Strategies for Increasing Comprehensibility

When communicating with your ESL students, you want to make sure they understand your meaning as clearly as possible and vice versa. Here are few ways to help make sure you and your students are understanding one another:

• Use sentence structures that expand the students' output by supplying needed phrases and vocabulary
• Use gestures to convey instructions
• Concentrate on understanding and communicating rather than on error correction
• Provide alternative grouping procedures so that students can share their understanding with one another and with the teacher
• Maintain regular classroom procedures and routines

These ideas were drawn from Diaz-Rico and Weed's The Crosscultural, Language, and Academic Development Handbook