Some key principles

Five important principles for the language-rich classroom:

Aim for ‘comprehensibility plus’

This principle guides our choice of classroom texts and where we
pitch our classroom talk. It means choosing or making texts that are
largely accessible to your language learners (comprehensibility), but
stretch them a bit (plus). So simplify but don’t over-simplify.

Exploit repetition, recycling and redundancy

Language learners will benefit from opportunities to repeat reading,
writing, speaking and listening tasks. Keep classroom displays with
target language for revisiting. They will also benefit from re-cycling
structures and key vocabulary in new tasks. By redundancy, we
recommend that you offer meanings in a number of modes at the
same time – for example, writing up key words or phrases as they are
spoken, or supporting verbal text with visual text.

Supply models and scaffolding

Share good examples of the kind of text (spoken or written) that you
want your students to produce. Help them build their own appropriate
texts with supports such as a structured outline, key wordings or
phrases, and sentence starters. These will help them build a more
appropriate, elaborate or extended text.

Meaning matters most

Always respond to the meaning that your language learner is
expressing. Don’t rush in to correct surface grammatical errors.
Rather, help them to express what they want to say by offering
linguistic choices. Create tasks that are meaning-full.
Stop and talk about language along the way.
Maintain a habit of paying explicit attention to the language demands
of your classes. Make this a thread in your pedagogy. Share your
understanding of how language works with your students.

Now, think about your own teaching. How do you apply one of
these principles to your own teaching? Post your response in the
comment box!