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Language Acquisition Stages, I CAN Statements and Teaching Strategies

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Language Acquisition Stages, I CAN Statements and Teaching Strategies

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Language Acqusition Stages and Strategies

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Introduction

Chapter 1 - Who Are Newcomers?

Chapter 2 - Welcoming Newcomers to a Safe, Inclusive and Thriving School Environment

Chapter 3 - Supporting Newcomers' Social, Emotional, and Mental Health Needs

Chapter 4 - Providing High-Quality Instruction for Newcomers

Chapter 5 - Establishing Partnerships with Families

To request the toolkit in an alternate format as a reasonable accommodation, i.e. large print, CD Rom or audio, please contact Melissa Escalante by phone, 202-987-1745 or email at: Melissa.Escalante@ed.gov.

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To request the toolkit in an alternate format as a reasonable accommodation, i.e. large print, CD Rom or audio, please contact Melissa Escalante by phone, 202-987-1745 or email at: Melissa.Escalante@ed.gov.

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Increase and improve student talk time with any of these 10 effective strategies!

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Increasing MLL Talk Time Beyond "Turn and Talk"

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Sample Lesson Plans for Elementary Newcomers

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Sample Lesson Plans for Elementary Newcomers

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Sample Lesson Plans for Elementary Newcomers

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20 Discussion Protocols for Small Groups

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20 Discussion Protocols for Small Groups

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Sample Designated ELD Lesson Plans for Elementary LTELs

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Best Practices for Teaching Elementary Newcomers.pdf

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First Week Activities for the MLL Classroom

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First Week Activities for the MLL Classroom

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Rooted Linguistics: Serving Teachers of Multilingual Learners

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The first few days of school lay the groundwork. They help to create a foundation and atmosphere for the rest of the year. Here are a few of my favorite ways to start the year off with students. You can adjust these to meet your students' age level, but mostly they can be accommodated to fit K-12.

I picked these activities because they keep ELs at the heart by building community, encouraging interaction, lowering the affective filter, and they can be used later in the year for more academic lessons.

A good old fashioned scavenger hunt is a great way to get kids moving and help them get to know one another. You could create a scavenger hunt around finding things in your classroom, for example the "Turn in assignment tray" or the folder for absent work. You could also create a scavenger hunt based on your syllabus or the textbook. Students could work in groups or pairs to find important dates, chapters, etc. One more way to use a scavenger hunt at the beginning of the year would be to find peers. For instance, find a classmate with similar shoes, or find a classmates born in the month of September, etc.

If you enjoy using technology or you want to try implementing tech in your classroom, Flipgrid might be your thing! It's a great platform for students to share a quick video recording. You assign a topic of conversation, they record their reply, and view and respond to their classmates. They can view their own response and redo it before posting it. I've found that shyer students tend to like Flipgrid as a way of speaking up in class. The tool empowers student voice. At the beginning of the year, assigning students to share who they are, how to correctly pronounce their name, and something we wouldn't know by looking at them or a fun fact works well. Be sure to share your own so students have an example and get to know you as well.

Bring a bag to class filled with 10 objects that tell something about you. This will help students get to know you and build connections. In my bag, I might bring a book because I love to read, a fire truck toy because my husband is a firefighter, a tiny globe because I travel and love the world, etc. Then ask students to bring a bag filled with 10 objects that represent themselves. Over the next few days, provide time for a few students daily to share. Throughout the year, this method can be used for content learning too. Students can bring in objects related to a specific unit of study and share in groups why they belong.

Students bring a picture from home, select one from their phones (if allowable), choose an object from their belongings (such as in their backpack). They are the expert on this picture/object. They pair up and use question/sentence stems to get to know one another. Let them meet with several peers. I begin by sharing one myself (see below). The class asks me questions with the option to use the sentences stems provided. This activity is later used for content too. For example, students select a vocabulary word or a section from the unit that they feel they are experts on. They pair up and hold their expert/novice conversations. This activity can be found on page 73 in
7 Steps to a Language Rich Interactive Classroom by John Seidlitz and Bill Perryman.

As a teacher, this was one of my favorite activities at the beginning of the year and my students loved it too. I learned about it from Georgia Heard who wrote a book on the topic called . I gave them a black line heart on white paper and inside they drew and illustrated all the people, places and things that they love. I shared with them my example as a way for them to learn more about me and my experiences. But I also showed them examples I saved from former students. After creating their Heart Maps, they shared with their classmates too. Heart Maps (HM) continued to be used throughout the year for writing inspiration. Students looked back at their HM to decide on topics they wanted to write about. For instance, one student drew a picture of her grandmother. Later that year she wrote a biography of her grandmother, a story about a time she and her grandmother made special Mexican cookies together, and a how-to take care of your grandmother. will take you to some handouts and more directions on Heart Maps.

6. Read Aloud
There are many wonderful choices for a first day read aloud. Reading aloud to any age group of kids is beneficial. Even secondary students can benefit from a teacher reading aloud to them. Read alouds, especially on the first day, tend to create a calming atmosphere as well as build community. Here are some popular first day read alouds:

Here are some additional first week activities that I won't go into detail about but are popular and worth mentioning: Learner Surveys, Social Contracts, Time Capsules, Bingo, Tic-Tac-Toe, 2 Truths and a Lie.

All in all, the goal is to build community from day one and then to sustain it. If we want students to learn, think, and get along, then creating an atmosphere that breeds those qualities is key.

Feel free to leave a comment with a first week of school activity that you love!

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The first few days of school lay the groundwork. They help to create a foundation and atmosphere for the rest of the year. Here are a few of my favorite ways to start the year off with students. You...

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8 Cooperative Learning Strategies to Use in the Classroom

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#CooperativeLearning supports a positive #classroom environment and helps students develop social-emotional skills. Find cooperative learning strategies in our latest blog post:

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August, D., & Shanahan, T. (Eds.). (2006). Executive summary. Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Available at: http://www.cal.org/natl-lit-panel/reports/Executive_Summary.pdf

August, D., & Shanahan, T. (Eds.). (2006). Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Collier, R., ∓ Thomas, W. P. (1997). School effectiveness for language minority students. Resource Collection Series #9. Washington, DC: National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education.

The Education Alliance at Brown University. (n.d.). The knowledge loom: Spotlight on elementary literacy. Available at http://knowledgeloom.org/elemlit/index.jsp

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. (NIH Pub. No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Available at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/smallbook.cfm

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What Does Research Tell Us About Teaching Reading to English Language Learners?

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In this article, a seasoned ELL teacher synthesizes her own classroom experience and the findings of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth to make recommendations for effective literacy instruction of ELL students.

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Integrating Language While Teaching Math

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Integrating Language While Teaching Math

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Integrating Language While Teaching STEM (Science)

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Integrating Language While Teaching STEM (Science)

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Integrating Language into Early Childhood Education Podcast

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Integrating Language into Early Childhood Education Podcast

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Integrating Language Into Early Childhood Education (January 2020) | NCELA - English Language Acquisition & Language Instruction Educational Programs

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Supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA)

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This guest blog post was written by my friend Becca over at Science Rocks! She is a terrific teacher with a lot of experience working with ELL students in her science classroom and I collaborated with her in writing this post. I think her ideas are full of fantastic tips for teachers who teach English Language Learners.
If you've been teaching for a while, chances are you have had some ELL (English language learner) students in your classroom. I've known many teachers that have panicked and asked me "how can I teach them science if they don't speak English?" I think many teachers tend to think they need to dumb down the content for these students. They aren't dumb! Your job is to make the content accessible. It's been my experience that ELL students are amazingly hard workers and are a blast to work with. My friend Bethany Lau over at Science with Mrs. Lau and I have created a list of best-practice tips for working with ELL students. We also have some helpful resources to share with you!

