Professional Standards for TESOL
Case Narrative 7
This case narrative is of an ESL teacher working in a primary school in a combined
role which includes ESL support. Her story illustrates the variety of the different skills
and understandings you need to use as an ESL teacher.
Accomplished TESOL
teachers
I work in a primary school where my role as the E.S.L. teacher
is only one of a number of ‘hats’ that I wear to make up my
teaching load. I also provide L.A. support and team teach with
maths and reading groupings in the Senior School, and teach a
specialist dance program from Years K-6. It can be pretty ‘fullon’ but also places me in a unique situation to really know my
E.S.L. students across a wide range of settings and, hopefully,
to tailor programs to best suit their particular learning needs.
This story is about a Year 4/5 reading group that I see twice
weekly whilst working with the class teacher. The group of six
includes three E.S.L students. These students have been
grouped together according to their Rigby reading level although
their needs are quite different. The ESL students are all good
decoders, but sometimes are limited by their familiarity with
vocabulary and colloquialisms at this level due to their ESL
backgrounds. They often find it hard to draw out inferred or
more complex meanings from the text. They mask this lack of
understanding with good paraphrasing skills, particularly when
writing. The other students are less confident decoders but are
more familiar with many words and colloquialisms, although
they also benefit from vocabulary enrichment. All are fairly
enthusiastic about reading groups and enjoy the small group
interaction.
The Activity

select and implement
teaching and
assessment practices
appropriate for the
learners and
educational setting

know how language
and culture function in
spoken, written and
multimodal texts
Recently we tackled two short Aboriginal dreaming stories over
a number of sessions Both stories featured human dreamtime
characters being changed into animals. We spent quite some
time doing -Read, Stop, and Have a Chat- about the vocabulary,
then Read. Stop and Chat again. The stories were short and
engaging, the students quite enjoyed reading them -in fact the
stories really captured their attention. We have no indigenous
students in the group but spent quite some time discussing the
background to Aboriginal stories and what traditional stories
mean to different cultures. This elicited plenty of responses from
the E.S.L. students who were able to draw on their own cultural
examples. The non-E.S.L. students who had gained familiarity
with Aboriginal stories over the years also made useful
contributions.

are sensitive to
student learning needs
and interests in
relation to language
and culture
As the interest level had been so high with these two stories I
thought, “Let’s strike while the iron is hot!” These students had
been pestering me for some time to do another reader’s theatre
(always popular and we’d performed one that they’d enjoyed the
previous term). I knew that the class teacher had been working
on direct speech in class, I knew that these students didn’t
always use directed speech appropriately in their writing and
besides the suggested follow up activities that came with this
reading program didn’t suit the needs of this group at the
moment so a new plan was hatched!
The following lesson I arrived armed with photocopies of both
stories, which were both narrative with no dialogue, and
highlighter pens .I asked the students if they’d like to do these
stories as plays. Great response! “Yes, yes,.. Please please,
please!” I told the students that there was just one problem….I
didn’t have a script! We’d have to write our own. Responses
varied from, “Great , no worries”…to “But how?” or “That
sounds hard, will we have to write much?” One observant
student noted that there were no lines of ‘talking’ included for
characters to say. But all seemed keen to try, such was the
motivation of doing a play!
First I had two students read out the first story as it was written
and the other four students cast themselves as the characters.
They basically just acted it out with myself helping the two
narrators to decided when they should pause for some ‘onstage’
action to happen. There was much melodramatic mime egged
on by myself and the narrators, some animal sounds, but no
real dialogue.
Next we repeated this procedure rotating parts as required. We
then started thinking about what the characters could actually
say to replace parts of the narrator’s dialogue. Once again this
was done orally, with many different suggestions. Initially the
ESL students were mostly paraphrasing the original text while
the non-ESL students came up with more conversational, less
formal lines of dialogue. As confidence and ideas grew some
tried more humorous lines or overly dramatic ones. I busily
scribed all these lines on a whiteboard showing how we use
direct speech punctuation.

design courses and
activities to teach and
assess relevant
features of the
systems of language
and culture, including
their integration in
diverse subject areas
The next session we worked sitting around the whiteboard.
Students then used highlighters to shade in the parts of the
original narrative we chose to leave for the narrators leaving out
the parts we didn’t want to use.
Finally the students had to select which lines to use for the
characters and where they would say them, and think about
what actions they would have to carry out. This involved more
scribing on the original stories and circling out choices from the
whiteboard. We then had a go at a ‘read through’ performance
with the students successfully navigating between their
highlighted lines of narration, scribbled in stage directions and
circled out ‘lines’ to speak off the whiteboard. Some ad-libbing
did occur but they mostly stuck to the agreed script. Then we
did it again with actions and much more dramatic flair!!! All in all
a great hit!

select and implement
teaching and
assessment practices
appropriate for the
learners and
educational setting
A few days later in another session and rotating the roles of
actors and narrators the students tackled the second story using
much the same method. All had a better idea of how to go about
it, confidence was much higher and the ESL students were
certainly extending their vocabulary and coming up with more
adventurous lines They really saw themselves as capable script
writers and were showing more awareness of the differences
between the more formal narration, and the more personalized,
character-revealing lines they created for their characters to
speak.
The obvious extension of this activity would be to print out
copies of this ‘play’, rehearse it and perform to a bigger
audience -perhaps the rest of the class. We didn’t on this
occasion as due to some time-tabling interruptions time just ‘ran
out’. However the students seemed happy just performing it
within the reading group setting where they were comfortable
with each other and I was happy that the activity had served its
purpose and generated a good level of interest over a number
of sessions.
Reflection.

scaffold students’
learning and English
language development
through appropriate
classroom interaction,
negotiation, teaching
strategies, activities,
materials and
assessment
I chose this story as I hope it illustrates a variety of the different
skills and understandings you need to use as an ESL teacher.
These are by no means exclusive to ESL teaching as they
would be ‘best practice’ for any teaching situation. However
these ones are of particular relevance to ESL learners.
1. Take advantage of content where the interest level is high
and there is a good cross-cultural reference point -in this
instance the Aboriginal dreaming stories.
2. Be aware of the relevant classroom learning that is
happening and try to integrate this into your lessons -in this
case focussing on the teaching of directed speech.
3. Use a range of practices that engage language learners from
the role-play and oral language practice and then move to
reading and the written format-although in this instance the
reading of the stories was the starting point, we then moved to
discussion and role play, then scribing, reading and writing.
4. Understanding the role and use of non-ESL speakers to
model mainstream language usage and to engage them in a
way that is genuine, rather than contrived. -In this case the nonESL students helped when coming up with vocabulary and
colloquialisms used in the dialogue, which was a particular
focus for the E.S.L. learners in this group.
5. Being flexible enough to change plans and take advantage of
student interest and motivation but still make the lesson ‘work’
to fit with your desired learning outcomes -in this case the good
interest level in the dreamtime stories and the desire of the
students to perform in readers theatre.
6. Good scaffolding and modelling of grammar and written
conventions in contexts that are meaningful to the learners - in
this case to produce dialogue for a play.
7. Have a good sense of humour!! Probably the most essential
quality without which you will go insane. Timetable changes
happen, work around them. Team teach in with teachers….
you’ll get to know your students better and see where they really
could do with assistance based on what’s going on in their
learning context.