves understanding their diverse educational and cultural backgrounds, as well as their English-language proficiencies. For example, a student from a country with strong early education in mathematics might solve geometric problems with ease but may hesitate to participate in discussions due to limited English proficiency. Similarly, a student from a region with fewer educational resources might need foundational support in both geometry and language skills to fully engage.

To address these varied needs, teachers can implement differentiated instruction. They can adapt their teaching methods by incorporating more hands-on activities and collaborative work, using leveled materials to support readers at different proficiency levels, and applying strategies and scaffolds tailored to the specific needs of the students in their classroom.

Effectively differentiating requires getting to know the students, including their academic strengths and weaknesses, cultural perspectives, personal interests, and more. Technological advances have greatly simplified the ways teachers can achieve this. Tools like Diffit, ChatGPT, Khanmigo, and School AI enable educators to create engaging activities that deepen their understanding of multilingual learners, making these learning experiences exciting for students.

Teachers can utilize AI-powered tools to generate discussion topics such as those provided by the Khanmigo platform, powered by Khan Academy: “Describe a typical day in your life, including any cultural practices,” “Discuss a time when you felt your cultural background was misunderstood or misrepresented,” “How does your cultural background impact your interactions with others?” and “What aspects of your culture are you most proud of, and why?”

Furthermore, teachers can use tools like Google or Microsoft Forms for “get-to-know-you” questions such as “What do you want me to know about you?” “Do you prefer working independently or with a partner?” and “What is your favorite subject and activity?” By organizing and analyzing the responses, teachers can better understand and support their students.

Icebreaker games and activities that encourage students to share fun and interesting facts about themselves can also be very helpful. These can range from “Two Truths and a Lie” to “Find Someone Who.” A great resource for such activities is K20Learn—a University of Oklahoma educational website that includes excellent strategies, games, educator and family resources, and tech tools.

The deeper our understanding of multilingual learners, the more effective we become at differentiating instruction and fostering a supportive, enriching learning environment that celebrates diversity and promotes educational equity.

‘Planning for Supports’

Alexandra Gorodiski is an instructional coach who is beginning her sixth year in education, all in Spanish dual language or biliteracy contexts:

Instructing English learners provides educators with a unique opportunity to become a part of a child’s path to adding a new language to their vast linguistic repertoire. Even more beautifully, as a child adds a new language, their identity shifts to include a new culture, become more open to new friends and access new experiences.

Being involved in such defining moments often provides yet another “why” for teachers. Of course, in order to reap the benefits of those rewards, we must work through some challenging “opportunities.”

After conducting a survey of 36 teachers from various schools in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, two major challenges about working with multilingual learners emerged:

1. Newcomers

• Summary of comments: When students first come to the United States with “no English,” how are they supposed to understand anything I say? Are they even learning?

2. Planning for supports

• Summary of comments: When teaching in a classroom with EL students, it is difficult to plan because it takes a lot more time and also it is unclear whether the support I choose for my students is going to be effective.

In order to best support newcomers, building positive and strong teacher-to-student and student-to-student relationships is essential. In order for a child to take academic risks, newcomer or not, they must feel that they are welcomed in the space and that they are safe within our classrooms and school buildings.

According to Abraham Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs, individuals must feel a sense of belonging before they are able to open themselves to new learning. In order to build trust, teachers need to greet the child daily. While the child may have limited English proficiency, making it difficult for them to respond to your greeting, receptive language through listening develops first, and verbal greetings display we care. Also, playing nonverbal team-building games like four corners using visuals is a great way to get to know their interests (example here).

Newcomers will often undergo a silent period, where they may not outwardly engage with peers or adults in the new setting. While many newcomers may have some English experience, we often make assumptions about their language proficiency; however, we must be vigilant in truly understanding how much of the English language they know and what their level of exposure to the language has been.

This information may debunk initial assumptions and also provide us with invaluable data that we can use to make more informed decisions about how to support these children in our classrooms. Moreover, teachers often express concern that they are not sufficiently supporting their newcomers if they do not see expressive participation from this student population within just a couple of days.

We must remember that if students occasionally sit in our classrooms absorbing their environment and hearing the language for a bit of time directly after arriving at our schools, we are not doing them a disservice but instead are giving them an opportunity to feel safe and like they belong.

