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When planning lessons for English language learners, teachers must brainstorm a variety of ways to make
cognitively complex academic language and concepts comprehensible to second language learners. An excellent way to make content
comprehensible is to provide pictures, drawings and visuals that will support academic vocabulary development. Students at
all levels of proficiency will benefit from the use of pictures or visuals, but students at the lower proficiency levels will
most benefit from having a visual representation of unknown vocabulary words. Teachers can use the following resources to
find appropriate pictures and visuals: Google Google is an excellent resource
to locate pictures of academic vocabulary and concepts that will be taught to English language learners. In the upper left
hand corner of google.com, teachers can click on "images" and search for pictures of the academic vocabulary word
that will be taught. Pictures can be printed out in black and white, or color, and shown to English language learners prior
to a lesson or during a lesson. Complete National Geographic National Geographic has released over 120 years
of its pictures, articles, maps and graphics onto a DVD. The National Geographic software is an excellent resource for teachers
due to the high quality and one-of-a-kind pictures present in the National Geographic magazine. Teachers can search on the
DVD Rom by using key words for pictures that they are searching for. The National Geographic software can be purchased by
on Amazon.
Flickr.com Flickr also has many pictures that can be used by teachers when teaching
academic vocabulary and content to English language learners. Teachers can sign up for a flickr account, or can sign in through
yahoo email. EnchantedLearning.com
Enchanted Learning has a variety of visual and graphic organizers that can be used during Science, Social Studies and other areas with English
language learners. For teachers who have been trained in Project GLAD, many of the visuals and graphics on the Enchanted Learning
website can be used to create a pictorial input chart.
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