Tip #1: Get them talking! A quiet classroom is not conducive to learning a new language. Many students are scared to speak out loud in English, especially in front of the entire class. To help build their confidence, try small group discussions first. To ensure that every student has spoken to his or her group, give each student something color-coded (I use colored popsicle sticks from the dollar store). When a student speaks, they place their popsicle stick in the center of the table. It is easy as a teacher to walk around and monitor who is speaking and who isn't. Make it a requirement that each student has to speak at least twice during group discussions.

Tip #2: SLOW down when you are talking, and use nonverbal cues. This is much easier to do when you have all your ELL students together in one class, but when they are mixed with native English speakers we often don't realize how fast we are talking. It is really difficult for ELL students to process when you are speaking a mile a minute. So take a deep breath, slow down, and use your hands and other nonverbal gestures. Don't be afraid to act things out! Yes they will giggle, and yes they will love it.

Tip #3: Build vocabulary. When you teach new words, always make your students repeat the word out loud after you say it. And if they aren't loud, make them do it again. If you have a word wall in your classroom, go down the list frequently and make your students say them with you. To help students remember the definitions, discuss prefixes and suffixes to help them decode meanings.

Find fun ways for students to practice those new words. Instead of doing vocabulary worksheets, do vocabulary games instead! Bingo is an awesome way to review vocabulary words before a test. Create a bingo card from a free online bingo-card maker such as http://osric.com/bingo-card-generator/. Type in the words you want your students to learn and print a class set. Instead of calling out the words, say the definition and the students need to cover up the correct word. If they get a bingo, they need to say the words out loud in order to win a prize.

Tip #4: Utilize pictures. I used to try and translate parts of my power points into Spanish before the lesson thinking I was doing my students a favor.

I quickly realized that:

1. Google translate is frequently wrong

2. Many of my students could speak fluent Spanish but couldn't read it.

3. Even if they could read most of it, they didn't know the content specific terms in Spanish. Why would I want my students to learn the word "homeostasis" in Spanish AND English? Let's just stick with English.

Instead of translating, stick with visual pictures. Pictures are understood in all languages. Include them as much as possible in your lessons and power points. Make students draw pictures in their notes. Include pictures in all your articles you want students to read. A great pre-reading activity is to have students look at the pictures and captions in an article before they read the body paragraphs. Have them guess what the article is about based on the pictures and discuss with their neighbors (get those popsicle sticks back out). If you have a word wall in your classroom, make sure it includes pictures too! The more they see a picture associated with a new word, the more likely they will remember what it means.

Tip #5: Learn about their language and culture, and include it in your lessons when applicable. Students will have more buy-in to your lessons when they feel like their language and culture is valued. If you can connect their language to the content, chances are they will remember it better. For example, students use the term "liga" in Spanish to mean rubber band or hair elastic. When teaching "ligaments," discuss how they are stretchy unlike tendons. Students won't forget!

Tip #6: Use Manipulatives! Sometimes students need help learning how to structure their writing into logical paragraphs (even native English speakers need this too!) If you have sample paragraphs for them to learn from, you can print separate sentences out on separate lines, and cut them into strips. Then you can mix the sentences up and have students order them in how they should logically appear in a sentence! You can also do this for other parts of a lab report, like the procedure section or even the proper labels for a graph!

You could create your own writing structure manipulatives, or you can check out Bethany Lau's Lab Report Writing Activity Bundle found here. She has a set of activities with manipulative for each and every part of the lab report with a lot of examples for students to learn from.

Tip #7: Get them writing as much as possible. Data shows that when students take the state language proficiency tests, they struggle the most with writing. Find ways to get students writing on a daily basis. This could work in many different formats- just find one that works for you. Daily bellwork is a great place to start, as well as having students keep writing journals.

What should you have them write about? Check out these writing prompts from Science Rocks' store!

These were designed to be used before new concepts are taught, and allows the teacher to assess prior knowledge and check for misconceptions. When students are first learning English, allow them to write in their native language if they are able to and plug in English words that they know. Throughout the year as their language improves, you will see their writing transform from fragmented to fluid sentences.

Another great writing strategy for ELL students are sentence frames. For students still learning how to write a complete sentence, give them half the sentence first and have them fill in the blanks. For example, a hypothesis on a lab report for an ELL student could look like this: "If I change ___________, then I think ___________ will happen, because __________.

Tip #8: Model. And then model some more. As science teachers we tend to think of "modeling" as meaning "I'll show them how to do a lab before it's their turn." Modeling applies to so much more than labs.

1. Model reading strategies. As you read through articles out loud, stop and discuss. What was the main idea? What did you highlight and why?

2. Model writing strategies. When you assign those writing prompts, work through one with them first. Show them what a quality answer would look like.

3. Model behaviors. Many students will enter your classroom from different backgrounds. Behaviors that may have been acceptable where they grew up may not be acceptable in your classroom. If you want them to give a verbal presentation with eye contact, show them what a good presentation looks like first.

4. Model word pronunciation. Sometimes if students are nervous to say things in English, I have them teach me how to say the phrase in their native language first. Once they have giggled at my horrible pronunciation, they aren't so embarrassed to pronounce things in English.

Tip #9: Modify. Yes, one more thing to add to your to-do list. But it can honestly be as simple as cutting down the number of questions for them to complete, or adding pictures to an assessment. One of my favorite websites to find nonfiction science articles on is newsela.com. Not only is it free to use, but once you find an article you can change the lexile! That means all your students can be reading the same article but at a reading level that is assessable to them.

Tip #10: Use formative assessment frequently, and celebrate gains. It's important to check in with ELL students often. Many of them will take notes, smile, and nod during class, but only understood 20% of what was discussed. Exit tickets and note summaries are great ways to check in and see where they need help and what they have mastered. Make your exit tickets specific. Don't just say, "One thing I still need help with is..." but instead ask them to answer a specific question related to the lesson. This will help you group them by mastery and focus on the students that really need your help. Once they have mastered a new concept or learned new vocabulary, don't forget to celebrate! Let them know you are proud of them, and they will work harder in the future. If students feel like their hard work is recognized and celebrated, they will continue to work hard!

We'd love to hear stories from you about what helps your ELL students! Let us know in the comments!

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Ten Tips for Teaching ELL Science - Science and Math with Mrs. Lau

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This guest blog post was written by my friend Becca over at Science Rocks! She is a terrific teacher with a lot of experience working with ELL students in her science classroom and I collaborated with her in writing this post. I think her ideas are full of fantastic tips for teachers who teach English Language [...]

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Effective Literacy Instruction for MLLs: What it is and What it Looks Like

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Effective Literacy Instruction for MLLs: What it is and What it Looks Like

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The U.S. Department of Education's Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) in collaboration with the National Committee on Effective Literacy (NCEL), and the National Association of English Learner Program Administrators (NAELPA), hosted a webinar to share research and resources on literacy development for multilingual learners. Presenters discussed best practices and leadership actions to promote effective literacy programs that honor the multilingual brain and leverage the linguistic and cultural assets of multilingual learners. Presenters included Dr. Jasmine Bitnara Park, American Institutes for Research; Dr. Kathy Escamilla, University of Colorado, Boulder; and Dr. Laurie Olsen, Californians Together and Sobrato Early Academic Language.

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Effective Literacy Instruction for Multilingual Learners: What it is and What it Looks Like | NCELA - English Language Acquisition & Language Instruction Educational Programs

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Supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA)

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Seven years ago, we walked into Wolfe Street Academy, a school with an 83% Latino population in Baltimore. We were impressed by the overwhelming levels of support for what seemed like a very homogeneous student body of Spanish-speaking families. As an ESOL teacher (Anna Kirkness) and as a Special Education teacher (Katrina Kickbush), it was welcoming to see the morning assembly each day in English and Spanish, a bilingual secretary, Spanish correspondence, and Spanish interpreters for special education testing and parent conferences. We both thought, "This is a school that understands the importance of knowing its families, addressing their needs and celebrating their strengths."

