Language Acquisition Principles for ELL Students

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Language Acquisition Principles for ELL Students

Abstract

Within this paper we will take a brief look at the Language Acquisition Principles and how they work on the behalf of ELL students. We will see how these principles can be applied within our own learning environment. There is much information from Walqui article that gives a brief overview of ELL students and how things looked in the past for these students. Now that times has change we will see how educators can make the requirements for ELL students better and more effective for teacher and students. Hopefully, as we look at ways of changing learning for our ELL students we must remember that every student learns differently. Even if you follow the principles from 1-8 we must keep in mind that everyone is unique and process things within their own time table.

When reading the article, “Principles of instructed second Language” by Professor Rod Ellis (2008), he gives us a brief overview of eight principles that we can use to help ELL students. L2 (second language learners), must be able to adapt to the language of America. As educators we must find the correct road map to assist these students. SLA researchers are not so sure that we can help these students to achieve this goal. Professor Ellis does believe with some guidance that educators can have “provisional specification”.

The first principle Professor Ellis talks about is, “instruction needs to ensure that learners develop a rich repertoire of formulaic expressions and a rule base competence.” Here is where Professor Ellis talked about the Natives who use larger number of formulaic expression more than SLA. He also went on to explain how rote learned materials were internaliz...

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...nts up to speed. ELL students do face the challenge of learning a new language while still having to learn other subject areas.

We as educators must first develop reading skills for our ELL students so that they will get in the habit of reading and writing. We must also look at different avenues to increase their literacy skills. We must work on the strengths of our ELL students. When we work on what our ELL students already know then we can help build upon students learning from multiple languages. We can even have the ELL students share their native language with other students. This can help make learning interesting when they share their cultural background.

Works Cited

Citations

Ellis, R (2008) “Principles of Instructed Second Language” Retrieved July14, 2010, from: http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/digest_pdfs/Instructed

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