I teach 2nd grade and half of my students are ESL. None of my students are new comers, but they have limited English skills and WBT is AMAZING because it allows the students to have plenty of time to speak.
The
Teach-Ok strategy requires the teacher to speak in small chunks of less than 1 minute each. This is perfect for ESL because they can only process small amounts at a time. Then students teach each other. And they keep teaching each other untill the teacher calls for attention. This helps build repetition. The students hear it and say it over and over again. I find that it is good to have sentence frames on the board for ESL students to follow. So for example we had a lesson on past tense verbs.
So I might say, "When an action takes place in the past we add an -ed to the end of the verb. Teach!"
The class will say "Ok" and tell their partners about adding -ed to the words. You could have this rule on the board for them to refer to as needed.
Then I would show some examples on the board with a present tense sentence and a past tense sentence and have guide the students with completeing the sentence with the appropriate past tense verb. Then I would say "Teach!" They will say "ok!" and they will teach each other the same sentences practicing using the past tense with their partners. This is so good for ESL because the partners create a safe environment to practice without being put on the spot in front of the class. There is also a new strategy called Air Punctuation ( I don't think it is on the website yet but it can be found in these videos:
www.livestream.com/wholebrainteaching1 ) With air punctuation they create complete sentence orally and use gestures to model the capital letters and punctuation.
As they teach each other you get to move around the room and monitor for understanding. Once they have adequate practice orally, you can move on to writing it down.
There is a new document online that I haven't read through all the way yet, but it may have some guides for lesson plans:
www.yousendit.com/dl?phi_action=app/orch...JyYUlwQk5ubHl4dnc9PQ
I use WBT all the time when teaching vocabulary. I'll introduce 6-8 words over 2 days. They will repeat the definition and act it out when I call out the word. So any time of day when I need their attention, I can just call out a word, and they will automatically respond this way. On the 3rd and 4th day I will often have sentence frames on the board and the students will have a few minutes to read them with their partner and discuss answers. Then I will call for students to share with the class while modeling air punctuation and I may even end up with 5 minutes for the students to write sentences in their spiral that they have created.
This is a lot of info. I hope I answered some of your questions.
Let me know if you have more!
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