ELD Lessons: Grammatical Forms cont. and a Summary Thus Far

Yes Effective ELD lessons are a big topic. (Which is why there are coaches, specialists and curriculum developers just for this!)

Often times, the classroom teacher feels that they have to be English grammar gurus to be effective ELD teachers. While we don't have to have every nuance of English grammar down pat, but with the tools I've shared, it is even more important to determine the context for your effective ELD lesson. It is also just one component (albeit a very important one) of your ELD lesson plan.

So How Do We Know What Grammatical Form is Right?

Ultimately ensuring a particular grammatical form is what your students need comes down to this:
- Consulting the ELD Standards (Remember that they are written such that they follow a progression towards the ELA standards)
- Getting to know the profile of each Language Proficiency Level (especially in light of the above information)
- Using a tool such as the ELD Matrix of Grammatical Forms in order to make informed decisions about specific forms to teach at each level of proficiency
- Creating appropriate language prompts to allow students to produce, practice and eventually master the grammatical form in appropriate language response frames
- Assuring this occurs within topics that are interesting, meaningful, relevant and age-appropriate (and starting off a week's lesson with the topical vocabulary that will help students "glue on" to the grammatical forms which will be the focus of the bulk of the ELD lessons over the week
- Attempt to increase the level of rigor of the grammatical form if the students seem to be mastering. For example, adding a negative language response frame (e.g. adding "not" to a response)

All this should sound familiar as these are all of the elements of an effective ELD lesson plan that I've been focusing on for most of this month.

The Last Piece

So far I've focused on the what of ELD teaching and a bit of the "how to know the what."

What does remain is to talk about those practices that will allow English Learners to practice newly acquired language forms for a large part of the ELD block. Tomorrow will be a good day to start that conversation. That will also be the last component of an Effective ELD lesson I plan to discuss.