 Okay, how is language acquired and how can you create a classroom environment that promotes language development? Think about a toddler that you know. How did they acquire language? Through your discussion, you probably came up with some of these points. The toddler received lots of input. The caregivers talked a lot to the child and they heard a lot of the language. Caregivers tend to respond to the message and not the errors in the message because it's a meaningful communication. Caregivers explain and label things and the child repeats and copies what they hear the caregiver saying. Caregivers also expect to hear the child's message and hear the child's message. Caregivers explain and label things and the child repeats and copies what they hear the caregiver saying. Caregivers also expand utterances. So if a baby says milk, the parent might say, oh, milk, do you want some milk? I'll get you some milk. Do you want it in this glass? So caregivers respond and expand to the utterance. The caregivers have an expectation that their child is going to learn how to talk. There's very few parents that shake their head at 18 months and say, I don't think they're ever going to talk. We believe that they are going to learn how to talk unless there's something physically wrong. And there's lots of meaningful interaction. So we know that the process of acquiring a first language, a second language, is similar to the process of acquiring a first language. There's lots of meaningful communication and purpose for talking in real situations. So we want to try to replicate that in the classroom. So how can you create a classroom that promotes language acquisition based on what you know about the first language acquisition? You can have a conversation about that with your colleagues. So some of the things you may have come up with is that you want to create a safe place where students are able to take risks. They want to feel that they can talk and that it's okay if they make errors. We have high expectations that students will acquire the language, just as parents do for their children. The student has a desire to communicate in meaningful ways. And the students are exposed to proficient speakers of English in many different contexts. In other words, students need to be given lots of opportunities for language input, as well as opportunities to use the language which we call output. And by the way, research indicates that the quality and quantity of the language that they hear will affect the language that ELL students produce. So we don't want to dumb our language down too much. We want to increase that language acquisition by using rich language. I'm going to talk for a minute now about input and output. The notion of receiving lots of input was put forth by Crashing many years ago, but we still use part of his theory. And it is termed comprehensible input. He theorized that students need to understand most of what is being said to them. Otherwise, whatever is being said sounds like blah, blah, blah. And the language that they hear must be appropriate for their language proficiency. So there are ways we can make content understandable or comprehensible in the classroom. And Elizabeth Coelho has an excellent chapter on this in her book, Adding English. So some strategies for teaching, for providing comprehensible input are to use visuals or realia, which are real items and manipulatives. The use of nonverbal skills, just like we do with social language, we want to support what we say with facial expressions and gestures and tone of voice. Modify your speech. Slowing down your speech is very effective for English language learners. Provide enough response time. Explain vocabulary and then revisit and rehearse those new words and new concepts. Repeat, rephrase and paraphrase concepts and directions that students are expected to understand. Demonstrate what you're trying to do. Provide a peer tutor so that there's a student in the classroom that can explain what's happening. Often the peers can teach what is happening much better in some cases than the teacher. Just be aware of figurative or idiomatic language slang and explain that. Focus on meaning making just as we do when children are learning their first language. And provide alternative resources and simplified resources. Awareness of the level of proficiency that your students are at and comprehensible input can also contribute to language acquisition by making the language one degree more complex than what they're able to understand. We call that comprehensible input plus one. Coelho suggests that we can encourage language acquisition by teaching just beyond their level of proficiency by expanding on the language that children produce, providing prompts, involving students in chants and songs, encourage students to chime in when reading a patterned story, and organize structured group activities. So cooperative learning activities are really helpful for ELLs to acquire that language. So if you notice a lot of these points also involve output of language, not just input. So for a long time researchers held the belief that comprehensible input was a necessary and sufficient condition for second language acquisition. Now however we know that students need language output is as well. No one can develop a language proficiency simply by listening to people talk. It's like any skill that we're acquiring we need practice. We can't learn how to play the piano by watching someone play the piano. So we want to provide lots of opportunities for interaction. I'd like you to try an activity with a colleague. If you see a structure visual on the screen, try to describe what you see without using the letter C or T. Okay what did you notice about your communication? You probably noticed that you had the cognitive ability, but you were filtering everything you were going to say through your brain to make sure that it didn't have a C or a T. That's similar to what our ELLs go through. They have the cognitive ability, but they don't have the words to express themselves. They need to think about what it is they want to say and they need to think about the order of the words so that they can express their idea or concept. Language production or output can be a frustrating experience for ELLs. And yet as educators we want them to be able to speak fluently and accurately. So we want to encourage and intentionally target language output from our ELLs. What are some ways that you think we can target language output? So some of the things that you may have come up with is that we want to invite discussion and have cooperative learning activities. We want to ask open-ended questions so that students have to give more of a response than a simple one word response. Have students repeat or rephrase the question that's being discussed. Simply saying tell me more about that. If you pay attention to students responses they may use a one word or two word response and if we just say tell me more about that they have to use language to express a little bit more. Wait time. Students need that time to create those words, think of those words in English. Encourage students to ask their own questions and culturally that this might not be something they're aware of so you might have to model what that looks like. Again letting students be risk takers. Give students opportunities to write. Writing is another form of output and some students at higher levels of proficiency in their first language might be able to write something down before they feel comfortable saying it out loud verbally either writing it in English or their first language. We want to capitalize on the strength of the first language and that there's lots of ways to produce language through reading. There could be choral reading, readers theater, shared reading, role plays and discussion about a book with their peers. We also want to provide language models for our ELL so that they know how to disagree politely, contribute their opinion, interrupt a conversation politely and so providing those language models for actually all of our students is beneficial so that they know how to conduct themselves in a group situation. By focusing on meaningful language use we're helping to build communicative competence as outlined in the benchmarks. You may recognize this chart from the benchmarks. These are all of the communicative competence skills that we want our English language learners to have. Why do we want them to talk then as a review? It develops not only speaking skills but listening skills for our ELLs. It gives students an idea of the construction of the English language. It helps students to connect with their peers when they have the opportunity to talk. They're a part of what's going on in the classroom and it develops self-confidence. So we know that classrooms that are language rich are an ideal environment for that language acquisition. What does language rich mean to you? After your discussion about what a language rich classroom might look like, you may have come up with some suggestions that teachers have come up with before in an in-service about what a language rich classroom looks like. So to summarize ELLs need many opportunities to interact with proficient speakers of English but they also need many opportunities to use and practice English. Thank you.