Secondly, teachers often worry about how to choose appropriate scaffolds for students who are progressing in their English-language proficiency. While sentence stems are a great start, we must consider whether those are sufficient or needed. When using sentence stems, teachers must encourage the use of high academic language. There is no specific key that explains what scaffold may work best in every classroom scenario. Planning for such scaffolds is challenging and time consuming; yet, they often benefit all students.

When lesson planning, teachers who teach English learners must ask what it is they want students to know and do instead of what “I” as the teacher will do. If students must orally respond, then we must provide a visual word bank, dialogue cards, oracy-based stems that include the language of instruction, and peer support so that all language learners can actively participate in the lesson. During the lesson, it is important to take note of what worked and what did not to better plan for future instruction. Observational data are imperative to supporting our multilingual learners.

‘A Safe Environment’

Michele Kimball, B.A., a consultant at McREL International, leverages her experience as a bilingual early-childhood educator in Texas and as a national school support consultant (P–12) to develop and support educators in ways that have a lasting impact on their students:

There are some common misconceptions about multilingual learners that can create challenges in the classroom. For example, it’s easy to think that English-language development strategies are just for English class. Or that if a student can’t express themselves in English, it means they don’t know the skill or concept. The good news is that these challenges can be addressed head-on by shifting how we think about language and its development. ollowing are five recommendations for any educator to keep in mind when working with multilingual students.

1. Recognize students’ first-language skills. Students come with language skills, such as the knowledge of what letters and sounds are used for, directionality, and can recognize cognates (words that may look and sound the same in their language as they do in English).

We also know that as multilingual students learn, they often apply what they know about their first language to English, so if teachers have an awareness of how their students’ first language works, they can watch for trends in the students’ English speaking and writing to identify areas needing support. This doesn’t mean we have to be linguists, but if we repeatedly hear a student not using plurals, it could be that their first language doesn’t have that same structure for plurals. When we recognize a pattern, it can signal an area to target instructional support.

2. Be mindful of your students’ cultures. Cultural factors can impact student participation. In some cultures, you do not draw attention to yourself, it’s about the group. Knowing this, we can provide opportunities for those students to process information, content, and skills in groups, which embraces their culture.

We create a safe environment that takes the focus off of the individual and allows for multilingual students to listen to language used by their peers in context. It also creates more thinking time to find the words in their first language and then translate into English to formulate an answer.

3. Build supports throughout the school. Teaching English to multilingual learners shouldn’t be confined to an English class. We can and need to support multilingual students in math, science, social studies, art, PE, music, etc. Look for opportunities for multilingual students to participate in schoolwide communications. We need to support them at every opportunity in meaningful ways because learning a language is complex.

4. Provide a safe environment. Before communicating in English, multilingual students translate into their first language, process the new information, formulate an answer, and then translate back to English. When we hear students talking with their friends in the hallway, at first listen, it may sound as if they are more fluent because these interactions involve social language in a relaxed environment.

In the classroom, they typically are spotlighted and asked to speak individually in academic language. With this additional pressure, processing takes extra time, and they do not want to stumble in front of their peers, so some students shut down and don’t try at all. We can provide a safe environment by not only being mindful of the processing time but also adopting strategies that support processing with their peers.

5. Be patient. Developing oral and written fluency can take up to seven years or more, depending on the opportunities for use inside and outside the classroom. Writing is the most complex skill of language acquisition, so we should begin with an emphasis on developing oral-language skills. All too often, we ask students to be quiet in class and work individually, but that’s counterintuitive to how they learn.

Think about how we all learned our first language: We first listened, then spoke, then read, and finally wrote. We didn’t have to master each skill before we started to develop the next, but there was a sequence. It’s the same for anyone learning a language, including our English learners.
When we have an awareness of how language develops, we can be patient. There are many layers to learning a new language in school, and multilingual students also are learning the content like their peers. They are doing double duty.

Thanks to Irina, Alexandra, and Michele for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post answered this question:

What do you think are the biggest challenges to teaching English learners, and what are your recommendations for how to meet them?

In Part One, Marie Moreno, Anastasia M. Martinez, and Francoise Thenoux shared their responses.

In Part Two, Lynmara Colón, Shondel Nero, Jenny Vo, and Laura Ascenzi-Moreno contributed their recommendations.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on X at @Larryferlazzo or on Bluesky at @larryferlazzo.bsky.social .

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