Transcript
1 turns · 29 min[upbeat music] 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 Voshe, 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. [upbeat music] Hey there, and welcome back to the Equipping ELLs podcast. I'm your host, Beth Voshe, and I am so glad you are here today because we are getting into one of my absolute favorite topics. This is the kind of thing that once you really understand it, you will never look at your ELL students the same way again. Last week, we talked about confident ELL teachers and the four-part framework that really underlies everything they do: who, what, how, and when. And I told you that over the next several weeks, we are gonna go deep into each one of those pieces. So today, we are starting with the who, because that is where everything begins. We need to know who our students are, who we're working with, and then we can make all the other decisions once we have a good idea of who our students are. So today, we're specifically gonna be talking about the five stages of language acquisition. Now, I know if you've taken any courses and you have any experience with working with multilingual learners, you're like, "Okay, obviously, we already know the five stages. Why are we talking about this?" But I wanna really break this down into a way that is really helping you identify, as you work with your students, of what you should be expecting from them. Because as I've shared before, having clear expectations that are appropriate for the language levels that they're at is one of the biggest ways that you will help your students build confidence and have language growth. A lot of times, this can feel very muddy, and figuring out what is it that they should be able to do. Am I pushing them enough? Am I not pushing them enough? All of these things and questions that we juggle. And so I think it gets back to coming to these five stages of language acquisition and really understanding each stage and what to expect in that stage, and then easy things we can do to make sure that we are providing the support of that stage. This might be a great episode to share with other coworkers that you work with that maybe don't have that background in teaching multilingual learners. It's really an episode that is gonna help break it down in a really practical and tangible way. So today, we're gonna be covering the five stages of language acquisition, what they are, what they actually look like in a real classroom, and why knowing them changes everything about how you teach, how you plan, and how you advocate for your students. If you didn't listen to episode 203 about really having that confidence to know what your students need and really setting the right expectations on them, go back and listen to that episode. It's a
Episode notes
In Episode 205 of the Equipping ELLs podcast, host Beth Vaucher dives deep into one of the most foundational topics in ELL education — the five stages of language acquisition — and breaks them down in the most practical, classroom-ready way possible. This is not a repeat of what you heard in your credential program. This is a real-classroom guide to what each stage looks and sounds like on a Tuesday afternoon, what students need at each stage, and — just as importantly — what teachers should stop doing that is quietly slowing language growth.
Beth begins the episode by addressing why knowing the stage names is not enough. Most ELL teachers can name the stages, but truly understanding what they look like in a real classroom is a completely different skill. When teachers do not have a clear picture of each stage, they misread their students, plan for the wrong things, and struggle to advocate confidently when homeroom teachers or admin question why a student is not producing grade-level work.
The episode opens with Stage 1 Pre-Production — the silent period — and immediately reframes silence as a stage to honor rather than a problem to fix. Beth explains that a student in pre-production is taking in enormous amounts of language even without producing a single word, and that the most damaging thing a teacher can do at this stage is call on the student in front of the class. She