Learner Strategies and Learner-Focused Teaching Part 2

“One can teach the learner a second language-but only the learner can learn it” (Diaz-Rico106).

The rest of this chapter focuses on the idea of the learner taking control of their learning process. The idea of “leaner autonomy”, the learners’ feeling that studying is taking place due to their own violation. This does involve simply the learner, but also the teacher and curriculum for the learner to benefit. We as teachers must give learners the skills to succeed on their own because as we all know, there is never enough time in the day to accomplish it all! Some excellent skills that will help each learner succeed include:

• Efficient learning strategies
• Identification of their preferred ways of learning
• Skills needed to negotiate the curriculum
• Encouragement to set their own learning objectives
• Support for learners to set realistic goals and time frames
• Skills in self-evaluation

This autonomy will enable students to feel pride in their achievements. We must try to get the learner to self-manage their success, become self-motivated and self-disciplined. At the beginning of the school year, introduce the idea of autonomy and set the tone for the rest of the year. The idea of “working together” toward a mutual goal!

The chapter goes on to discuss the many different learner strategies and preferences for both the student and the teacher. We, as educators, must realize what our learning preference is so that we may understand what we will tend to provide our students with that because it comes more natural to us and be sure to reach as many learning styles as we can in a given lesson. It is also important to find out what our classroom learning styles consist of. This may be done by creating a questionnaire and/or observation survey to be sure that we are adding variety to our instruction to reach all learners! For many of us educators this has become a very natural part of lesson planning, but for other we still may struggle with making sure that we are accommodating as many learners as possible. 

There is a great example of a questionnaire for figuring out your individual learning style or helping to create a questionnaire for your students:

 http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html

@joetapia

“Another resource that I found interesting is a book by Harry McNaught. The book is in English and Spanish. It is called 500 Palabras Nuevas Para Ti; 500 Words to Grow On. It is a great resource because it is filled with visual illustrations of words, animals, and objects with their English/Spanish names. It would be a great addition to any classroom with ELL students”. Thank you for this resource! I was interested to see it and have recently purchased it to see how I can help incorporate this into helping my teaching and making my classroom more effective for my EL’s.

@lindsyhughes

“There is an interesting BLOG on the Scholastic website, http://blogs.scholastic.com/ell/, that is focused on strategies that are based in SDAIE. It aligns with this chapter in that it helps the teacher to focus on the needs of the EL when designing instruction”. Thank you for this resource as well! This has given me some great ideas to use in my classroom and during my ELD group. I especially enjoyed “Hot Seat”. Here is how this works: Have one student sit in the "hot seat" and assume the identity of a historical figure or character from a story. The other students need to ask questions in order to give them clues to find out who the historical figure or character is. The students absolutely love it!