A Language Puzzle

Several months into our tenure at Wolfe, we began to suspect that our Latino population, which we originally thought was simply Spanish-speaking, was linguistically more complex. A Kindergarten teacher who was fluent in Spanish said to us one day, "One of my students must be using a dialect of Spanish. I don't know the words they're using, nor do they understand me in Spanish." Then, a few ESOL teachers working in the early childhood grades raised concerns that several of their students seemed to have speech pronunciation patterns that didn't match those of their Spanish-speaking ESOL counterparts. Even in the upper grades, several teachers had approached our Community School Site Coordinator, Connie Phelps Bozek, to ask for her guidance with some students who had similar speech and articulation patterns.

See more from Wolfe Street!

To learn more about how Wolfe Street serves its ELLs through the community school model, take a look at this related video!

These conversations regarding puzzling performance and unexpected student responses to intervention sparked our interest in the possibility of a common underlying reason uniting these concerns.The final tipping point was when the Special Education team created a document to analyze specific caseload numbers. The team noticed that a significant number of these same students had been identified as having a speech and language disability. It seemed nearly impossible, or at least highly improbable, that this could happen by coincidence. This was one more clue, and it was time to bring our full team together.

We brought together the teachers and staff who had some experience with these students and could potentially provide guidance with this complex issue.This was the first time all the different parties (ESOL, Special Education, Community School Coordinator and Principal) sat together in real-time to share and consider all the information we had regarding this group of students.

It was at this meeting that Mrs. Bozek, our Community School Site Coordinator, mentioned she knew that a family at Wolfe spoke Mixteco, an indigenous language that families referred to as a "dialect." She went on to explain that historically in Mexico this language population had been marginalized and the effects last to this day. Several families had expressed shame or a feeling of inferiority when approached about using this language at home or in front of the Spanish-speaking community. This revealed why it had taken so much time to uncover this language in our community and indicated that we needed to move forward with a high level of sensitivity, acceptance and awareness.

Learning About Mixtec

After this initial meeting with our colleagues, we immediately began researching the Mixtec language and discovered many interesting facts:

Mixtec is an ancient language, unrelated to Spanish, dating back to pre-Columbian times.

There are anywhere from 30-50 variations of the language, some differing greatly from each other.

Mixtec is mainly spoken in the Oaxaca region of Mexico, a very mountainous and isolated area.

It is one of eight branches in the Otomanguean language family.

It has a Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) structure, which is a structure that accounts for only 9% of world's languages.

Mixtec is a tonal language partially relying, like Chinese, on how a word is pronounced to convey meaning.

It uses repetition of words to take on different meanings (for emphasis, repeating 'slow slow' to mean 'very slow').

It does not have a past or perfect tense.

It is an analytic language that conveys meaning through free instead of bound morphemes.

Building Upon What We Learned

After discovering more about Mixtec, we took several steps to address the specific needs of this population. The school administration fully supported our search for the best ways we could use this new information to plan interventions and specific strategies in support of these students. We provided Wolfe Street Academy staff with basic professional development regarding the Mixtec language (features, culture, history, and geographic location), as well as ESOL strategies for addressing our Mixtec speakers' specific needs in the classroom as trilingual (English, Spanish, Mixtec) learners.

We also adjusted our procedures and routines in other areas of the school based on our new learning. If a student was referred to the Student Support Team for struggling to meet academic requirements, we began asking parents if another language (or 'dialecto') was spoken at home. We had realized this was an essential piece of information that we had been missing.

Parents began responding that indeed one parent spoke exclusively in Mixtec to their child, even if the other spoke Spanish. In other cases, a caregiver such as a grandparent spoke Mixtec to the child, while the parents spoke Spanish. We found this information invaluable as it helped explain more about the child's language background and development over time, key factors linked to the child's academic performance. With all of this information we were able to provide more time and strategic planned interventions with the support of special education and ESOL teachers in the primary classroom.

A few months later, we hosted a parent gathering for families that speak an indigenous dialect. We had gathered information from our own staff and from the research, we sought to find out more firsthand information about the personal journeys and experiences of our families and their first language, their "L1." We also used this time to share information with our families on the importance of building a strong L1 in establishing strong skills in second (L2) and third languages (L3). Included in these gatherings were strategies our families could use at home to build oral vocabulary strength in Mixtec.

As a result of this family gathering and continued conversations with our Mixtec speakers, we noticed a positive impact on the school's climate and culture. A few parents came forward in talking about using Mixtec in the home and were much more open and comfortable sharing their rich language heritage and encouraging others to do so as well. We even had one parent offer to translate from Spanish to Mixtec at a school sponsored literacy night. That was a huge turning point in our development. Students also became more linguistically aware, and started becoming language leaders in their classrooms, sharing words and phrases in Mixtec with their peers and teachers.

Making Mixtec Part of Our School Culture

In the five years since we began delving into this topic of an indigenous language hidden within our Latino community, we have learned several important lessons. First and foremost, the ever-changing and dynamic nature of language lends itself to the fact that we can never assume that we completely understand the language landscape of a school community. Before we had shed light on this topic, we held to a set of assumptions about who we were and what our students were coming to school knowing. This experience showed us the potentially narrow understanding those types of assumptions can carry. The lasting effect of this is that we now better understand and continue to challenge ourselves to look beyond the general label of 'ESOL student' to obtain a greater understanding of the students' family background, culture and language.

We have also learned about the strength and resilience of our staff, our students and our families. Faced with a puzzle, staff dug deep into their own lack of understanding together to discover answers; our families, seeing our commitment to understanding, gave us their trust and helped us understand their personal stories; and our students worked hard every day to do their very best. Many of them, as they have grown older and have the gift of time to establish strong language skills, find themselves exiting our ESOL program all together.

More Work to Do on Behalf of Students

But we still have plenty of questions that remain unanswered. We know there is always more work to be done. Most recently, it has come to our attention that several of the preschools in our community need professional development on the topic of identifying indigenous languages in their population. We have heard them question why "Spanish-speaking students are not speaking like their Spanish-speaking peers or are even nonverbal."

When our staff looked further into the issue, we discovered it was simply that the family's dominant language is Mixtec and the preschool staff was exactly where we were a few years ago - unaware of the language and this population. We also still seek to identify the best programs and interventions in reading, language and mathematics that will support our students' unique language needs. And we still work to figure out how to best train our teachers to view this topic with the urgency that will allow them to make effective pedagogical changes to their instruction of these students.

We have only scratched the surface of producing a comprehensive toolkit for helping our struggling trilingual students. But our goal remains constant. It is our mission to close the achievement gap between our trilingual, bilingual and monolingual students. As we approach any issue here at Wolfe Street Academy, together we will observe, assess and assist in a continuous cycle that will allow us to discover the "next best plan" for helping our students and their families succeed. Persistence is the key.

Hear more about the discovery of Mixtec at Wolfe Street Academcy from Principal Mark Gaither and special education teacher Katrina Kickbush.

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A Hidden Language: Supporting Students Who Speak Mixtec

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Seven years ago, we walked into Wolfe Street Academy, a school with an 83% Latino population in Baltimore. We were impressed by the overwhelming levels of support for what seemed like a very homogeneous student body of Spanish-speaking families.

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5 Stages of Second Language Acquisition (coupled with Costa's Levels of Thinking & Questioning)

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5 Stages of Second Language Acquisition (coupled with Costa's Levels of Thinking & Questioning)

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What Is Translanguaging and How Is It Used in the Classroom?

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What Is Translanguaging and How Is It Used in the Classroom?

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For years, research into the best instructional approaches for students identified as English learners has pointed to the concept of translanguaging.

Identified by bilingual education researcher Ofelia García, it's both a skill set and a total shift in the way language is thought of, used, and taught in K-12 classrooms where multiple languages are honored and addressed, even as English remains the dominant language of instruction, said Marybelle Marrero-Colon, the associate director of professional development for the Center for Applied Linguistics.

