Ready to help your English Language Learners take the next step to independent reading, use Actively Learn’s embedded features to help support language development.
Define and translate features are great for identifying new vocabulary. The define feature allows your ELL student to take the first step in decoding the word by seeing it used in other sentences and hear it spoken aloud. They can also choose to have a word, phrase or even entire text translated into one of 20 different languages. Another feature our ELL students could find helpful is the text-to-speech where they can “hear it” and have the text read aloud. Having it both visually and audibly helps ELL students make connections to words and word sounds, which are often different from their native language.
A great way to offer additional help or support is to assign “extra help” to your ELL students where you offer additional information to help guide their reading. You can identify your students who need extra help in the roster and check “extra help”. Extra help notes are a great way to embed vocabulary, scaffolding, or question/statement stems. When you add the note, you can then select whether it is extra help. Extra help can also be added to questions under the options menu. You could also consider creating an Assignment Version specifically for your ELL students so that extra help instructions address your ELL student’s needs for word clarification and phonemic awareness support.
Finally, to support our language learners, chunking the text by inserting questions helps ELL students feel the text is more manageable. They have to pause and think about what they read instead of viewing an entire text at once.
These are some of the great features that Actively Learn offers to help support ELL students in our classroom. For more information, check out this informational sheet.