Best Practices for Learning English

Abstract

Some teaching strategies for ELLs address all the reading areas of vocabulary, grammar, fluency, and comprehension. Some best practices include repeated reading of words, sentences, and stories; using cognates and synonyms to explain unfamiliar words and concepts; and summarizing text. Strategies are a means the language user exploits to mobilise and balance his or her resources, to activate skills and procedures, in order to fulfil the demands of communication in context and successfully complete the task in question in the most comprehensive or most economical way feasible depending on his or her precise purpose. Communication strategies should therefore not be viewed simply with a disability model – as a way of making up for a language deficit or a miscommunication. Native speakers regularly employ communication strategies of all kinds (which will be discussed below) when the strategy is appropriate to the communicative demands placed upon them. The use of communication strategies can be seen as the application of the metacognitive principles: Pre-planning, Execution, Monitoring, and Repair Action to the different kinds of communicative activity: Reception, Interaction