Researchers are looking into how it can be applied to formal assessments, such as state standardized tests on which English learners might struggle to demonstrate their academic proficiency because they are tested in an unfamiliar language.

Here's a look at what translanguaging means in the context of classroom instruction and how all educators, including monolingual English-speaking teachers, can cultivate spaces for translanguaging to occur.

Translanguaging is the ability to move fluidly between languages and a pedagogical approach to teaching in which teachers support this ability.

In translanguaging, students are able to think in multiple languages simultaneously and use their home language as a vehicle to learn academic English.

A student could be reading an article about the solar system in English, but in their brain, they are also thinking and making connections in Spanish. They might annotate in Spanish or first write down reading comprehension responses in Spanish and then figure out how to provide the responses in English, said Marrero-Colon.

It's all about encouraging students to access their full linguistic repertoires, said Emily Phillips Galloway, an assistant professor at the Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University.

Translanguaging is also multimodal. More research is underway, for instance, on hearing impaired translanguaging by students who are part of families with American sign language, Spanish sign language, and signs families create for themselves, said Maria Cieslak, the professional development content manager at the Center for Applied Linguistics.

Teachers can engage in a variety of activities that deliberately encourage translanguaging, ranging from providing vocabulary in multiple languages to collaborative translation opportunities. The goal is to get students translanguaging as a practice that can be leveraged toward supporting literacy outcomes and engagement, as well as other academic endeavors.

For example, two students could be assigned to solve a word problem, and one might be stuck on a word in English. The two students can then use an equivalent word in their home language to make sense of what the word problem is asking of them, Phillips Galloway said.

Or in group activities, students can be prompted to share with the rest of the class how something taught in English would make sense in Spanish by highlighting similar and different grammatical structures between the two languages, Marrero-Colon said.

"When you translate, you don't have to do it word for word. You're really trying to capture the feeling of that text," Marrero-Colon said.

Once teachers start doing these activities, research has found that students who have not spoken before start speaking and students who were not as engaged in text-comprehension activities suddenly are, she added. That's occurring because they are being encouraged to use their home language in class to think about language use overall.

Translanguaging extends beyond translation to something where students gain an understanding of how language functions and works.

Although translation activities are a way to engage in translanguaging, it's not word-for-word translation. It's about a student using the words and thoughts they have in their home language to make sense of English and then be able to respond in English, said Kia Johnson, the director of PreK-12 language and literacy at the Center for Applied Linguistics.

Translanguaging requires students to think about language components such as the placement of adjectives, what cognates are in various languages, and more in multiple languages at once, Phillips Galloway said.

Teachers don't have to speak the home languages of students to help them engage in translanguaging.

It does require teachers to be comfortable being a learner themselves as students teach them what they know about their own language. Some teachers may fear that students may engage in off-task behavior in languages the teachers don't understand, but research has found that in such cases, teachers are still able to register what is going on and get students back on task, Phillips Galloway said.

She also said that teachers who work in states with laws requiring English-only instruction can and should still allow students to use other languages in the classroom to help them access academic content.

The key, Marrero-Colon said, is flexibility. For instance, a student may need to write an essay in English. They can instead start with building a PowerPoint primarily of images that convey a story or meaning. The teacher can then use the PowerPoint to help students come up with words and phrases, then move to sentences and paragraphs, and so on.

All students can benefit from a classroom welcoming of translanguaging because few use academic English at home, regardless of their home language.

For instance, Black students may be fluent in African American Vernacular English and can use translanguaging activities to engage in academic classroom English, Johnson said.

An example of English-only translanguaging is asking students to turn William Shakespeare's sonnets into modern pop songs, because it is a use of language in different registers, or levels of formality, Phillips Galloway said.

Students are also more interested in acquiring more languages after hearing their peers use their home languages, which helps them succeed in an increasingly global society, she added.

The more opportunities students have to use language, whether that's English or not, breeds more language use, which is then associated with language learning.

"I think the mistake that we often make is that we don't help students to make the connections between the linguistic resources that they bring in languages other than English," Phillips Galloway said. "And in the course of doing that, we take a whole set of resources that could be used for comprehending texts as they read in English, or learn to write text in English, we take those resources off the table."

More research has found that allowing students to participate in translanguaging helps English learners eventually outperform their monolingual peers because they become more flexible in thinking about and using language in academic contexts, Marrero-Colon said.

Improved curriculum, professional development, and mindsets around the value of home languages can all help schools to encourage translanguaging and support students in the process.

Phillips Galloway is working with colleagues on a curriculum that better guides teachers in translanguaging activities since not all curricular materials recognize the concept.

Researchers at the Center for Applied Linguistics, including Cieslak, also work on professional development and policy discussions that help educators and policymakers alike understand how English learners bring with them linguistic assets that should be nurtured for overall academic success.

"It's about understanding cultural identity, and my language is part of my identity," Cieslak said. "And I'm going to naturally translanguage, whether you tell me I can or cannot."

Ileana Najarro is a reporter for Education Week covering race and opportunity in schools across the country.

A version of this article appeared in the August 16, 2023 edition of Education Week as What Is Translanguaging and How Is It Used in the Classroom?

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What Is Translanguaging and How Is It Used in the Classroom?

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Research into the best instructional approaches for students classified as English learners has pointed to the concept of translanguaging.

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High-quality Interactions at the Secondary Level (Summary)

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High-quality Interactions at the Secondary Level (Summary)

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High Quality Interactions at the Secondary Level

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
A note on terminology: The acronym ESL is used less often now in schools than it used to be, because we recognize that many students who are learning English already speak several other languages, so English would not be a "second" language. I use it several times in the post because schools sometimes refer to the teachers as ESL teachers, and the term is still widely used as a search term for this topic. My intent in using the acronym is to make this post easier to find online.

You have a new student, and he speaks no English. His family has just moved to your town from Japan, and though he receives English as a Second Language (ESL) support, he will also be sitting in your room every day to give him more exposure to his new language. How can you be a good teacher to someone who barely understands you?

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, an average of 9 percent of students in U.S. public schools are English Language Learners (ELLs); that number is closer to 14 percent in cities. Although many of these students start off in high-intensity, whole-day English programs, most are integrated into mainstream classrooms within a year, well before their English language skills would be considered proficient.

How prepared are you to teach these students? If you're like most classroom teachers, you have little to no training in the most effective methods for working with English language learners (Walker, Shafer, & Iiams, 2004). So that means we have a problem here: Lots of ELL kids in regular classrooms, and no teacher training to ensure the success of that placement.

Below, three ESL teachers tell us what they know about the things regular classroom teachers can do to improve instruction for ELL students. These 12 strategies are simple, they are not very time consuming, and best of all, they will help everyone in your class learn better:

1. Make it Visual

"Avoid giving instructions in the air," says Melissa Eddington, an Ohio-based ESL teacher. "ELL kids have a harder time processing spoken language." So instructions - even basic directions for classroom procedures - should be written on the board whenever possible. Challenging concepts should be diagrammed or supported with pictures. And modeling the steps of a process or showing students what a finished product should look like can go a long way toward helping students understand. "Sometimes showing our students what to do is all they need in order to do it," Eddington says. Not only will this kind of nonlinguistic representation improve comprehension for ELL students, it will help all of your students grasp concepts better.

2. Build in more group work.

"Kids aren't just empty glasses that we pour stuff into and then at the end of the day they dump it back onto a test," says Kim, an ESL teacher who was the subject of my very first podcast interview. "If you really want the kids to learn, they've got to be engaged." That means less teacher-led, whole-class instruction, and more small groups, where students can practice language with their peers in a more personal, lower-risk setting. And if ELL students attend your class with a resource teacher, make use of that person: In most cases the resource teacher doesn't have to work exclusively with the ESL students; they can work with smaller groups that happen to contain these students, helping to improve the teacher-student ratio and give kids more time to practice.

