Teaching Newcomers Grammar with Lingolift 

Newcomer students require intentional and detailed language instruction, which involves understanding grammatical structures. In addition to Lingolift’s grammar collections, which focus on different parts of speech, all Lingolift lessons offer rich opportunities for students to learn various language forms along with vocabulary.

Below, we offer ideas for teaching newcomers grammar with Lingolift, including suggested language objectives and activities before, during, and after viewing the videos.

Lesson Plans for Teaching Newcomers Grammar with Lingolift

We have selected Lingolift’s Food Collection to demonstrate instructional strategies for teaching newcomers grammar with Lingolift. You may also want to consult the accompanying Teacher’s Guide for more ideas and suggestions for differentiation.

Determine content and language objectives 

Language objectives play a key role in guiding  instructional planning for multilingual learners.  The sample language objective below works for a lesson focused on grammatical structures. Although fairly broad, Lingolift lessons target all four language and literacy domains – speaking, listening, reading, and writing – and you can incorporate opportunities to practice any or all of those domains in your lesson.

Sample objectives for a grammar lesson using Lingolift’s Food Collection:

• Content objective: Students will be able to identify common foods.
• Language objective: Students will be able to describe food preferences with verbs and  negative sentences.

Before Viewing – Activating Prior Knowledge

Build engagement and cultural relevance 

Pre-teaching vocabulary and activating prior knowledge provides the perfect opportunity to engage students in fun and culturally relevant ways while introducing targeted grammatical structures.

Here are some sample ideas for activating prior knowledge using the Food Collection: 

Before presenting relevant vocabulary, consider starting with a game of “Would you rather” focusing on different foods, including those listed in the vocabulary section of the Teacher’s Guide. You may display a pair of photos of food with labels and ask “would you rather eat _____ or _____?” This is a good chance to introduce the language objective and encourage students to use phrases such as “like,” “prefer,” or “don’t like” in addition to “I would rather…” Students may verbally share, write their answers, or move to the corresponding side of the classroom to express their opinion. 

To foster student engagement, display options from students’ home countries, encourage students to share foods from their culture, or identify foods they know in English to help activate and assess prior knowledge. Students can jot down vocabulary and corresponding drawings or translations using the Words & Meanings worksheet.

You can extend the lesson by selecting another video from our library that highlights a similar sentence structure. In this case, searching “preferences” on the Lingolift platform shows this video about likes and dislikes, which has helpful sentence structures that could reinforce the language objective beyond the topic of food. 

You can extend the lesson by selecting another video from our library that highlights a similar sentence structure. In this case, searching “preferences” on the Lingolift platform shows this video about likes and dislikes, which has helpful sentence structures that could reinforce the language objective beyond the topic of food. 

During Viewing – Providing Learning Supports

Scaffold towards language objective through modeling

Lingolift videos offer students the chance to engage with content in multiple ways using the Watch, Learn, Speak sequence. First, students watch a video; then on their second viewing, they spell words they hear spoken; and on their third viewing, they speak lines from the video and receive feedback on their pronunciation. Teachers should model each step of learning in the video and the corresponding worksheets the first time they use Lingolift. 

The Useful Phrases worksheet asks students to note grammar and sentence structures from the videos, which may correspond to the language objective. You may instruct students to practice saying at least two lines that contain the target grammatical structure. More advanced newcomers may record new useful phrases or extend their knowledge by watching other videos with similar constructions. 

You can extend the lesson by selecting another video from our library that highlights a similar sentence structure. In this case, searching “preferences” on the Lingolift platform shows this video about likes and dislikes, which has helpful sentence structures that could reinforce the language objective beyond the topic of food. 

After Viewing – Deepening Learning Across Language Domains 

Assess and extend learning

The After Viewing activities give students a chance to apply what they’ve learned and express their own thoughts and experiences. Lingolift Teacher’s Guides provide sample sentence starters to help students discuss or write about the topic.  And cloze (fill-in-the-blank) sentences are also provided for students who may need more structure in showing what they learned.  

Other interactive activities can help to reinforce content and language.  For example, as a formative assessment for lessons on food,  students may role-play a server asking a customer what foods they like to eat, or students can interview each other about their food preferences. Remember to ask students to refer back to their vocabulary and useful phrases worksheets, or another chart of your choice, to support targeted grammar practice.

More Ideas: Teaching Newcomers Grammar with Lingolift Collections

The above model of focusing on specific grammatical constructions can be applied to other collections as well. Here are some ideas:

• In the At School Collection, a language objective that helps students understand common phrases in the videos is “Students will be able to describe common classroom activities with present progressive verbs,” such as “she is reading the book.” The School Subjects video from that collection pairs well with the grammar video What Are They Doing?

• For the Environment Collection, “reduce, reuse, and recycle” presents a great opportunity to introduce prefixes. A language objective such as, “Students will be able to use verbs with appropriate prefixes to explain ways to help the environment,” would work well with the video Protecting the Planet.

• The Space Collection contains the video Bigger and Bigger on comparatives and superlatives like “bigger” and “larger,” so an appropriate language objective might be, “Students will be able to  compare planets in the solar system using comparatives and superlatives.” Students could also use adjectives such as “smaller” and smallest” or  “closer” and “closest” when discussing the planets.

We hope these ideas and examples demonstrate a range of possibilities for teaching newcomers grammar with Lingolift. Happy exploring!