| Secondary English language learners (ELLs) spend most of their school day in classes with regular education teachers who have little or no training in methods for teaching English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). This mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) study investigated teacher use of accommodations and strategies for ELLs and assessed how the format of the resources made available to them affected their teaching. The participants were mainstream secondary teachers at the district-designated ESOL high school in an urban Midwestern city. The participating teachers were randomly divided into 2 groups and presented with a lesson plan addendum designed to help them increase their use of accommodations and strategies for ELLs. The first group received a CD version of the addendum which included Internet-linked resources explaining the strategies and accommodations. Participants in the second group received a paper version of the lesson plan addendum, and printed versions of the Internet-linked resources were available in the school Media Center. The researcher observed the teachers' classes before and after receiving the lesson plan addendum. She recorded the strategies and accommodations demonstrated in their teaching, (before and after), in order to determine if the teachers in both groups changed their strategy use. Additionally, she compared the results from each group to ascertain if there was a difference in the frequency of strategy use between the two groups. Finally, the teachers were interviewed after the quantitative data were collected to determine if their self-perceptions about using strategies for ELLS aligned with the researcher's observation of their teaching.;The results of this study showed that providing mainstream teachers with a lesson plan addendum focusing on English language learners does, in fact, lead to an increase in strategies and accommodations used. The results on the preferred way to provide the lesson plan addendum are inconclusive, although there is evidence that the resources linked via the Internet are more likely to be accessed than those that are made available in the Media Center at the school. Finally, based on interviews with the participants, the researcher concluded that they had a good understanding of how they changed their teaching as a result of using the lesson plan addendum. |