3. Communicate with the ESL teacher.

Mary Yurkosky, a former ESL teacher in Massachusetts, credits much of her students' success to the strong relationship she had with the regular classroom teachers. "The classroom teachers were always talking to me about what they were doing in their classes," she says. "They made it so easy for me to support them: If a teacher was going to be doing a unit on plants, I could make sure we used some of that same vocabulary in the ESL class."

Ideally, this could be systematized, where ESL teachers could regularly get copies of lesson plans or collaborate with regular classroom teachers to build solid back-and-forth support, but "it doesn't have to be that much work," Yurkosky insists. "Just talk to each other. Talk about what's going on in your classrooms, invite each other to special presentations, share what your students are learning, and the words will naturally find their way into the ESL class."

4. Honor the "silent period."

Many new language learners go through a silent period, during which they will speak very little, if at all. "Don't force them to talk if they don't want to," says Eddington, "A lot of students who come from cultures outside of America want to be perfect when they speak, so they will not share until they feel they are at a point where they're perfect." Just knowing that this is a normal stage in second language acquisition should help relieve any pressure you feel to move them toward talking too quickly.

5. Allow some scaffolding with the native language.

Although it has been a hotly debated topic in the language-learning community, allowing students some use of their first language (L1) in second-language (L2) classrooms is gaining acceptance. When a student is still very new to a language, it's okay to pair him with other students who speak his native language. "Some students are afraid to open their mouths at all for fear of sounding stupid or just not knowing the words to use," Yurkosky says. "Letting them explain things or ask questions in their first language gets them to relax and feel like a part of the class."

And this doesn't only apply to spoken language. If you give students a written assignment, but the ELL student doesn't yet have the proficiency to handle writing his response in English, "Don't make them just sit there and do nothing," Eddington says. "Allow them to write in their first language if they're able. This allows them to still participate in journal writing or a math extended response, even if you can't read what they write." There has even been some evidence that allowing second-language learners to pre-write and brainstorm in L1 results in higher-quality writing in L2 in later stages of the writing process (Yigzaw, 2012).

6. Look out for culturally unique vocabulary.

"For most of these kids, their background knowledge is lacking, especially with things that are unique to American or westernized culture," says Eddington. It's important to directly teach certain vocabulary words: "Show them videos of what it looks like to toss pizza dough, show pictures of a juke box or a clothing rack - things that are not common in their own language."

One way to differentiate for ELL students is to consider the whole list of terms you're going to teach for a unit, and if you think an ELL student may be overwhelmed by such a long list, omit those that are not essential to understanding the larger topic at hand.

7. Use sentence frames to give students practice with academic language.

All students, not just English language learners, need practice with academic conversations. Sentence frames - partially completed sentences like "I disagree with what _________ said because..." - show students how to structure language in a formal way. Keep these posted in a highly visible spot in your classroom and require students to refer to them during discussions and while they write.

For this kind of language to really sink in, though, Kim says it has to become a regular part of class. "They won't do it if it's not the norm in the class, because they'll be embarrassed to use it among their peers," she says. "But if they can put it off on the teacher and say, Oh, well, you know, Miss Kim makes me talk like this, then they don't look as hoity-toity as they would otherwise."

8. Pre-teach whenever possible.

If you're going to be reading a certain article next week, give ESL students a copy of it now. If you plan to show a YouTube video tomorrow, send a link to your ESL students today. Any chance you can give these students to preview material will increase the odds that they'll understand it on the day you present it to everyone else. "That kind of thing is wonderful," Yurkosky says. "The kids feel so empowered if they've had a chance to look at the material ahead of time."

9. Learn about the cultural background of your students...

Our second-language populations grow more diverse every year. Taking the time to learn the basics of where a child comes from - exactly, not 'somewhere in the Middle East/South America/Asia/Africa' - tells the student that you respect her enough to bother. Kim remembers one time when she had to set the record straight about the diverse South American population at her school: "I was listening to the teachers talking about the 'Mexican' kids in our building," she says, "and I was like, 'We don't have any Mexicans.'" Not taking the time to at least correctly identify a child's country of origin, much like not bothering to pronounce their name correctly, is a kind of microaggression, a small, subtle insult that communicates hostility toward people of color. Make a commitment to be someone who bothers to get it right.

Once you have the country straight, take things up a notch by learning about students' religious and cultural practices. If he is a practicing Muslim, he should be told if one of the pizzas you ordered for the class party has sausage on it. If she comes from a culture where eye contact with adults is viewed as disrespectful, you'll know not to force her to look you in the eye when she's talking.

10. ...but don't make a child speak for his entire culture.

In her podcast interview, Kim shared a story about watching a teacher ask a new Iraqi student how he felt about the war in his country, right in the middle of class. "That's not cultural inclusiveness," she explains. "I've seen teachers do this and then pat themselves on the back. The students' English is limited so they can't express themselves very well, and they don't want to 'represent'; they just want to be there." If you anticipate a theme coming up in your class that's going to be relevant to one of your students, have a conversation with them in advance, or check with your ESL teacher to see if they think it's appropriate for in-class discussion.

11. Show them how to take themselves less seriously...

By modeling the risk-taking that's required to learn a new language, you help students develop the courage to take their own risks, and to have a sense of humor about it. "I tried to say the word 'paint' ( pinta) in Portuguese and instead I said the word for 'penis' ( pinto). They all roared with laughter while I stood there with a What?? look on my face," Yurkosky says. "When they explained what I'd said, I laughed so hard! I told them that laughing was fine because sometimes mistakes are really funny, but ridicule is never okay."

12. ...but always take them seriously.

One of Kim's pet peeves about how teachers interact with English language learners is the way they often see students' efforts as 'cute,' missing the whole point of what the student is trying to say. "A student will be desperate to communicate, and the teacher will get distracted by the delivery and miss the message," she says. "That's painful for me to watch." It bothers her when teachers mistake a lack of language for a lack of intelligence or maturity. When a child can't express themselves as well as they would in their native language, it's far too easy to assume the concepts just aren't in their heads.

"It breaks my heart when I hear teachers say (ELL kids) don't know anything," says Eddington. "These are brilliant kids and they know a lot. They just can't tell us in English yet." Make a conscious effort to see past the accent and the mispronunciations and treat every interaction - every student - with the respect they deserve.

"They're doing twice the job of everybody else in the class," Kim adds, "even though the result looks like half as much." ♦

Further Reading

The ESL/ELL Teacher's Survival Guide is one of the highest-rated books on teaching English-language learners available. In addition to offering an overview of the research on second-language learners and best practices in teaching ESL, it also includes a whole section on teaching ESL in the content areas and another specifically geared toward teaching ELL students in mainstream classrooms.
References:
Walker, A., Shafer, J., & Iiams, M. (2004). "Not in my classroom": Teacher attitudes towards English language learners in the mainstream classroom. NABE Journal of Research and Practice, 2(1), 130-160.

Yigzaw, A. (2012). Impact of L1 use in L2 English writing classes. Ethiopian Journal of Education and Sciences, 8(1), 11-27.

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12 Ways to Support English Learners in the Mainstream Classroom

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Advice from three ESL teachers on the things regular classroom teachers can do to help English language learners thrive in mainstream classrooms.

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Listen to my interview with Tan Huynh and Beth Skelton (transcript):

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The population of English learners in our schools continues to grow every year; if you're a teacher reading this, you have probably taught at least a few students whose first language is not English. In many school systems, students who are newcomers are given lots of support through separate programs or classes with teachers who specialize in building language proficiency, but eventually they move out of these programs and attend regular classes with everyone else. At that point, they are assumed to have enough of a grasp on the English language to perform as well as peers who have spoken English since birth.

But in many cases, that assumption is incorrect. While these students - a group we're calling experienced multilinguals - are probably quite comfortable and fluent with speaking English socially, they may still be unfamiliar with the academic language used in science, social studies, math, and other content areas. There are specific strategies that can make a huge difference in how well these students perform.

