1. Provide content such as reading material in the student's native language. This is most important because students need a "break" from English. Even if the teacher is unable to speak the the student in his or her native language, this allows the child the chance to actually learn the content. It is impossible to expect a child to learn content in a language they are still learning.
2. Allow minor mistakes in grammar or pronunciation when students speak without correcting them. When I spoke with my teacher, I would usually mess something up; I frequently used the wrong tense of a verb or didn't conjugate it correctly. As long as he understood the basic idea of my question or statement, one of my professors usually let me get away with it. By not correcting me, he allowed me to just focus on the things he was saying to me; either the answer to a question or a statement back.
3. When a student needs to be corrected, explicitly correct more than eliciting correction. I learned in ELL workshop at university that eliciting correction is the most effective way to teach ELL students. In this way, the teacher repeats everything the student says and pauses on the area that the child messed up, hoping for them to correct themself. In Spanish class, I finally got to experience this form of feedback from the student perspective and I learned that I completely dislike it. Since I believed that I said the sentence correctly to begin with, I just started guessing when put in this situation. Because of this experience, I believe it is much more effective to repeat the sentence correctly and have the student repeat it.
4. Provide instruction in various modalities addressing things like learning styles and multiple intelligences. This is obviously important for all students to learn. Instruction must be differentiated to meet the needs of all children in the classroom. To read more about this idea, visit my blog post about learning styles.
5. Provide modeling to help students understand. Oftentimes in Spanish class and at the elementary schools I or the students did not understand the directions from the teacher. It is hard to learn the content when you don't understand what you are supposed to be doing. Because I didn't know enough Spanish to explain the directions to the students, I gave them a basic explanation in English and then demonstrated. One great example of this is when I, along with two other classmates, played a drawing game with elementary students at San Luis Primary School to practice naming the body parts.