Top 10 Principles for Effective Language Instruction

1. Honor home languages and home cultures

In the paper titled On Educating Culturally Sustaining Teachers, Paris (2016) suggests that “humanizing relationships of dignity and care are fundamental to student and teacher learning.” One important way teachers can humanize their students, and build relationships of dignity and care, is to implement culturally responsive practice in their classrooms that honor their students’ home languages and home cultures. “The goal…is to connect students’ lived experiences and backgrounds to the content, positively reflect students’ cultures within the curriculum, and expand their linguistic repertoire” (Hyung, 2020). This can help students feel more supported and validated, which can improve their academic outcomes. In the words of Gloria Ladson-Billings, “All instruction is culturally responsive. The question is: to which culture is it culturally oriented?” (as cited in Gibson, 2020). Effective language instructors will work to ensure their classroom is oriented at least in part to their students’ culture(s).

2. Uncover and seek to move past implicit bias

A teacher has a responsibility to educate each of their students in the best, most affirming way possible. A classroom full of language learners is, in all likelihood, a classroom in which multiple races, cultures, languages, and socioeconomic backgrounds are represented. Unfortunately, even taking steps to reflect their students’ cultures and backgrounds in the classroom and curriculum does not guarantee that a classroom will be an affirming space for all students; “You can have a multicultural curriculum and still not have an anti-racist classroom” (Michael, 2015, p. 2). Teachers must also do the work of examining and their own biases and unlearn or move beyond them.

3. Meet learners where they are in their language acquisition journey

A teacher may have students in any of the six stages of language acquisition, and should be prepared to support their growth and development no matter where they are in their language learning journey. Fortunately, there are instructional strategies a teacher can use to aid in receptive and expressive language development that are tailored to specific language levels. For example, a teacher might focus on developing receptive language with a student in the pre-production stage “by using read-alouds and music,” but in contrast, help a student in the early production stage begin to develop independence by “[modeling] a phrase and [having] the student repeat it and add modifications” (Robertson & Ford, n.d.)

4. Make standard content accessible with texts and resources tailored to language acquisition levels of students

This principle is borrowed from Li (2012). Although some mistakenly believe that individuals who are not yet fluent in a language have a reduced capacity to learn because of their perceived language deficits, with appropriate scaffolding and challenges, language learners are as capable of achieving academic success as any other students. Rather than altering the content standards for language learners, language instructors should instead make the existing standards more accessible while maintaining high expectations for their performance and growth.

5. Provide multiple ways for students to access new concepts

All students can benefit from instruction that incorporates multiple modalities, and none more so than language learners. This is especially true for students who may have background knowledge of a topic in their home language, and need access points to integrate the information into their target language. Regardless of whether a student has background knowledge in a topic, however, they will be well-served by having a number of ways to understand new topics, especially content topics, as they develop the language associated with the topic.

6. Integrate reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills in a balanced way

Li (2012) said it best: “Teachers should not focus only on one of the four language skills at the sacrifice of the others. Instead, they should integrate the four skills in their instruction and they should do so from the very start.” Successful language users have access to all four language skills, and so it behooves instructors to integrate each of these skills consistently and with equal weight. 

7. Provide many authentic contexts for practicing new language forms and vocabulary

If our goal is for individuals to be able to communicate effectively through speaking and writing, as well as understand communication they receive orally and in writing, we need our learners to be flexible in their language use. The best way to foster this flexibility and generalization of new language forms and vocabulary is for students to gain experience using them in multiple contexts that relate to real life. As Himmel (2012) says, “research allows us to state with a fair degree of confidence that English learners best acquire English when language forms are explicitly taught and when they have many opportunities to use the language in meaningful contexts.” This can improve student motivation as well as better prepare them to use their target language in authentic contexts, having practiced it in similar contexts.

8. Make metacognition visible and explicit

Having an understanding of metacognitive strategies, or strategies to help oneself learn, benefit all learners, and is absolutely essential for language learners. Teachers should model a variety of strategies, work with students to break them apart and name them, and provide opportunities for students to “select, evaluate, and adjust strategies” (Li, 2012). Teachers should not assume that students will pick these strategies up naturally, but teach them deliberately and explicitly.

9. Provide differentiated ways for students to demonstrate mastery of new concepts

This relates to Principle 3: “Meet learners where they are in their language acquisition journey.” It would not be fair to ask students at different levels of language development to produce the same work to demonstrate their growth and understanding. However, a skilled language instructor can focus on similar concepts while differentiating how students demonstrate their understanding. For example, a student in the Early Production stage could be asked yes/no questions, while a student in the Beginning Fluency stage can be asked questions that require a fuller response (Robertson & Ford, n.d.).

10. Clearly define content and language objectives, and offer time to reflect on growth and achievement

Finally, although this principle may be the first element visible in a lesson, is that of learning objectives. Ideally, teachers should provide distinct content and language objectives, and should “specifically outline the type of language that students will need to learn and use in order to accomplish the goals of the lesson” (Himmel, 2012) so that students know what is expected of them in each area and can measure their success.