ESL: Learning Strategies

1. Introduction To Learning Strategies: Hello and welcome. In this course we're going to be looking at teaching strategies and we'll be discussing some of the different types of strategies that you can use in your classroom. These strategies we're going to look at are going to be some of the most commonly used ones. And the ones that I personally have used with great success in my own classes. However, please remember that each teacher will have their own teaching style and you need to think about your own classes in relation to these strategies and methods, and pick the ones that best suits you, your class and your needs as a teacher. Using carefully chosen strategies in your classroom will help students begin to understand the process of learning. Strategies are so useful and have so many benefits. They can help students to identify and overcome the areas of weakness and to perform at the level at which they are capable. They can also promote creative and flexible thinking and teach students the importance of shifting their approaches to different tasks. This process, however, requires thoughtful execution and considerable planning on the part of the teacher is specially if you're introducing a strategy to the class for the first time. Carefully selecting the right strategies for your class is also essential to ensure the learning process is cohesive and it is, it's achieving the desired results. In short, cultivating and choosing the correct strategies for your students is important for them to learn successfully, as well as this. In modern education systems these days, I expect it to show more initiative in the learning process and learning materials and show a higher understanding of the course contents. To this end, we, as educators, need to consider our learning strategies carefully to get the most from our classes. Throughout this course, we will look at the most prominent and useful strategies. Moreover, we'll explore these learning and teaching strategies and discuss how adapting and making use of these strategies for your classroom can get both you and your students the best chance for success. Let's get to it. 2. Active Learning: Active learning. For the most part here we will focus on active learning strategies as most of these strategies fall into this category. Anyway, active learning is simply defined as any instructional method that engages students in the learning process. Active learning requires students to do meaningful learning activities to encourage them to think and consider about what they're doing. They're not simply being passive participants, but discovering, processing and applying the information. This can involve discussion, problem-solving, group work roleplays, debates, and more. Basically, anything that gets the students interacting with each other, active with the teacher, and engaging with the material. Active learning refers to a broad range of teaching strategies which engage students as active participants in the learning. Typically, these strategies involve some amount of students working together during class, peer reviewing, and may also involve individual work with teacher input. These types of strategies are especially effective and put students at the center of the learning process, enriching the classroom experience, and boosting engagement. We use them to help students talk more openly, think more creatively, and ultimately feel more engaged in the process of learning. As teachers, one of our biggest challenges is to create and plan out lessons that inspire our students and help them stay actively involved in the learning process. These days, traditional teacher-centered learning plans aren't always conducive to achieving that inspiration. This is where active learning strategies come into play. You can use them to empower, encourage, engaged, and stimulate your classroom by putting students at the center of the learning process. Reciprocal questioning strategy. Learners of all ages will at some point come across blocks of texts that they have to digest and make sense of. Having an active and meaningful strategy is of paramount importance. Reading and comprehending text and pass it is, is a fundamental part of learning, not just in ESL. Reciprocal teaching not only helps with learning, but also it gets kids excited to participate in a lesson. As a teacher, we know how difficult it can be to keep students interested in particular school subjects, especially when the students aren't really interested in what's being presented to them in their books. Reading especially can be boring and it can be seen as hard or uninteresting by the students. Reciprocal teaching strategies have been shown to increase student reading comprehension and if done correctly, can help boost interest and enjoyment of the process. Reciprocal teaching not only helps with learning, but if you present it in the correct way, it gets kids excited to participate in the lesson. This part is really up to the teacher's own energy that teacher has to show that they are interested in. The teacher has to show enthusiasm, and this enthusiasm will pass on to the students. As a general rule, if you act bored or uninterested than their students, also be bored and uninterested if you act excited and enthusiastic than the students are going to copy that also. Reciprocal teaching is a few simple strategies together to help students better understand the text or a reading. These strategies get students more involved throughout the reading process. It helps them stay engaged and improves the overall comprehension skills. Reciprocal teaching falls the I do, we do, you do formula, which basically means there's a gradual release of responsibility. In this teaching strategy, you do demonstrations, you prompt, and then you practice. So when new material is being introduced, the teacher first as a prominent role in the delivery of the content. First, you demonstrate how this strategies work. Then your students will work together in small groups with your guidance to better understand the process. And then finally, once students are comfortable, they use these strategies on their own. This in itself can instill competence and independence in the student. It can also give them a sense of responsibility. And if Sean and promoted in the right way, you can include peer to peer learning to help each other and guide each other. There are four parts to this strategy. Predicting, questioning, clarifying, and then summarizing. Each one of these building blocks plays an important role in helping the students improve literacy, stay engaged, boost reading comprehension, and it helps them learn on their own or in groups. So let's dig deeper. 