I found a way to help my ESL students generate a variety of ideas for writing. At the beginning of the year, I tried picture prompts. I thought it would be a fun way to get the words flowing. They could describe the picture. They could write a story about the picture. They could write from the point of view of a variety of people, animals, or objects in the picture. They could put themselves in the picture. The possibilities were endless! All I got, however, were lists of what was in the picture. Eventually I gave up.
Enter my lifeline, The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox by Larry Ferlazzo. My goal is to try just one new strategy from it each week. I was marching through the book, still early days, and posted a blog about vocabulary. There was a flurry of activity around it when I posted it to a Facebook group of ESL teachers, sending me back to the book—is it only for middle schoolers? No. Does it have strategies for beginners? Yes. Does it deal with writing or only with vocabulary?
I scanned the table of contents down to writing. I noted for the inquirer that there were plenty of strategies for writing, and then realized that since writing was the place I was struggling with my class, I should skip ahead and dip into some writing strategies. I saw Strategy 17: Using Photos or Other Images in Reading and Writing. It sent me back to my earlier failure and I wanted to see what Larry had to suggest.
I used the New York Times picture prompt “On the Street.” Check out all the New York Times picture prompts—a great resource for photos, but while the prompts may be sufficient to get a native speaker ELA class’s ideas flowing, the next step was the magic for my ELLs.
Larry Ferlazzo’s assignment “Examining an Image (for Intermediates)” (Figure 17.3) was the magic fairy dust. At list of questions prompting the students to think about the image in a variety of ways:
- Describe the objects in the image.
- Describe the people and/or animals in the image.
- Describe the different activities you see happening in the image.
- Describe the mood of the image. Is it happy, sad, or something else? What evidence do you see that supports your answer?
- Write a title for the image and explain why you chose that title.
- What might the people in the image be thinking or feeling? Why?
- If you could see outside the frame of the image, what things or people would be there? What do you think would be happening? Why?
- What year do you think the image was taken or made? What evidence do you see that supports your answer?
- What questions do you have about the image?
One student focused on the detail that one person has an umbrella up and the rest don’t. Maybe it’s starting to rain and people are worried. Other students focused on the robots—either as real robots that were mixing with a nervous population in the future, or as people in costume excited to go to a party. One student specified the location as New York, noting the buildings in the background.
I wonder what will happen if I use this prompt with an image once a week from now until Christmas. I hope it will increase fluency in writing so we’ll need less and less time to do the exercise. (This time took quite a while—15 minutes in class, 15 minutes at home, and 10 more minutes in class to finish.) I also hope it will increase flexibility in thinking, so that after Christmas I could give a shorter prompt and students could come up with a variety of ways to approach it on their own. Finally, I can track errors and teach one mini-lesson per exercise on common mistakes. This week’s was subject-verb agreement in this phrase: “There is a lot of people.” I think the next image I’ll use will be a Norman Rockwell painting.
And that is just one exercise of many given for each of the 45 strategies offered for ELL students in this book. If you teach English language learners at any grade level, any ability level, and you’re feeling the need for an infusion of new ideas, I highly recommend this book.
What do you turn to when your teaching is needing a shot in the arm?
P.S. More recommendations:
- Larry Ferlazzo's blog
- All the "Best of" lists Ferlazzo has curated (He claims to have 2,000, and I don't doubt it. The first is "The Best Art Websites For Learning English" and the last is "THE BEST WEB 2.0 APPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION IN 2020 – PART ONE"
- Other books in the series give strategies help English-proficient students as well as ELLs in subject areas. I haven't read them, but if they're anything like The ELL Teacher's Toolbox, they're worth their weight in gold:
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