Instructional Strategies for ELL Classrooms - Essay Example

Research indicate that giving right instructions makes student grasp fast what is being taught as opposed to giving unstructured instructions. This paper will address instructional strategies that need to be employed by teachers for English Language Learners (ELL) classroom. Sheltered instruction is noted to be a very effective strategy to use in ELL classrooms. Sheltered Instructions refers to the instructional activities that ensure that contents are made available and comprehensible for English language learners.

Sheltered instruction exists in a variety of models, one such being the Sheltered Instruction Observation protocol (SIOP). Research indicate that teachers who make use of SIOP in planning for their lesions tend to become more effective in connecting language and contents when giving instructions to ELL. In addition, the use of SIOP makes them feel very much being in charge of their career development resulting in the teacher’s ability to incorporate diverse proficiency levels in the teaching rooms.

SIOP has several strategic components useful for planning ELL (Wallace, 2004). The first strategy according to SIOP is that teachers must start by defining the language objectives, which is then shared with the learners (Echevarria, Vogt and Short, 2004). This ensures that teachers and learning become objective oriented. In addition, setting teaching objectives ensures that all contents relevant for the lesion is covered within the stipulated timeframe. It also enables teachers to easily, identify forms, structure and functions that need to be taught and setting attainable targets for the ELL students (Echevarria, Vogt and Short, 2004).

Research indicates that teachers who have used language objective strategies in their lesions have helped native English-speaking learners who are finding it hard coping with academic demands of English language. For this to happen,