Tan Huynh and Beth Skelton, two educators who have had decades of experience working with English learners, have written a new book called Long-Term Success for Experienced Multilinguals ( Amazon | Bookshop.org). The book focuses squarely on this particular population, English learners who are well beyond newcomer status, but who still need some scaffolding to reach their true academic potential. On the podcast, they shared some of the strategies from the book - things you can start to do right away to help these learners thrive. You can listen to our full conversation or read the transcript linked above. Here's a summary of the strategies they shared.

These kids speak English now, so what's the problem?

An experienced multilingual student may present a conundrum to their teachers. In many ways, they appear to have developed all the necessary skills, including fluency in English, to do well in school.

"These students have been in this system for at least five years, so they have experience," Skelton explains. "We don't have to teach them how to open their locker or how to get to the cafeteria. They have friends. They are in the community. They have experience being a student."

Despite this ease in navigating school and their social lives, these students can hit a wall when it comes to certain academic tasks.

Huynh has personal experience with this. Having moved to the U.S. as a refugee at the age of 5, his only school experiences were in the U.S. "I went to the ESL program, and I exited in fifth grade," he says. And that's when his language support ended. "When you listen to me talk, you're like, okay, he's really fluent. We don't need to help him. And this is what happened all the way through middle school and high school."

When it came time to take the SAT, he was confident. "I was like, oh, this is going to be fine. My teachers are great. They really took care of me. I've had mostly A's and B's on most of my exams. I had almost a 4.0 by that time. I had every single award, distinguished, honor, this and that, dean's list, whatever, I got it. I'm going to be fine. And then I got my score back: 910. I was like, wait, you get a 600 just for putting your name on. How did I get a 910 and I have an almost 4.0 GPA?"

For other multilingual students, things like test scores aren't quite as surprising, because their school performance isn't as strong as Huynh's was. "They often aren't the award winners and the honor students," Skelton explains, "and so teachers start to see them as, well, they've been in our system since kindergarten or first grade. They've been learning English that long, and now you're in seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, and you're still classified as an English learner. There must be something wrong with you. They're still classified as English learners for all kinds of reasons. States require them to have a certain level on an English language proficiency test in order to exit as an English learner. And so when teachers see that, then often that deficit label comes with them."

With this deficit label, many students are subjected to more and more pull-out coursework to improve their English, which means missing out on electives, extracurriculars, and advanced courses.

"Imagine if a kid comes to school and all they love is just design," Huynh says. "All they love is just art. They come to school to be in drama. And they say, No no, because of your English scores, you're out. You're pulled out. " For a student who may have been born in the U.S. and isn't even fluent in their heritage language, this can be heartbreaking.

So what is the problem? If extra English classes aren't helping, what will?

Skelton and Huynh believe the answer lies in academic language. To succeed in all subjects, students need additional scaffolding to understand the unique vocabulary, phrasing, and conventions of those disciplines. When teachers intentionally design instruction and assessments with academic language supports in place, they unlock those worlds for students and give them the tools they need to thrive.

Planning Lessons for Multilingual Learners

If you teach science, math, history, health, technology, even literature - anything other than a class designed to teach a language - your course is built on content-specific standards. You already base your instructional objectives on these standards; Skelton and Huynh recommend adding academic language objectives to those content objectives. This ensures that all students not only get the content, but also the language used to describe and synthesize it.

Here is the process they describe in the book for integrating academic language into what you already teach.

Step 1: Create the Assessment, then Add Scaffolds

Following the backward design approach, start by creating summative assessment that will measure what students should know and be able to do by the end of a unit. Once the assessment is made, add scaffolding in places where the academic language might prevent students from understanding what's being asked of them.

Here's an example: If a test question asks students to hypothesize what would happen if the concentration of oxygen that was consumed inside the glass cylinder increased, they might have a good understanding of the science involved, but some of the terms in the question might throw them off.

"When students encounter a sentence like that," Huynh says, "it becomes not a science test, it becomes a reading test. If a kid doesn't understand the word hypothesize, that's a problem. If they don't know the word concentration and they Google that, that's going to be like, oh, focus? What does that mean? And the word consumed and glass cylinder and increase, all these words now add up to a reading test."

To give students the support they need to do their best on assessments, teachers can "engineer" them by adding these scaffolds:

synonyms: Near the terms that may be unfamiliar, add synonyms that will help define them. If the teacher has already explicitly taught the term, this may not be necessary. So for the example question, it might look like: "Hypothesize (make an educated guess) what would happen if the concentration (amount) of oxygen that was consumed (used) inside the glass cylinder (container) increased (got higher)."

sentence starters: Provide students with the academic language needed to construct quality responses in that discipline.

chunking: Rather than squeeze multiple steps into an essay-type question, break multi-part questions into separate, individual chunks with their own spaces to respond.

images: Add relevant images to questions to aid comprehension.

word banks: Provide banks of key vocabulary terms for the unit that students can access when writing responses.

sequencing: For assessments that require longer responses, provide visual frameworks to show students the sequence in which their response should be written.

While some teachers may feel this is too much hand-holding - for example, they may feel strongly about wanting students to practice reading all parts of a complex question - Huynh and Skelton emphasize that in content-area classes, the focus is on whether students are learning that content; giving multilingual students help with the reading and writing part doesn't take away from that.

"We haven't changed the rigor," Skelton says. "I haven't changed the expectation. I've simply chunked the question. When (teachers) see the difference in response patterns and that kids are able to show more about what they know, most teachers say, You know what? I'm going to do that for everybody. That's not just for my experienced multilinguals. This is a strategy that's probably going to be better for everyone in the class. "

Step 2: Write Daily Integrated Objectives

With a good, scaffolded end-of-unit assessment in place, teachers can then work backward to design the lessons that will lead to success at the end. As in any class, this requires daily learning objectives that can be assessed with a simple exit ticket. For multilingual learners, we can add a specific language piece to that objective.

Skelton describes a physics class she observed where students from many language backgrounds were doing a hands-on activity with focal points and convex lenses. At the end of class, the teacher prompted students with this: "Explain what you learned about finding the focal length."

When one student replied with "It gets bigger when it gets closer," the teacher was thrilled. He knew what the student meant and felt it adequately showed that he understood.

But when Skelton asked the teacher, "Does that sound like what you would want for a scientific response?" he realized that a real scientist would have used the terms focal point and convex lens. She then had the teacher write out his own response, something that would represent a good response to that question, and this gave him a much better idea of what he was looking for.

The revised prompt, integrating language objectives, looked like this: Explain what you learned about finding the focal length using precise vocabulary from the word bank. By adding this to the objectives, the teacher could then plan instruction that would give students practice in using that language throughout the lesson.

Here are a few more examples:

Before: Compare the social inequality in nineteenth-century France to the reality of the twenty-first century Western society.
After: Compare the social inequality in nineteenth-century France to the reality of the twenty-first century Western society using comparative language (both, just like, another similarity, etc.)

Before: Describe how the graph has been transformed.
After: Describe how the graph has been transformed using precise terms and the phrase by a factor of or by ___ units.

Before: Predict what will happen to the main character in the next chapter.
After: Predict what will happen to the main character in the next chapter using conditional language such as might or could.

Step 3: Teach for Comprehensible Input and Academic Output

When it comes time to teach the lessons themselves, use the daily objective as a guide to ensure that students understand the language that is being used to teach them - in other words, that the input is comprehensible to them - and that the students' output is framed in the language of the field being taught.

Huynh gives an example from a 9th grade science lesson on solubility. "Imagine a graph, XY graph, and then there's a line all the way through up. (The teacher) said, 'Above the line, we call that super saturated. It cannot melt anymore. Below this line, we can keep melting things. We call that unsaturated. That line is saturated. Anything on that line means everything can melt, but it can't melt anymore.' So the teacher just drew that, labeled it for kids. She color coded it and made it so comprehensible."

