Julie O’Connor is an ESL teacher with this helpful math video on TeacherTube.
Do you teach students who are already familiar with the math concepts themselves, but don’t know enough English to talk about them? Or are they being exposed to the math concepts for the first time? What’s the situation usually?
Many times, they are familiar with the concepts - some students from the Middle East and Asia have been exposed to more complicated math. However, the word problems are a major challenge for the ESL students, so I try to give them some tools.
Do they get frustrated or impatient since they know the math, but not how it’s being communicated (like through word problems). How do you handle that?
Yes, there is frustration, but their actual math class teachers play a big role in this. Some of the math teachers are very understanding and don’t count the word problems as full credit, while others are not as patient about the challenges. So, that teacher compassion is a big factor in student frustration - I try to support the children when they are with me and help them in their other subjects.
Do you have any tips you’d like to share with math teachers who have an ESL student in their class?
I think that teachers should count the word problems as extra credit. They also should use a lot of visuals to represent the lesson objectives. There are also ESL strategies and games such as Vocabulary Jigsaw which is a vocab. game - there are many fun ways to learn and then reinforce math vocab. Obviously, they should partner students with others of more language abilities to help the ESL child to communicate.
