TEACHING ENGLISH IN THE CONTENT AREAS

Many teachers struggle with the problem of how to teach the contents areas to students whose English is limited. Should science and social studies wait until students are more fluent and can read the text?
No waiting is needed. For example in science students can learn with demonstrations, hands-on activities and experiments. In other hand, social studies teacher should use pictures, movies, filmstrips and video presentations.
But for limited- English students, teacher must include sufficient repetition for listening comprehension and ask frequent yes/no question to get feedback about vocabulary. Furthermore, teachers should allow time for students to learn the language needed to talk about activities.

1.1 SCIENCE ACTIVITIES

Teacher should use and discover different methods of science in order to keeps student motivation high and supplies the context for insights both into the natural world and into language.
The content of the elementary school science curriculum is generally tangible and concrete: our bodies, senses, the weather, living things, rocks, local land formations, the sky, simple instruments and machines.
Finally, your sense of wonder and participation in discovery will enhance the lessons. All good science lessons should answer some question and raise others, some open-ended[1].

1.2 SOCIAL STUDIES ACTIVITIES

For teach social studies teachers should reinforce vocabulary and use different resources as PowerPoint presentations or overhead transparencies, also is important to Use a variety of text, video, and taped material of varying degrees of difficulty[2].
Furthermore, in social studies teachers should Offer several options for projects so that each student can express his or her understanding in individual ways.

In order to make a motivate class social studies teachers should bring to class pictures, posters, or teacher- or student-created posters around the room , art prints .

Social studies teacher should coordinates time, space, materials for helps the class achieve their group and individual goals.

Social studies teacher must coordinates time, space, materials, and activities for helps the class achieve their group and individual goals.

[1] ELS TEACHER’S ACTIVITIES KIT.
[2] En línea: http://teachingtoday.glencoe.com/