Have you ever struggled to teach history or social studies to your English
language learners? This may be because the curriculum assumes that your
students have prior knowledge about
many things, such as historical figures or U.S. geography (Chamot, 2009). ESL researchers Schleppegrell, Achugar,
and Oteiza, (2004) believe that textbooks about history/social studies are
particularly tricky because they include specialized academic vocabulary,
abstract concepts, and are often unclear about the subject/event to which they
are referring. Anna Chamot (2009), who created a method for working with ELLs
in the content areas, outlined these key principles for making social
studies/history easier for ELLs:
·
Integrate
geography across all social studies/history units to help ELLs who are
unfamiliar with the states and regions of the U.S..
·
Use historical fiction books to introduce U.S. history or democratic concepts to young students. Examples of these include Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul
Curtis, Baseball Saved Us by Ken
Mochizuki, and many more that can be found here.
·
Design
your units of study to be chronological, theme-based, and include contexts
outside of the U.S., such as the heritage countries of your students!
·
Make
sure your lessons include opportunities for ELLs to develop their academic
vocabulary through listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
·
History
textbooks may be too tricky for ELLs! Outside resources, such as the EL
Civics website, have easy-to-read
texts and materials for young learners.
Here
is an example of an instructional sequence that could be used for teaching
history or social studies to ELLs (Chamot, 2009; Vaughn et al., 2009; Vaughn et
al., 2017):
1. Activate
prior knowledge: Use
maps to discuss the geography of your students’ heritage countries, or
integrate the oral history of their families into your units.
2. Provide
explicit instruction in vocabulary: Teach 4-5 vocabulary words each week. First
introduce the word and its pronunciation, identify a cognate/translation in the
students’ native language, give a student friendly definition, use a visual
representation, and show examples of the word in sentences.
3. Use
videos: Videos, such as
those from TeacherTube, and virtual field trips can increase understanding! Be sure that
you select 2-3 questions to guide the students.
4. Engage
in critical readings of texts, with explicit instruction on vocabulary: These can be teacher-led, in partners,
or in groups. Critical readings should be accompanied by several key questions
that the students can discuss or write about. Plan to teach some strategies to
your students to help them become “critical readers”, and understand concepts
like author bias and compare/contrast.
5. Provide
opportunities to use the language:
Debates, cooperative groups, journal writing, and graphic organizers are great
ways to engage your students with the language, and to build critical thinking
skills.
6. Explicit
instruction in strategies:
Teach your students how to identify participants, events, and relationships in
their textbooks, and how to decode maps, charts, graphs, and timelines.
7. Comprehension
checks: Around two times
a unit, design formative assessments to see what students still need help with!
One idea is to do the same assessment twice, individually and then with
partners. Hopefully, the partners will learn from each other!
There are many websites with resources
for ELLs, including National Geographic Education, which has ready-made lesson plans covering
many social studies topics and tools for students to practice maps and graphs.
Another website is Biogiraffe, which has biographies of culturally
diverse individuals.
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