3. Reciprocal Teaching: Predicting. There are two parts to predicting a text. The first involves what's going to happen overall in the reading. And the other involves predicting what's going to happen next in the section or chapter. They sound similar, but both have different processes. Part one, you predict what would happen. Throw a text by using the title. Try word association exercises are asking about what's the title infer or make them think about. You could use the images such as looking at the cover art or the pictures if there are any and building vocabulary and ideas by studying at closely or even have a guess at the topic, main ideas and such. Then you would use those clues to make your prediction of what will happen in the entire piece. Part two is where you're going to be predicting what happens next and a section or chapter, you would skim the next bit of text you've been assigned to read and pick up certain words, sentences, or images. And from that, you will have a quick overview and make a quick prediction as what's going to happen next in the text. Now, you need to remember the students may be quite lazy here and they might try to get away with basic answers, small three or four words, sentences, or even just one word answers. This is something you need to find a way to discourage positive reinforcement. Reward systems can work quite well here. Encourage them to come up with evidence as well. E.g. I think something because of something. Let's say your class is covering high Potter, e.g. you wouldn't want them to give you simple predictions. Like he's a boy, He's a wizard. I think he goes to school. You want to encourage your students to work a little bit harder and predict something with greater detail. And get them to say as long the sentence as possible. Based on the picture, I would think that he is a young boy that goes to school to learn how to be a wizard. That's our answer, will definitely receive a reward. And it would encourage other kids to come up with the same types of answers and we'll need air. You can push a little further. You could ask follow-up questions as well. Why do you think he's a wizard? What makes you think he goes to wedge it in school? Well, teacher, because he is wearing wizarding robes and he has a wand. Any little details like that deserve rewards and deserve stickers. And hopefully they will encourage others to speak out as well. Making these predictions with evidence that they have found themselves gives them a sense of achievement and makes them more involved in the reading process. When there are more involved with the texts, they're more focused and it helps them understand what's happening throughout it. Questioning, admitting that you don't understand something is a crucial part of the learning process. We have to get things wrong in order to get them right. So you want your students to take the time to pause and think about questions that they have and write them down as they read through a portion of the text. You want students to question why certain things are important with the reading and it shows that they're getting involved. Asking questions can be hard for many students because they don't know where to start. The easiest way is to ask who, what, where, when, why, and how. Students asking and discussing and answering questions amongst themselves and to the teacher. It gets them involved with the reading and ensures that they're paying attention to the important details. It also helps them with peer to peer learning strategies to make sense of the text as well. Clarifying. Clarifying as CTQs are used to make sure students continue to understand what they're reading throughout the entire process. They can be simple questions such as what, where, when, how, and it can be simple as identifying unknown words to things more complicated, such as explaining key concepts of a particular passage. Clarifying is a two-step process where the students, one, identify that they are confused by an idea or a word, and then to take steps to resolve the confusion and better understand the text. What teachers need to remember is that students can easily get tripped up with one complicated words. Hard to interpret. Images such as graphs or tables. Convoluted sentences are complex ideas and they often hide it. They'll pretend to know what's going on just because they don't want to admit that they don't know, they're embarrassed or they want to save face in front of their peers. To remedy this, the teacher can come up with some decoding strategies to help these students without actually calling them out in the first place. These decoding strategies are actually good ways to review the passage for everybody. Instead of singling individual students out, you can get everyone involved again. You can reread the passage. On average, people don't realize that they can only focus for ten to 15 min, so they need a break. Sometimes they don't even realize their brains are distracted until several minutes later. And easy fix for this is to reread the passage again and do it with different people reading and in different ways to keep it interesting. You can also break down the complicated parts. Ask the students what partial confusing them and have them write them down by two on the board, go over them, break them into smaller parts, explain them, go over the words are difficult. You can also discuss, summarize with them. You can go over it again in your own words as a teacher and let them hear you explain it in simple terms. This can give them a different context and a