Mount Royal School’s ELL Program (ESL)
All ELL students are fully integrated into regular classes to receive authentic English language instruction. Within these classes, students receive individualized supports and modified curriculum to address their ELL needs.
There are ELL options offered at Mount Royal school for students who require further language development. The ELL options are divided into beginner and intermediate levels. Both options are heavily structured around contextual teaching and integrating the 4 areas of the English language: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. These 4 components are based upon the ELL benchmarks outlined in the ELL Program Expectations. Students’ participation in class and in these 4 areas is essential to their progress in English language acquisition. These options are offered each term and we encourage all students who are developing their English language skills to enroll in these courses.
Recommendations
Students can work to develop their English language skills by spending time at home practicing their English skills through reading level appropriate English books, writing daily, actively learning unknown English words and practicing using them, and speaking in English as much as possible.
Level 1: Level 1 ELL students require intensive support in learning basic functioning language skills. These areas include basic numeracy, basic decoding and phonemic awareness, basic syntax, nouns, requests, and commands. This is language that they would need to get through the day.
Level 2: Level 2 ELL students require support in learning sentence structures, situational vocabulary, continued decoding practice, complex phonemic awareness, syntax, and attending to basic multistep commands and requests.
Level 3: Level 3 ELL students show developing understanding of more complex language structures such as plurals, possessives, compound words and sentences, variation in syntax, and acquiring and using subject specific academic vocabulary.
Level 4 and 5: Level 4 and 5 ELL students demonstrate a capable control of complex and uncommon language structures such as possessive plurals, apostrophes, inversion, parallelism, irregular verbs and tenses, and a more nuanced appreciation of academic language and structures. Students can work on developing their curricular language around the varying subject areas they are working in.
