Direct Instruction Spoken English (DISE)

Intended Audience: ELL Teachers Grades 4-Adult

Experience Level: All

This session provides training for teaching Direct Instruction Spoken English (DISE), Levels 1 and 2. DISE teaches a fundamental mastery of the English language to students who have little or no knowledge of the language. Students need to have at least a third-grade level of knowledge in their own language to be successful in the DISE program. With this foundation, DISE can give students the oral language skills they need to benefit from their other classes as quickly as possible. The goal of the DISE program is to enable students who don’t speak English to master the basics of the English language in one school year. 

DISE doesn’t include reading or writing instruction, simply oral English. The DISE program assumes that the teacher knows English and speaks it with no or very little accent. 

DISE includes two levels. Level 1 has 100 lessons and requires 90 minutes of daily instruction. It introduces over 1,300 words and 50 sentence forms. Students who know no English will need 140-170 school days to complete all 100 lessons. All instruction is in English. 

Level 2 builds on the foundation established in Level 1. Students learn the vocabulary and sentence forms they are likely to encounter in various content and social areas. Students learn over 500 new words and model sentences that clarify the syntactical context in which they are used. Students say an increasingly wide variety of sentence forms in the present, past, and future tenses. 

Participants will need to print a set of training materials, in color if possible, to use during training. Please expect to receive access to the masters a week in advance.