different idea about what the passage is about and can help them understand it better. Summarizing. Summarizing is about condensing a reading to its most important points in both written and verbal forms. A classic mistake students make is they try to rewrite a whole passage in their own words. So the art of summarizing will take practice and it can be complicated for them a farce, but when done correctly, summarizing can greatly improve a student's understanding of a reading and is also a key skill. There are many different ways that we can help students improve their summarizing skills. We can encourage the students to stop off and throw a text and then take shorthand notes. This is a skill in itself, may take some practice to get right. After the reading. We can get them to group work sessions where each student verbalize their summaries to each other and they talk about it. We can do a strategy called combining summaries, where students write down apart each and then they combine it, say one student writes the beginning and the other student rates than middle, and then the last one writes the end. They combine their three parts together to write one whole summary. And through all of this, we can be prompting our students, asking them questions like, what was this part above? What happened at the beginning? What happened at the end? What are the most important ideas from this paragraph? Who are the most important characters and so on. The ability to complete a summary shows that the students have been listening and they're able to not only understand it, but they're able to describe it and talk about it in their own words. 4. Experiential Learning: The pause strategy. The pause strategy, or as it's otherwise known, the pause procedure is a good method to use while using other strategies in the classroom. I use this often when using reading or writing strategies. It is a good way to enhance student understanding of the teaching materials. The way I use this strategy is every 20 to 30 min of class time, I will take a short two or three-minute break to discuss the class and take a rest. During these brief breaks, encourage students to discuss their notes in pairs, raised questions with the teacher, or take down any notes missed. As well as their students can work together to highlight key ideas in the reading or in their books, is wherever you decide, it's almost like a brain break and including quick fire activities here would work well also, breaking election to brief pauses like this can increase student intention and overall output. The use of the pause procedure involves a minimal amount of classroom downtime, but actually makes the rest of the class more productive and rejuvenate the students energy and interest. Muddiest point, strategy. Muddiest point is a classroom strategy that allows teachers to gain an understanding of student misconceptions? Or are they finding hard? Why are they finding difficult? Is a simple technique which requires students to write down or discuss. The most challenging vocabulary points are the most challenging grammar points, translations, readings, or wherever they need more clarification on. This is a simple classroom technique to see if there's anything unclear to the students. It can be done manually or electronically, or individually, or even in groups, is a powerful exercise because it compels them to create their own knowledge of a topic. It can also serve as an insightful source feedback and provides a good insight for the teachers. Something to bear in mind with this strategy is that students can not always verbalize clearly what's on their mind or what's confusing them. Some of them will be embarrassed and someone just be shy and they won't be able to see clearly what they're finding confusing. Some of them will just use it as an excuse to complain or moan about the material. And that's okay as well. Just as long as there's constructive conversation. Remember, try to listen with an open mind at all times. Don't take it personally if they say something isn't clear or something isn't good or something isn't fun. Use it as an opportunity to try a different method or a different approach. Experiential learning strategies. Experiential learning is the process of learning. By doing. This learning, technique encourages students to have firsthand experiences with materials rather than just learning through someone else's lectures are textbooks. By engaging students in hands-on experiences and reflection, they are better able to connect theories and knowledge learned in the classroom to real-world situations. This includes things like going to the zoo to learn about animals through observations instead of just reading about them or seeing them on the TV. Projects where you grow flowers from the seed and observe their progress and take notes and what they see. Scavenger hunts, putting on plays and hands-on learning. Experiential learning, as exactly as the name implies, is creating a learning experience that resonates with the students. When this happened, the students remember facts, The understand the content, they truly comprehend how the knowledge attained is relevant to them. The best example of this is learning to ride a bike when you're young. You don't listen to your parents conceptualize how to do it. You don't listen to them tell you how to do it. You get on the bike and you learn by doing, learn by getting it done. Understanding how the byte works, and understanding how you as a person are going to write it. There are so many benefits to experiential learning. Research has shown that student-centered approaches like this and power the participants to take learning into their own hands and apply it in the real-world. As well as this, it increases the student's self-esteem and their confidence in their own abilities. It increases the student's likelihood to engage in the classroom discussions or activities, and it provides a positive effect on students motivation for learning. You notice that there's an improved understanding of the course material after experiencing it firsthand. And the students generally have a greater ability