EP212 — ESL Speaking Activities That Actually Work for Every Language Level

Teaching ELL students is a privilege and a joy. Is it easy? No way. But with the right support, you can feel empowered to tackle each day with ease and confidence. I'm your host, Beth Beauches, founder of Inspiring Young Learners. With over 10 years of teaching both nationally and internationally, I know what it takes to ensure that your ELL students have what they need to thrive today, tomorrow, and for life. I'm on a mission to empower you to equip your English language learners. Welcome to Equipping ELLs. Let's get to today's episode. Hey there, and welcome back to the Equipping ELLs podcast. I'm so glad you're here today. We've spent the last several weeks going deep on the ELL success cycle. We've been working on understanding who your students are, knowing what you need to teach them, figuring out how to scaffold and shelter your instruction, and how to always know what comes next. And now we are moving into what I think of as the practical aspect application series. If you've been around here at all, you know how much I love to make things very practical, things that you can listen to and apply in your classroom that day. So that's what we're going to be moving into for the next couple of weeks as we head back into school. I want you to feel super prepared and very capable to meet the needs of your English language learners this upcoming year. So we're going to be diving into different strategies that really make all of that framework actually come to life in your classroom every single day. If you missed any of those episodes, I'd encourage you to go back. We started about episode 202 to 210 or 211, and you can listen to that and gain that foundation, that framework, as we move into now the super practical part of it. So Today, we are starting with the one that I think has the biggest impact on language acquisition and the one that a lot of ELL classrooms are still not doing enough of, and that's speaking. Not just speaking in general, not just asking students a question and hoping someone answers. But I mean really speaking in a structured, intentional, daily type of practice that is designed to work for every student at every language level in your room. So that is what we're going to be talking about today. It's something that is near and dear to my heart as someone who took many, many years of Spanish, did not speak a lot of it, and then when I moved abroad, had to relearn all of the Spanish that I learned. So we don't want to do that to our students. We want them... to constantly be using it so they don't lose it, so that they really gain that language growth, that language acquisition that we want them to. So I promise you by the end of this episode, you are going to have concrete activities that you can bring into your classroom this week or at the start of school year. All right, let me start by naming something that I see often. A teacher wants her ELL students to talk more. So she purposely builds that speaking time into her lesson. That's great, right? Maybe she gives them a prompt and then she says, talk to your partner. And one of a few things usually happens. A lot of times the higher level students carry the