Teaching English Toolbox

Differentiation, Scaffolding and Adaptive Learning

From Deep AI: cute cat using scaffolding in an English language classroom

Choiceboards

Choiceboards, TicTacToe boards or learning menus are frequently used in other countries and are useful because they give learners options - maybe something might be too difficult for them, but they like doing it, so why not let them have that option! Here is an article to get you started (Buechel, L. (2023,). Motivated to Work: The Power of Choice Boards. English Teaching Forum (Vol. 61, No. 4))  and try a googleimage search, for instance "Vocabulary choiceboard ESL" to see what you get.

Topics of individualization, differentiation and scaffolding belong to general education classes and those same principles belong to the English language classroom as well. Every classroom is a mixed-ability classroom and there are many points to consider.

  • How do you set your aims? Our suggestion is to always set them relatively high for the whole class (so A2 or higher in local primary schools) and then to help learners reach them through scaffolding. Don't set the bar too low!
  • When do you take away the scaffolding? Think about if it's important that the learners are accurate or not or if it's more important that they can complete the task even if it's not perfect!
  • How can the teacher be a scaffold? Your body language is a scaffold which you can take away (e.g. show what you want them to do to start, simply explain without body language later). How else might you scaffold?
  • What can you scaffold? Everything! For a story you might use Google Images to seach for "story frame". For a writing activity, you might google "writing graphic organizer ESL". For listening and reading you might think about having picture prompts that don't repeat information but contribute to deeper understanding or note-taking sheets with a pre-determined structure.
  • How can you differentiate easily? Writing and speaking are easy because learners will do what they can do, though you might provide some different levels of support or expectations. However, reading and listening are a bit trickier. For example, in a listening activity, the second time you do the exercise, perhaps different learners can do different things. Or in a reading activity, perhaps you use reading roles that are suited to specific learners' strengths or needs to develop.
  • How can you design an exercise with differentiation in mind? Think about the famous "gap fill" or "cloze" - can different learners have different gaps? Can you use word shapes or scrambled letters for some learners and a complete gap for others? Can you have a word pool or not? Can you have the speaking prompts on a different piece of paper that learners can come to get if they need it? Think about easy ways of making an exercise more or less challenging!
  • What are some categories of differentiation? You can differentiate by content, by process, by product, you can differentiate by variation or by outcome. What are some examples and why and how would you use these?

This issue of Babylonia (click on the picture) provides you with ideas for differentiation in general in your language lessons.

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Adaptive Learning

Adaptive learning and feedback are especially important when learners come to school with extremely varied levels of proficiency in a subject!

Here are a few questions to think about:

  • English is a subject that is learned informally, outside of the classroom. Thus what happens inside the classroom needs to respect a learner's exposure and not limit what they learn for the sake of "control". What could this look like?
  • Only very large publishers are able to provide adaptive materials that take away the role of the teacher as a "content provider" and use teachers to simply moderate and motivate learning. This could imply every child working on the computer during much of class time which has its advantages and disadvantages. It could also be that materials are provided and learners can work on the same materials on different levels or that there are "open" tasks that are shared and developed in class. What could this look like in the Swiss classroom? Would you be able to come up with different activities for different learners based on a given page in a coursebook?
  • How can English language lessons be based on open tasks and where learners are motivated to and do work at the level they can? How can you guide a project (like creating a poster) in a way that learners actually do their work and where they get the required support (or lack thereof)?
  • How can teachers make feedback sustainable? If learners work on the computer, they can directly practice a discrete skill (e.g. past forms) when they get a question wrong and hopefully integrate the item correctly. In the classroom, it is harder to give feedback and make learners responsible for integrating it. What ideas do you have?
  • Might a CLIL approach to English lessons (e.g. combining your Religion, Culture and Ethics or Science and Social Studies lessons with English) lead to more adaptive lessons because a teacher's thinking changes - they might define the task to be done (e.g. summarizing a film clip or making a presentation) and learners can do minimal parts or more in English? Is simple exposure (e.g. watching a documentary in English on Super Animal Senses (BBC)) enough for English language learning?
  • What tools do you know that provide adaptive activities and feedback to learners (e.g. Pearson Write to Learn or  Cambridge Write and Improve that you can use in your English language classroom? Do you know of any for reading or listening comprehension or speaking analysis? How might basic tools such as the Immersive Reader function on One Note or any speech to text or spell/grammar check functions be used for adaptive learning?
  • There are many publishers of graded readers (Macmillan, for example that provide diagnostic tools to help learners select books at appropriate levels. One the one hand, this is somehow adaptive if learners can choose texts at their level. On the other hand, it could be that a learner is interested in a book that is not at their level - what should you do as a teacher? What are the advantages and disadvantages of adaptive tools like this?
  • What sort of feedback do online programs offer that the general classroom teacher cannot?
  • How can an online program both diagnose and adapt to the needs of the learner? What technology lies behind this and is it useful for learners to spend time using such programs?
4th grade storytelling evening (Patrick Buechel). Text adapted with Canva.
  • Any class has a variety of different learners. Think about your general routines / organizational scaffolds in English - how can you accept children where they are but push them to a higher level when each one is different? What should you do? What should you NOT do? What are some general suggestions for English? How will you scaffold language learning? What is important to think about?
  • Can you name categories of ways of scaffolding learning and categories of whom you will scaffold learning for?
  • What are low-prep ways of meeting the needs of different learners in your English lessons if you think concretely about a reading, writing, speaking or listening activity?
  • What sort of visual support is useful in the English language classroom to help learners understand language? to help them produce language?
  • You have to give report cards twice a year and you have some native speakers of English some complete beginners. How can you do this?