Back-to-school time is such a whirlwind, and teachers everywhere are establishing their rules and expectations! As an ESL teacher, I’ve spent a few weeks getting into a groove with my schedule and establishing expectations of my own. One large expectation I have of my students is that they rely on their resources, not their teacher, to be successful.

In my ten years of teaching, I’ve always leaned toward helping my students just a little too much out of compassion for them. But as I’ve grown and learned, I’ve discovered that my students always do better when I establish high expectations and teach them strategies to be successful on their own.

If you work with multilingual learners, you know that they have unique linguistic needs for support and accommodation in order to be successful in English. Support might be needed with any of these areas:

• Reading in English
• Written responses in English
• Translating oral language into their primary language
• Simplifying complex language
• Extended time on assignments and assessments

While support such as simplified language is heavily reliant upon the teacher to provide, most of the other categories for support can be student-accessed rather easily if given the proper tools! Here are some of the ways that I teach & encourage student self-advocacy for support:

Reading Support

When students are having trouble decoding or understanding written text, I always encourage them to listen to it. If an adult or peer is available, great! Ask them to read it aloud! If not, there are so many digital tools available that they can use to listen to text read aloud. My students use the Read&Write Chrome extension on their Chromebooks to listen to any digital text.

Writing Support

There are so many great writing tools that you can make available for students to use independently! Some of these tools include anchor charts, posters, letter/sound/alphabet charts, word walls, sentence stems/frames, and dictionaries. For writing tasks that require them to get a lot of thoughts down on paper, relieve some of the translation mental load by scribing/dictating their thoughts for them. If they’re typing, a voice typing tool can help them easily get their thoughts written down! My students love to use the voice typing tool that is embedded into Google apps.

Translation Support

One of the most powerful tools in a student’s belt is their primary language. If it is helpful for them to use their primary language to understand or complete a task, I believe that it is important to teach them how to advocate for themselves to use that language whenever they need it! Teach students how to ask for an interpreter (if available) or how to navigate an app such as Google Translate. There are so many great features on this app that can be used for students who are literate or non-literate in their native language! On a mobile device they can even take a photo of text and the app will translate it immediately. Just remember that these translations are never perfect and could still cause some confusion!

Asking for Help

No matter how much we try to be there to support our multilingual students, it is almost certain that there will be a time when they are left on their own and feeling helpless. This is where empowerment and self-advocacy become so important as a real-world solution. When I began explicitly teaching my students how to ask for help or accommodations, they performed better on assignments and assessments because of their resourcefulness. Teach your students to ask for more time, more help or more information if they need it. They can ask for these things from teachers or peers!

Last year, my team created self-advocacy cue cards that had icons and sentence frames so that Emerging learners could simply point to the card in order to communicate what help they needed. I’m re-thinking that strategy this year because they got lost in the shuffle of moving desks, losing supplies, and peeling tape. So for now, I’m just trying to emphasize these expectations and remind students to do these things daily. But they need a visual cue for sure!!

It feels good to know that, whether or not I’m in the classroom with my multilingual students, they have all the tools they need to be successful. Slowing down to establish these expectations really is worth it! Tell me what other things you would do to promote student self-advocacy. I’d love to hear!