Next, she posed a few questions to make sure students understood how the graph worked. "She said, 'Okay. Let's look at 60 degrees. At what point would we go up, will 60 degrees hit that line of saturation? Let's look over to the left, oh. It's 120. That is the solubility.'"

Up to this point, her focus was on comprehensible input, making sure students understood the terms she was using to describe the graph. Next she shifted to the output, giving students practice using the terms themselves. "She said, 'Now I'm going to give you a question. I'm going to model for you the kind of language I want you to write. Don't just write the answer. Saturated, unsaturated, that's not enough. So this is what I want you to do. Always start your sentence with the word at, then give me the amount of grams. So At 110 grams of potassium nitrate... then give me the degrees, at 40 degrees, the solution is... then add is it saturated or unsaturated? And then say, because it is ... is it above the line of saturation, below the line of saturation, or on the line of saturation? That's it.'"

This kind of explicit modeling gives students guided practice in using this unfamiliar language correctly, integrating the content they are learning and the language needed to demonstrate that learning.

No More Doors Closed

By making these small shifts to help students build proficiency in discipline-specific language, we're helping them reach higher levels of learning. "Instead of lowering the expectations for these students," Huynh says, "we're saying, we're going to keep expectations high, but we're going to give you different paths to get to that mountaintop."

And when we do this, we eliminate the need for extra English classes. We put to rest the question of why students who seem to know English perfectly well still struggle in some classes. And we free up space for these students to pursue extracurriculars, electives, advanced coursework, and beyond.

For Huynh, seeing that shift would have personal significance, helping today's multilingual students reach that mountaintop without the setbacks he had to experience.

"No more doors closed," he says with resolve. "No more paths blocked."

Tan Huynh can be found online on his website at tankhuynh.com or on Twitter at @TanKHuynh. Beth Skelton can be found on her website at bethskelton.com or on Twitter at @easkelton.

To purchase Long-Term Success for Experienced Multilinguals directly from Corwin's website, click here and use the code SAVE20 at checkout for 20 percent off.

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Supporting Intermediate English Learners in Every Subject

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Students who have learned enough English to thrive socially may still need scaffolding to thrive academically. These strategies can help.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
If no one has ever encouraged, pushed, or insisted that you build more higher-order thinking into your students' learning, it's possible you've been teaching in a cave.

Higher-level thinking has been a core value of educators for decades. We learned about it in college. We hear about it in PD. We're even evaluated on whether we're cultivating it in our classrooms: Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, a widely used instrument to measure teacher effectiveness, describes a distinguished teacher as one whose "lesson activities require high-level student thinking" (Domain 3, Component 3c).

All that aside, most teachers would say they want their students to be thinking on higher levels, that if our teaching kept students at the lowest level of Bloom's Taxonomy -simply recalling information-we wouldn't be doing a very good job as teachers.

And yet, when it's time to plan the learning experiences that would have our students operating on higher levels, some of us come up short. We may not have a huge arsenal of ready-to-use, high-level tasks to give our students. Instead, we often default to having students identify and define terms, label things, or answer basic recall questions. It's what we know. And we have so much content to cover, many of us might feel that there really isn't time for the higher-level stuff anyway.

If this sounds anything like you, I have a suggestion: Try a curation assignment.

When a museum director curates, she collects artifacts, organizes them into groups, sifts out everything but the most interesting or highest-quality items, and shares those collections with the world. When an editor curates poems for an anthology, he does the same thing.

The process can be applied to all kinds of content: A person could curate a collection of articles, images, videos, audio clips, essays, or a mixture of items that all share some common attribute or theme. When we are presented with a list of the "Top 10" anything or the "Best of" something else, what we're looking at is a curated list. Those playlists we find on Spotify and Pandora? Curation. "Recommended for You" videos on Netflix? Curation. The news? Yep, it's curated. In an age where information is ubiquitous and impossible to consume all at once, we rely on the curation skills of others to help us process it all.

In an educational setting, curation has a ton of potential as an academic task. Sure, we're used to assigning research projects, where students have to gather resources, pull out information, and synthesize that information into a cohesive piece of informational or argumentative writing. This kind of work is challenging and important, and it should remain as a core assignment throughout school, but how often do we make the collection of resources itself a stand-alone assignment?

That's what I'm proposing we do. Curation projects have the potential to put our students to work at three different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy:

Understand, where we exemplify and classify information

Analyze, where we distinguish relevant from irrelevant information and organize it in a way that makes sense

Evaluate, where we judge the quality of an item based on a set of criteria

If we go beyond Bloom's and consider the Framework for 21st Century Learning put out by the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, we'll see that critical thinking is one of the 4C's listed as an essential skill for students in the modern age (along with communication, creativity, and collaboration) and a well-designed curation project requires a ton of critical thinking.

So what would a curation project look like?

Suppose you're teaching U.S. history, and you want students to understand that our constitution is designed to be interpreted by the courts, and that many people interpret it differently. So you create a curation assignment that focuses on the first amendment.

The task: Students must choose ONE of the rights given to us by the first amendment. To illustrate the different ways people interpret that right, students must curate a collection of online articles, images, or videos that represent a range of beliefs about how far that right extends. For each example they include, they must summarize the point of view being presented and include a direct quote where the author or speaker's biases or beliefs can be inferred.

Here is what one submission might look like, created on a platform called eLink (click here to view the whole thing).

Because they are finding examples of a given concept and doing some summarizing, students in this task are working at the Understand level of Bloom's. But they are also identifying where the author or speaker is showing bias or purpose, which is on the Analyze level.

Ranked Collection: Students collect a set of articles, images, videos, or even whole websites based on a set of criteria (the most "literary" song lyrics of the year, or the world's weirdest animal adaptations) and rank them in some kind of order, justifying their rankings with a written explanation or even a student-created scoring system. Each student could be tasked with creating their own collection or the whole class could be given a pre-selected collection to rank. This would be followed by a discussion where students could compare and justify their rankings with those of other students. (Bloom's Level: Evaluate)

Shared Trait Collection: This would house items that have one thing in common. This kind of task would work in so many different subject areas. Students could collect articles where our government's system of checks and balances are illustrated, images of paintings in the impressionist style, videos that play songs whose titles use metaphors. It could even be used as part of a lesson using the concept attainment strategy, where students develop an understanding of a complex idea by studying "yes" and "no" examples of it. By curating their own examples after studying the concept, they will further developing their understanding of it. (Bloom's Level: Understand).

Literature Review: As the first step of a research project, students could collect relevant resources and provide a brief summary of each one, explaining how it contributes to the current understanding of their topic. As high school students prepare for college, having a basic understanding of what a literature review is and the purpose it serves-even if they are only doing it with articles written outside of academia-will help them take on the real thing with confidence when that time comes. (Bloom's Levels: Understand for the summarization, Analyze for the sorting and selecting of relevant material)

Video Playlist: YouTube is bursting at the seams with videos, but how much of it is actually good? Have students take chunks of your content and curate the best videos out there to help other students understand those concepts. In the item's description, have students explain why they chose it and what other students will get out of it. (Bloom's Levels: Understand for summarization, Evaluate for judging the quality of the videos)

Museum Exhibit: Task students with curating a digital "exhibit" around a given theme. The more complex the theme, the more challenging the task. For example, they might be asked to assume the role of a museum owner who hates bees, and wants to create a museum exhibit that teaches visitors all about the dangers of bees. This kind of work would help students understand that even institutions that might not own up to any particular bias, like museums, news agencies, or tv stations, will still be influenced by their own biases in how they curate their material. (Bloom's Level: Understand if it's just a collection of representative elements, Create if they are truly creating a new "whole" with their collection, such as representing a particular point of view with their choices)

Real World Examples: Take any content you're teaching (geometry principles, grammar errors, science or social studies concepts) and have students find images or articles that illustrate that concept in the real world. (Bloom's level: Understand).

