Teaching Word Problems to ESL students

For teachers in ESL or EP Programs, it must be recognizable that many students struggle with word problems. it seems that the language barriers are just too much sometimes.

What can we do? Well teachers, you can:

-rewrite your material in very basic wordings.
-use cooperative learning strategies (student can communicate in their own language)
-let students reproduce the material in their own wordings
-understand the difficulties, but never give up
-use other strategies than written words (act out,m make video material, songs, posters, etc..)
-create vocabulary handouts

I am very curious what other option, we math teachers have!
Please let me know by posting a comment.

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ESL math is a double challenge!

Around the world we see more and more students studying content subjects in English.

In Asia for example, more and more EP (English Program) schools are opening and Chinese, Thai or Vietnamese students are studying the like of Science, Math, Social Studies and even PE in English!
Great, not? Well that's not so easy to answer! For students whose native languages have hardly any similarities with English, a lot might go lost in translation. Students who have not mastered English proficiency are required to solve educational problems. And this is risky.
Studying Science and Math is more than number crunching and memorization of chemical formulas, its all about problem solving skills. How can students solve problems, they don't fully understand? Even in a classroom where every student aces number skills (non-existent!), the students would struggle with the application of these skills. Its all about academic reading skills.

This creates enormous dilemmas for both students and teachers.
How to teach, how to develop application skills in subjects like Math and Science? This must be the one million dollar question and there's no defined answer to it. Schools must allow students to improve academic reading skills first! Therefor, be very careful as a student, teacher or parent to just enter any English Program. Are  measures taken to improve reading (understanding) skills, or not. If not, the student will probably learn a lot of English but lose out a lot problem solving skills that are already difficult in their own language.

Erik