Sheltered Education

Sheltered Education

Sheltered education is a technique that is founded on the idea of providing meaningful instruction in the content areas (social studies, science and math) for seeing through limited English proficiency learners towards a higher academic attainment while they are acquiring English fluency. Sheltered education allows the content to be at the same level to that of native English speakers while it’s still at the bettering of understanding the language. It’s different from ESL instruction because it does not entirely focus on language development but instead it achieves English proficiency through other topics or actual content material in the curriculum.

Important practical implications

The most fundamental components of sheltered instruction includes; content and learning objectives, the instruction strategies( analyzing suggestions in specific content areas), language functions, students language skills, language learning strategies, grammar or language structures and the assessment of the content learned.

Content objectives are derived from the stated content standards, they state the cognitive skills or knowledge that learners are expected to achieve during a lesson and they specify how learners will illustrate what they have learned.

Language objectives- using language objectives in order to get classroom instruction for English learners is still a fresh concept and literature suggestions states that teachers should have much more support in order to be comfortable with creating objectives that state academic language worthy teaching. A quality language objective should be able to complement the knowledge and skills identified in the content objectives.

Language functions- is always related to the topic of the lesson being learned. Teachers can alternatively access language functions related to content areas in their grade level content areas standards.

Student’s language skills- sheltered instruction lessons include chances for English learners to use listening, reading and writing skills but not all this four domains are directly taught and assessed in one particular lesson. As teachers construct the language objectives, they should consider the student’s language objectives, their language abilities and their language skills needed to accomplish the lesson’s activities.

Grammar or language structures- this is one area that is most common to the content area. For example if learners are asked to create an analogy between being a kid in a family and being a colonist as an England subject, the language objectives should address the use of comparative structures to write down about how these two situations are different and similar.

Language learning strategies- it majorly supports the comprehension of the lesson being taught. For example if the learners in a class are starting a new chapter in the textbook, the strategy used in the text previewing might turn out to be an appropriate language objective.

Assessment of the content learned- in an effective sheltered instruction process teachers continually assess the learner’s progress towards content and the language objectives achievement concerning the lesson taught. It should assess the use of formative assessment details to plan lessons that are able to meet the linguistic academic needs of all their students. Teachers that English must understand that unless learners reach a certain level of English proficiency, content area achievement can be clouded by limited language ability (Lord and Abedi, 2001).