Teaching ELLs: Tips for Math Teachers

If you teach math to English language learners (ELLs), there are several ways you can support your students' progress and success. Here are some ideas to get you started, along with reflection questions to help you identify some key strategies that might work for your students.

Reflection Questions

• How much math instruction have my ELLs received in their prior schooling?
• How much do their levels of math background vary?
• What are some of their strengths related to math?
• What are some of their challenges?
• What are some practical ways my ELLs are using math in their daily lives?
• What kinds of strategies have supported their success or engagement in other areas?
• What are some ways that collaboration or co-teaching might help support my ELLs?

Getting Started with ELLs

Get to know your ELLs

• Welcome students and families with warm smiles, positive body language, and a friendly greeting.
• Learn how to say and write students’ names correctly. Refrain from using a nickname or making comments about students’ names.
• Show respect for students, their families, their languages, and their cultures. Keep in mind that many things may be new to them.
• Get to know students and their interests. Building positive relationships can have a significant impact for ELLs.
• A positive word of encouragement can make a big difference for an ELL. Celebrate moments of success, no matter how small!

Learn about ELLs’ prior schooling and math backgrounds.

If possible, find out whether students have attended school regularly. Keep in mind that:

• ELLs’ math backgrounds may vary significantly. Some students may have had consistent schooling where they developed math strong math skills; others may have limited or no formal schooling. Yet even without formal schooling, students may have practical skills related to time, money, or other daily topics.
• While computational skills may transfer, ELLs may still need support with language-focused tasks, such as solving word problems and writing explanations.
• Students may use other systems, such as metric system, Celsius, military time, etc.

Connect to ELLs’ experience.

Look for ways to tie instruction to student interests (like sports) and responsibilities at home that involve math, such as helping with family finances, working in family businesses, and holding other jobs.

Language and Math

Use hands-on learning.

Use scaffolds, which can benefit all students! These include:

• Visuals: These can include visual representations of concepts, photos and illustrations of key vocabulary words, posters, and number lines.
• Realia (real objects) and manipulatives: These might include hands-on objects related to a topic or small items such as coins or small blocks for counting, sorting, weighing, etc.
• Graphic organizers: Graphic organizers are tools that allow students to organize information in a visual or hands-on way.
• Sentence frame and sentence stems: Sentence frames and sentence starters are "fill in the blank" phrases and sentences that provide the structures or patterns that students need in speaking and writing (e.g., The square root of _______ is ____.). Sentence frames and sentence frames can be differentiated for different levels of language proficiency.
• Anchor charts: Anchor charts are posters that students and teachers co-create to highlight key concepts that students will need for reference.

In addition, provide students with explicit, step-by-step instructions in how to read charts, graphs, tables, and infographics.

Teach key math vocabulary.

Choose key vocabulary to teach, such as:

• Academic words (equilateral)
• Words with multiple meanings (yard, plot, table, proof, area, even, plane, place, times, bill)
• Words and phrases needed to solve a problem (less than, given, arrange)
• Common words needed to solve word problems (train station, dolphin, favorite)
• Homophones (eight/ate, plane/plain, one/won, two/to/too, four/for, some/sum)

Draw on students’ home languages.

• Use cognates, which are related words in two languages. English and Spanish have many cognates within academic terms, like fraction/fracción.
• Use translated words or phrases strategically. For example, New York University has published bilingual glossaries for several topics.
• Allow (and encourage!) students to use their languages in group work to solve problems, brainstorm, and review material.

Teach academic language.

The language demands of math are complex. Working with an ELL specialist can be a good starting point for identifying some of the math demands of the lessons you are teaching, as well as for planning how to teach and scaffold those language demands.

• Model the kinds of writing students are expected to complete (e.g., written explanations) and give students plenty of practice with reading – and understanding – written word problems.
• Consider using language objectives as a way to target those language demands.
• Use more complex sentence frames students at higher levels of proficiency.
• Consider using AI tools to rewrite math problems in simpler language for students at early levels of proficiency.