Teaching English Language Learners Ron Rushia EDU 321 Cheryl Cardinal October 27, 2008 The second key principle is increased interaction. This principle is drawn from Swain’s emphasis on comprehensible output, a number of strategies have been developed that will increase students opportunities to use their language skills in direct communication and for the purpose of “negotiation meaning” in real life situations. These include cooperative learning, study buddies; project based learning and one-to one teacher interaction with the student. I really like this concept. I firmly believe interaction is very important. We have several students that have a one-to-one aid that they work with. This gives the students a chance to really stay focused and have that one on one interaction. I really can see this as a great idea for English Language Learners. Having an aide that can speak a foreign language would really help the students in the classroom setting. There is one student that I teach that comes to gym class by himself. He is autistic and has some behavior issues so he doesn’t come with the whole class. I can really give him one to one interaction and he is really focused for the 30 minutes of class. He learns the skills more this way than he would if he was in the regular class. I think the study-buddy concept is great. For example if I was teaching say a math class I would use this technique. I think students feel a little more comfortable in a group setting or working with a partner. Not all student but most. I also feel that having a study-buddy would be very much beneficial for English Language Learners because they could pick up the language skills they need maybe a little quicker just by having that one-to-one interaction with another student. They defiantly would benefit from teacher-student interaction as well. Drawing from Cummins’s theory is to increase thinking and study skills. Academic language and cognitively demanding communication are...