Teachers can begin creating a step by step at-risk reading program beginning with a focus on letter-sound correspondence and gradually progressing to include various aspects of oral exposure and early literacy. Nieto (1999) and Ladson-Billings (1994) view a nurturing environment in the classroom to be as critical to student achievement as an appropriate literacy curriculum that meets the needs of individual students.

• Provide a supportive environment and establish a trusting bond.
• Cater levels of activity to students’ level. Try and make sure that the learning tasks pose a reasonable challenge to the students: neither too difficult nor too easy.
• Help students recognize links between effort outcome – learning is a long term plan of effort and investment.
• Break down learning steps into understandable pieces.
• Minimize student’s performance anxiety during learning activities.
• Mark the student’s correct and acceptable work, not his or her mistakes. Always give a comment whenever possible.
• Recognize and give credit for the student’s oral participation in class.
• Encourage students to pursue tasks based on interests and talents.
• Always give shorter tests.
• Be realistic of the reading tasks and additional assignments and their level.

Tutorials is another effective way to build positive interpersonal relations.

Procedures during one-on-one tutorials:
1. Share observations including positive points such as accentuating what the student can do in the target language.
2. Discuss tactics for managing behaviors such as establishing a contract.
Follow-up: Provide positive reinforcement about specific students to school administrators, educators, parents, colleagues and other teachers.

The English language learner category is perhaps the most undefined and silent of all language learner types. Educators have identified special needs and slow learners, learning disabled learners, ADHD and ADD learners. Any student who has trouble coping in the heterogeneous classroom can be considered an at-risk learner and would particularly benefit from extra interpersonal attention. Teachers can use these procedures to nurture the interpersonal element in both whole and small instruction especially in teaching/learning situations of language learning difficulty. Various strategies and activities work for different types of students; it is important to identify and select the right activities and procedures early on as success breeds success.

Why Open Ended Activities with ELLs is the Best Way to Teach

Teachers of ELLs (English language learners) need to use activities that activate as many students as possible for as much of the time as possible. This short article provides an overview of activities that can be implemented with fairly large general education ELL classes.

Why open-ended activities?

In a mixed-ability ESL class, teachers should aim for full class participation rather than single-student activations such as calling one student to the board, or having one student write a response on a single paper going around the class. One way teachers can facilitate this process is to offer a variety of open ended exercises.

Using open-ended activities in differentiated instruction

An open-ended activity allows students to work at their own pace and allows for a variety of responses. For the purposes of full class participation however, teachers should aim at activities that ALL students can do together. During this time, the teacher visually checks students answers, correcting wherever possible. This kind of interaction gives the teacher more control with regard to classroom management and classroom organization. The teacher can use open-ended activities during various segments of the lesson particularly in the first twenty minutes of the lesson where students are either learning or reviewing important lexical (core) vocabulary.

Open-ended ideas for the beginning of the lesson
1. Raise the number of open-ended brainstorming activities (many answers to one teacher cue)
2. Encourage students respond all together, by pointing to things, raising hands or fingers, answering in chorus, moving their bodies, ticking off items or writing responses.
For example, if you are teaching colors and parts of the body for example, you could have students open their textbook and point to the item (in this case, body part or color) that you mention.
If you are reviewing vocabulary using pictures, number the pictures. Students then have to hold up the number of fingers according to the picture.

End-of-the-lesson activities
1. Students can recap new Lexi learned during the lesson using the picture-number sequence (listed above) or simply by pointing to the pictures in their textbook.
2. Dictation. Students can write down single-letter or even nonsense-words. Middle students can write the word and more advanced students can write down the phrase or sentence.
3. Command games - simply telling students to do things or Simon Says.
4. Quick guessing games - based on a rough sketch on the board.
5. Brainstorm: how many things can students think of that ... begin with a certain letter, have a certain letter in them, are animals, are colors, are in this room, or whatever you like. Give them an ambitious but possible target such as let's get to 10 / 20 / 30 words, and try to reach it. or:...we have 3 minutes left in the lesson, let's see how many words we can get to.

It is crucial that both the teacher and the students understand that students will progress at different rates. The emphasis on involving full class participation using open-ended activities takes effort. Students should understand that they are working at the level that will take them one step forward. This is the heart of the principles of differentiated instruction.

4 New Teacher Tips on How to Prevent Discipline Problems

Many potentially good new teachers become absorbed in managing the class and reporting bad behavior. They tend to focus on the negative consequences of their students' misbehavior. As a result, they lose focus of what their students can do, instead of what they can't.