What do you do when you have an ESL student who knows no English? Where do you start? When teaching an ESL student who does not know any English, your goal is to teach the student Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) or social language.
BICS consists of tier one vocabulary words. Tier one vocabulary words are basic words we use in social settings every day. One of the goals of teaching English to beginners is for these students to understand language in school, so that they understand what is happening in school. Because of this, the first set of vocabulary words to teach beginner ESL students is school supplies (pencil, book, paper) and classroom furniture (table, chair, door). You begin with the most common vocabulary words and gradually add more words over time.
The ESL student also needs to use these vocabulary words in an authentic way using simple sentences. When teaching the ESL students, your goal is to teach authentic language, or language that actually occurs in real life. When teaching school supplies, an authentic situation would be a teacher asking a student if he/she has a pencil. Therefore, you pair school supplies with the grammar structure, “I have”. I would ask the student, “Do you have a pencil?” and the student responds, “Yes, I have a pencil”. You then practice this question and answer drill substituting “pencil” with other vocabulary words pertaining to school supplies that the student already knows or is currently learning.
Next, I teach body parts for safety reasons. If the student gets hurt at school, I need this student to be able to express where he/she is hurt. The grammar structure I pair body parts with is, “My ______ hurts”.
Other vocabulary words I teach are: food, family, feelings, verbs, adjectives/opposites, clothing, animals, and places in the community. I also teach prepositions of place to beginners.
The following chart consists of the vocabulary words I would teach to beginners along with the authentic grammar structures. These vocabulary words and grammar structures are in sequential order.
Classroom Furniture and School Supplies I have…
Body Parts My __________ hurts.
Feelings I am…
Verbs I can…
Food I like…
Adjectives I am…, I have…She/He is…She/He has…
Family This is…She/He is….She/He has
Clothing I have…
Animals A (animal) is (adjective). A giraffe is tall.
Community Places Combine learned vocabulary words and grammar structures
Teaching the English language is a systematic and purposeful process. When you teach English, you build and expand on what the student already knows. For example, when you teach family, the student already knows body parts and adjectives. The student can use this knowledge to describe their family members.
I also would teach beginner ESL students frozen language at the same time that I teach vocabulary words. These phrases include information about the student. The phrases I teach are “My name is __________”, “I am __________ years old”, “I come from __________”. Two other important phrases are, “Can I go to the bathroom?” and “Can I get a drink?” At this point the student is memorizing each phrase. When teaching frozen phrases, I first used sentence strips. I cut each word from the sentence strip and the students first practiced reading the sentences or phrases with the words in order. Later on, I would scramble the words for each phrase, and the student would have to put the words in the correct order and then read the sentence. When the student has learned the phrases that pertain to information about the student, I then would have the student write these phrases in an “About Me” writing piece.