SDAIE

One of the SDAIE strategies I have been learning about is called Nonlinguistic Representations.  The strategy entails using more than oral communication throughout a lesson. The theory is that the body stores knowledge in a linguistic and nonlinguistic forms.  The nonlinguistic forms are rooted in imagery.  So a teacher can put to use pictures throughout the classroom, hand gestures during lectures, using objects that support main concepts, and model behavior.  Teachers can also put to use things like graphic organizers with pictures in them to further a student's content vocabulary.  This is something I observed my coteacher using in his class, as well as a Spanish teacher I was interviewing regarding content vocabulary.

My coteacher uses what he calls a "toolkit."  This is something the students create using different need to know terms.  There are places for written work but also for examples and non-examples to provide the student with visual representation of what something means.  The teacher I interviewed told me that in her class she uses hand gestures for all new vocabulary and doesn't even have to define it because the gestures actually do that for her.  For example, when she teaches "to break" in Spanish, she makes two fists and makes a breaking movement.  Students respond to it and it reinforces what she is teaching.