How to Adapt a Text to Suit Lower Performing ESL Students
Lower-performing ESL (English as a Second Language) students struggle to acquire the standard proficiency of reading and writing. When preparing lessons, teachers should accommodate all levels of student ability and proficiency.
Instructions
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How to Adapt a Text to Suit Lower Performing Students
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Find a reading comprehension text in your textbook that is appealing to your students for its thematic content. Make sure the subject of the text is motivating. It should be also one of the more difficult texts in your textbook. In this case, difficult means challenging syntactic structures, hard-to-grasp vocabulary, challenging concepts and ideas.
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Make of list of no more than 10 difficult vocabulary items which you plan to teach.Lower-performing ESL learners cannot handle technically more than 8 new vocabulary words.
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Isolate the challenging concept or theme of the text. Write out for yourself how you intend to introduce the text in conjunction with the theme of the text.If you are teaching a text about "Space Operations," you may need to bring in a picture or two and discuss some basic facts so that students have a clear and specific idea of what you are talking about.Mention to the students they will read this in a reading comprehension text.
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Simplify the text (if necessary) using simpler ways of saying things.
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Design appropriate reading activities. Types of reading activities can include skimming and scanning for information like names, places, dates.Other questions include easy "why" questions and multiple choice type questions. Have a wide range of questions that are open-ended (more than one right answer) and closed-ended (only one right answer).The range of questions should include both quality (students have a choice of which reading activity to choose) and quantity (students can give one answer instead of two answers).
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Teach vocabulary. If you teach a bilingual ESL class, consider giving translations in the students' mother tongue. You can also draw a picture of the word for younger learners.
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Distribute the "new" reading comprehension text and conduct your reading lesson as planned.Make a list of no more than eight vocabulary items and teach them. Have students read through the simpler version of the reading comprehension text. Alternatively, you may even want to read the text aloud and stop at various point, ask questions and check for reading comprehension.
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