Build the Foundation
In my first post I wanted to reflect and summarize on an article I read titled "Preparing ELLs to be 21st-Century Learners" by Khristina Robertson. Khristina started with an amazing quote by Linda Ellberbee (a Journalist and TV Producer). It said that in this century its not a luxury for students to use technology it's a necessity. This really set the tone of the importance for technology in not just the ESL classroom, but all classrooms in the world. The next section of the article shared a very upsetting story about a beginning English Learner (EL) that was in a class where the teacher overused unknown language and vocabulary to the point that not only did the learner not understand what to do, but sadly gave up on trying to understand. This was during a technology lesson that by nature is motivating and student-centered, but the teacher did too much telling and not enough showing. As you can tell from this story, teachers of ELs need to understand how they l...