Tag Archives: reading comprehension

How to Improve Reading Comprehension? Team With a Theme

Barbara Gottschalk
Barbara Gottschalk

“We don’t read that much at school. Mostly we do our work,” observed Selena, a third grade multilingual learner (MLL). I knew the “work” she was referring to involved reading, but obviously she didn’t think it was real reading. I … Continue reading

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Checking Reading Comprehension? Ask Better Questions!

Barbara Gottschalk
Barbara Gottschalk

“Ms. Gottschalk, don’t you get it?” The young English learner (EL) asking me this question was genuinely concerned. He was perplexed because I kept asking him and his classmates questions about a picture—questions whose answers I obviously already knew. In … Continue reading

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Optimizing Reading Comprehension for MLLS: 6 Strategies

Judie Haynes
Judie Haynes

When my school first adopted the Reading Workshop, a teaching method in which the goal is to teach students strategies for reading and comprehension, I became a proponent of this approach and worked to find ways to adapt it to … Continue reading

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Better Reading Comprehension: 5 Strategies

Elena Shvidko
Elena Shvidko

Today I’ll share five reading strategies that were helpful to me when I was an ESL student, and, hopefully, they will be valuable to your students as well.

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Adapting Folktales for ELL Learning Activities

Nathan Hall
Nathan Hall

We content-based teachers often struggle with how to make students focus on the specific reading skills we want them to learn without being distracted or overwhelmed by the language. This gets more difficult when my activity focuses on fiction, especially … Continue reading

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5 Sites for Using Mainstream News in ELL Classes

Nathan Hall
Nathan Hall

Those of us who grew up before the Internet remember how our parents read newspapers and magazines. We may even recall that time we tried to read one but couldn’t make sense of most of the words. After that happened … Continue reading

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All the News That’s Fit to Teach: Reviewing News Sites for ELLs

Nathan Hall
Nathan Hall

When I was an ESL volunteer with a community program, I thought using brief articles from magazines like Time or Newsweek for reading activities was a good idea. They seemed easy to read and had articles about interesting subjects, right? … Continue reading

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Literature in ELT: Integrating Literature into Language Learning

Guest Author
Guest Author

A Guest Post by Sybil Marcus Sybil Marcus has lived and worked on four continents.  She taught ESL at the University of California at Berkeley Extension and at the Summer English Language Studies on the Berkeley campus.  She has presented at … Continue reading

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