Nonlinguistic Cues And The ELL Student

Nonlinguistic Cues and the ELL Student

Nonlinguistic cues are great for ELLs and LEPs, as well as for all students. When a teacher differentiates his/her lessons, his/her students are more likely to become interested on the lesson given as well as learn and understand the concepts being taught. Nonlinguistic cues are vital nonverbal strategies.

Visual Aids:

When using visual aids, students can conceptualize what they are learning. Visual aids can be use in the forms of clouds, graphic organizers, or webs.

Gestures:

Each individual’s culture has its own gestures. When the teacher is knowledgeable about his/her student’s own culture, gestures and their meanings can be properly used. This will be very helpful for ELLs in the learning process.

Such strategies, when introduced at the beginning of the school year and used throughout the school year, allows the teacher to make any necessary changes (add or eliminate) according to the needs of his/her students as well as his/her teaching style.

Some examples of nonlinguistic cues are body language, visuals, demonstrations, and hands-on experiences. When a teacher often crosses his/her arms, he/she is sending a negative message and could have students creating a defensive barrier towards learning (body language). Another very powerful method of nonlinguistic communication is eye contact. Teachers must establish eye contact with their students. When eye contact is made, the teacher not only gains the students’ trust but also makes positive impressions.

The use of nonlinguistic cues in a motivational manner can serve as a very powerful tool in the classroom setting. I always joke with my students that I am the center of their attention before I begin teaching/talking. I, then, scan though the classroom to make sure that they are all looking at me. This can be very positive when establishing and maintaining classroom discipline. It is very important that my students are always looking at me when I am delivering a message or lesson; when I am instructing them. When this happens we can combine all of the above and make teaching

Carrizo implemented in her class several strategies used by her SDAIE coach. By writing her lesson’s objectives on the board and having her students reading them aloud, she had the students not only seeing but also hearing what they would be learning about. Mrs. Carrizo chose to use a modified text instead of a magazine in order to help her students to learn about topic sentences. She provided a copy of the text to each student. Mrs. Carrizo demonstrated what the students would be looking for during both the pre-reading and reading the text within their cooperative learning groups (“shoulder partners”). Mrs. Carrizo gave a copy of a thinking map to each of her students. She also placed a bigger one on the board to use during the teacher-centered portion of the class. Mrs. Carrizo demonstrated what to do with the thinking map and gave her students time to read through the text with their groups in order to fill in the map. During the student-centered portion of the lesson, students were able to think/pair/share with their partners about what they had learned during the