As a first entry on our new ELL Compass Rose blog, I find it fitting to begin with a link to a TED Talk by Deb Roy from MIT, explaining a recent research he conducted to trace the birth of a word. We've all experienced it, but never before has it been so graphically recorded so that we can begin to understand when that magical moment occurs that a word is captured and expressed. As ESL teachers, we are interested in recreating that environment to help our students learn another language just as naturally they did with their primary caregivers. I think this will be instrumental in encouraging us to dip and scaffold our language pattern down to the correct level for each of our students for them to capture the needed vocabulary and structures and then gradually build them up again to a more complex level where they can compete with their classmates' academic language.
Once you've had a chance to view the video, your valuable feedback will help us create a worthy conversation.
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