Literacy in ESL — Work in Progress

Vocabulary work separates explicit instruction of high-utility academic words from the incidental vocabulary students pick up through reading and conversation — both matter, but they need different teaching moves. For explicit instruction, I plan to use word walls, morphology study (roots, prefixes, suffixes), and cognate awareness, especially useful for students whose first language shares roots with English.

Words are taught in context, not in isolated lists. Cummins' distinction between BICS and CALP (Cummins, 1979) is a useful check on this: a student can sound conversationally fluent in English while still lacking the academic vocabulary a subject-area text demands.

Writing instruction moves students through a modeled → shared → independent progression, using sentence frames and starters as scaffolds that get removed as proficiency grows.

I plan to calibrate expectations and error correction against WIDA's Can Do Descriptors (WIDA, 2020), which describe what a student at each of WIDA's six proficiency levels can realistically be expected to produce — so a Level 2 writer isn't held to the same standard as a Level 5 writer on the same assignment, even while working on the same content.

Oral language is the piece I care most about building early, since it's the piece students are most afraid to risk in public. I plan to use structured academic talk protocols — think-pair-share, sentence frames for discussion, turn-and-talk — that give a student a low-stakes rehearsal with a partner before they're asked to speak in front of the whole class.

This is the same principle behind EnglishTeacher.com's practice-before-performance design and the Isan Storytelling Championship (see Community Events): confidence has to be built in private before it can be used in public. It also reflects Krashen's Affective Filter Hypothesis (Krashen, 1982) — anxiety blocks language acquisition regardless of how much comprehensible input a student receives.

Students arrive at wildly different points, and I plan to differentiate instruction using WIDA's six proficiency levels (WIDA, 2020) as a starting reference rather than a ceiling. That includes extra structural support for students with interrupted formal education (SIFE).

A student's home language and culture are an asset to build on, not an obstacle to get past — a student who is already literate in their first language understands what literacy is for, even before they have the English to demonstrate it.

Assessment combines formal measures — WIDA's ACCESS for ELLs, which reports proficiency across listening, reading, speaking, and writing (WIDA, 2020) — with informal, day-to-day checks: running records, informal reading inventories, and formative checks for understanding that let me adjust a lesson in the moment rather than waiting for a formal score.

The goal is to use assessment data to group students and plan instruction, not just to sort them.

Four frameworks do most of the work behind these notes: Krashen's Input Hypothesis and Affective Filter Hypothesis (Krashen, 1982), which argue language is acquired through comprehensible input in a low-anxiety environment; Cummins' BICS/CALP distinction (Cummins, 1979, 2000), which separates conversational fluency from academic language proficiency; the SIOP Model (Echevarria et al., 2017), a research-validated protocol for teaching content and language together; and WIDA's English Language Development Standards Framework (WIDA, 2020), which sets the proficiency-level benchmarks referenced throughout this page.

Full citations are in Sources & References below.