Page 19 - The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 9-12: English As a Second Language and English Literacy Development, 2007

To develop their oral communication skills, English language learners need extensive opportunities to listen and to talk about a range of subjects, including personal topics, school subjects, and current affairs. ESL and ELD programs should provide many cogni- tively challenging opportunities for students to engage in listening and speaking activi- ties tied to expectations from all the other course strands. Brainstorming to identify what students already know about the topic of a new text they are about to read, discussing strategies for how they will organize ideas in a writing assignment, presenting and defending ideas or debating current issues, and offering constructive feedback about work produced by their peers are all examples of richly integrated tasks that support the development of English language learners’ listening and speaking skills.
English language learners need to develop listening skills for use in their interactions with others, for comprehension in less interactive formats such as classroom presentations and radio and television broadcasts, and for many other social and school purposes: to listen to directions, instructions, and school announcements in the beginning levels of instruction; to take point-form notes on classroom presentations in the middle course levels; and to provide a summary of a television or radio news report they have heard in the higher-level courses.
Similarly, English language learners need to build a broad range of speaking skills, both for conversational purposes and for academic purposes such as presenting ideas and information to their classmates. Beginning-level English language learners will need many opportunities to engage in brief conversations on personal topics, progress to speaking tasks such as sharing ideas about books in a literature circle at the intermediate level, and advance to presenting a classroom seminar or participating in a debate in the higher-level courses.
English language learners need rich and frequent opportunities to interact in the class- room in a purposeful way – for example, through collaborative learning in pairs and small groups that allows them to engage in listening and speaking for authentic pur- poses. Teachers should be a supportive source of input for English language learners’ oral language development, offering instruction and feedback, as well as providing excellent models of the competence a first-language speaker would demonstrate in listening and speaking for both academic and social purposes. Teachers at all course levels should provide focused instruction and modelling of various features of the English grammatical and sound systems.
In addition, teachers should model the use of English conversational strategies that will facilitate smooth interaction appropriate to a variety of social and academic contexts, as well as the effective use of communication tools such as clarification, circumlocution, and repair to bridge gaps in students’ current level of proficiency in English.
THE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE AND ENGLISH LITERACY DEVELOPMENT
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