to analyze increasingly complex problems. There's also a significant increase in the student's critical thinking abilities. Project-based learning works hand in hand with experiential learning. This strategy uses an open-ended approach in which students can work alone or collectively to produce a theme-based project. This can be based in the classroom. Gardening experiments, talk best debates and so on, are coming down is like field trips around the school or communities. And you can think of things like environment or trash pickup or recycling, that sort of thing. This strategy can help encourage students to apply skills and knowledge that developed in your classes and allow students to take their own approach to develop an answer and deliver a product. It also promotes team-building, functional wine was UCs, and an overall sense of achievement when the projects are finished. Pbl, as it's often called, use these questioning and problem-solving skills as the basis of instruction. Topics may include things like ocean animals, habitats, or environmental issues. You will start this by asking the students to create a list of questions that they want to find out about. Questions include what animal habitats are found in my city or town, or does pollution affect me? From this, you can get students to complete diaries or journals to show the results. If there's a particular theme in your school or class of that particular month, say ocean animals or rain forest, then you can make your projects based about that. As well as this, the classes can take field trips, which incorporates experiential learning strategies to observe animal habitats or go to the beach or visit local botanical gardens on the park. Then decide which one they're gonna do. The students can take a vote and which products that they liked, the sound of the best. Teachers then implement of project-based learning environment with tasks, worksheets, diaries, Written parts, drawing parts, and reading work to produce a final report or booklet. With the final project, you can do presentations to the rest of the school or even just to the class. And then you can take them home and hand them to the appearance or display them in an around the school. This type of learning and duties much needed critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving skills. Teachers guidance and ideas are also a powerful resource here to support the students while they do their projects. Ideas, and class brainstorming sessions should also be part of this while IT tasks are being completed. 5. Co-operative Learning: Cooperative learning strategies. This is something I have covered in other courses before. This strategy is about how students are placed into small groups to learn a new concept together. Each student has a designated role to play in the group which holds everyone accountable to the learning process. In this strategy, groups are strategically created so the students have different ability levels, are grouped together. Students are then provided with a task that they must complete, both individually and together, that matches a lesson, topic or a theme. This strategy is effective for many reasons. Oftentimes, children can learn something differently from appear, which is why cooperative learning can be both engaging and effective. Student strengths and challenges are evident in this scenario, but the end result is created by the entire group working together. Bear in mind that this is also going to take some practice, prompting and persistence from the teacher. It may take some time to develop the right methods to execute this strategy effectively at first, but it is worth the time and effort making good use of the stronger students here and giving them roles such as leaders and encouraging them to guide the weaker students is a great way to start from there, Logistic time and repetition to get it running smoothly. Again, this is another strategy that you can use alongside the other strategies as well, such as project-based learning or reciprocal teaching. There are many benefits to using cooperative learning in your classroom. It makes each member stronger. Students learn together. It promotes confidence, builds up individual, team, and class. Morale encourages much more student-student interaction. Tasks can be simple or complex, and it can be a great way to have brain bricks. You can create routines and you can reinforce class behavioral management as well. So why should be used co-operative learning? Well, it builds responsibility, improves cooperation, increases problem-solving skills, and it incorporates active learning strategy. The purpose of using cooperative learning in your classroom is to make each member a stronger individual and his or her right? The students learn together, so they also perform higher as individuals. It promotes confidence in language learning, like speaking out, socializing, team-building, making friends. And it also relaxes the timid or shy students. It can also build up team and class morale as well. And ultimately, it encourages more student-student interaction and reduces the need for as much teacher-student interaction. Another thing to consider with cooperative learning is your classroom layout. This is good for your classroom management systems as well, because you need to think about what types of groups that you want to have. You need to think about the layout of your classroom and how does it affect your students? Do you want your students in pairs? You don't want to want them in bigger groups. You want girls in one group and boys in the other. Three groups of 34 groups of four and so on. This is something you need to think about and you need to arrange your classroom accordingly. As with many techniques and strategies, these things will take practice and time to get right. As teachers, we're always learning and we're always finding new ways to make our classes better and more efficient. I hope that you will try some of these methods in time. You can develop your own variations and ways to make these learning strategies work for your classes until next time, guys, thank you so much.