Favorites: Have students pull together a personal collection of favorite articles, videos, or other resources for a Genius Hour, advisory, or other more personalized project: A collection of items to cheer you up, stuff to boost your confidence, etc. Although this could easily slide outside the realm of academic work, it would make a nice activity to help students get to know each other at the start of a school year or give them practice with the process of curation before applying it to more content-related topics.

Most of the above activities would not be very academically challenging if students merely had to assemble the collection. Adding a thoughtfully designed written component is what will make students do their best thinking in a curation assignment.

The simplest way to do this is to require a written commentary with each item in the collection. Think about those little signs that accompany every item at a museum: Usually when you walk into an exhibit, you find a sign or display that explains the exhibit as a whole, then smaller individual placards that help visitors understand the significance of each piece in the collection. When students put their own collections together, they should do the same thing.

Be specific about what you'd like to see in these short writing pieces, and include those requirements in your rubric. Then go a step further and create a model of your own, so students have a very clear picture of how the final product should look. Because this is a genre they have probably not done any work in before, they will do much better with this kind of scaffolding. Doing the assignment yourself first-a practice I like to call dogfooding -will also help you identify flaws in the assignment that can be tweaked before you hand it over to students.

It's certainly possible for students to collect resources through non-digital means, by reading books in the library or curating physical artifacts or objects, but doing a curation project digitally allows for media-rich collections that can be found and assembled in a fraction of the time. And if you have students curating in groups, using digital tools will allow them to collaborate from home without having to meet in person.

Here are a few curation tools that would work beautifully for this kind of project:

Elink is the tool featured in the sample project above. Of all the tools suggested here, this one is the simplest. You collect your links, write descriptions, and end up with a single unique web page that you can share with anyone.

Pinterest is probably the most popular curation tool out there. If your students are already using Pinterest, or you're willing to get them started, you could have them create a Pinterest board as a curation assignment.

Symbaloo allows users to create "webmixes," boards of icons that each lead to different URLs. Although it would be possible to create a curated collection with Symbaloo, it doesn't allow for the same amount of writing that some other tools do, so you would need to have students do their writing on a separate document.

Diigo is a good choice for a more text-driven project, like a literature review or a general collection of resources at the beginning stages of a research project, where images aren't necessarily required. Diigo offers lots of space to take notes about every item in a collection, but it doesn't have user-friendly supports for images or other media.

I'm so excited about all the different ways we can use curation in the classroom, and I would love to hear your ideas as well. Please share them in the comments below. If you have links to student samples, share those, too! ♦

Curation is just one of the modules in JumpStart, my new online technology course created especially for educators. I thought carefully about what specific skills teachers need to make the most of classroom tech, chose 9 of them, and designed hands-on projects that will show you exactly how to use them.

If you're ready to take your tech skills from so-so to rock solid, this course will change everything for you.

Learn more about the course here.

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To Boost Higher-Order Thinking, Try Curation

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A digital curation project is a fast way to engage critical thinking in any content area. Here's how it works.

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Any Lauryn Hill fans out there would instantly recognize the opening chords to her classic hip-hop song, "Doo Wop (That Thing)," but how many of us could explain the line, "Don't forget about the deen/ the Siratul Mustaqim" without googling it? If you're not familiar with the term, I can save you the search: Siratul Mustaqim is Arabic for "the straight path." But why didn't she just say that? It's not by accident-she's code-switching.

What is Code-Switching?

Code-switching. Some of us have heard of it, most of us have witnessed it, many of us do it on a regular basis. But what is it, exactly? Why do people code-switch? And what does it have to do with teaching?

Code-switching is the act of alternating between languages during conversation. (For the purposes of this post, language is used as an umbrella term encompassing forms of speech including formally recognized languages, dialects, and nonverbal communication.) Code-switchers seamlessly switch back and forth without pause, often starting a sentence in one language and ending it in another. Sometimes they insert words from another language in the middle of a sentence, a behavior referred to as code-mixing. And it's not just words that change-when code-switching, people might speak faster or slower, louder or softer, mix up the pitch of their voice, change their laugh, and even vary their facial expressions and body language.

Why do people code-switch? Well, it depends. Code-switching is a very personal and complex behavior that occurs for a number of reasons. It's used to clarify or emphasize a point, and at times, to elude eavesdroppers. Strong emotions can prompt a switch, as does a sudden change in topic. Sometimes a word simply comes to mind faster in one language. Other times it's just simpler to say one word in another language ( deen) than produce an English approximation on the spot ("living according to one's religious principles").

Code-switching helps us express ourselves in a way that makes sense for us at that moment. Some people code-switch in every conversation, while others use it more strategically, depending on the situation. For example, your children might speak one way with you but sound totally different when they're off with their friends. People who code-switch are experts at navigating social situations and determining how to use language to our advantage. It helps us stand out; show who we are, unequivocally and unapologetically. It's how we establish community-a greeting of ¡Hola! or Assalamu Alaikum instantly signals cultural or religious solidarity. Conversely, people code-switch to assimilate, downplaying or modifying their natural speech to fit in where they're made to feel they don't belong.

Code-switching is both art and tool, subtext and premise, bridge and platform on which we build a conversation. Code switchers use language to deliver ideas with efficiency and style. When Ms. Hill called in her Muslim fans in that lyric, she chose the language of Islam to speak directly to them. That choice served her both lyrically and linguistically, expressing a complex idea to a specific audience in a single word. And with it, she reminds us that because we matter, so do our words.

Why Language Matters

Language is identity. It shapes and informs our thinking, our values, and our relationships. It binds us to our roots and informs how we interact with the world. This should be reflected in our teaching. Gloria Ladson-Billings says, "The goal of cultural competence is to ensure that students remain firmly grounded in their culture of origin (and learn it well) while acquiring knowledge and skill in at least one additional culture" ( Ladson-Billings, 2014). Code-switching is a feature of that multiculturalism, a skill set to be nurtured and developed. Language-affirming practices help us better understand what our students need to learn and grow.

The trouble is that not all students feel they can bring their whole selves into the classroom. Even the most well-meaning teachers can unwittingly do more harm than good. Many bicultural and bilingual children report experiencing a sense of loss when they acquire their second language ( Casesa, 2013) and it's not by coincidence that their educational setting plays a part in this. Over and over again, students are interrupted, corrected, and told to speak proper English by their teachers. This seemingly benevolent practice has long-lasting negative effects on many of them long beyond their school years.

Black English and the Culture of Power

Often when we think of multilingual learners (MLLs) we think of immigrants or children of immigrants who speak languages other than English, but many code-switchers actually speak a dialect of English as their heritage or home language. Despite there being no official national language in the U.S., one particular version of English has become so synonymous with academic language that not only is it the preferred dialect for reading, writing, and speaking, but other dialects are viewed as inferior. This has mostly to do with how dynamics of race and culture affect our perception of language.

In her 2020 book, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, Dr. April Baker-Bell explains how racism and linguistic injustice are linked. She says the white mainstream dialect known as Standardized English is held up as a model language while Black English or AAVE (African-American Vernacular English)-though widely spoken-remains underutilized and underappreciated in academic settings. Even though Black English and other racialized dialects do not exist in opposition to academic language, the students who speak them are discouraged from speaking their heritage languages in school, and their bilingualism is rarely viewed as an asset.

Why are certain languages treated differently? For one, it's still widely believed that Black English is simply slang or informal speech, when the fact is it has its own grammar, syntax, and vocabulary like all other languages ( Kamm, 2015). Another common line of thinking is that Black students need to code-switch to better navigate the academic or corporate world later on ( Baker-Bell, 2017). This is a response to what Lisa Delpit describes as "a culture of power," in which marginalized people learn to code-switch for survival instead of as a means of self-expression, feeling they have to speak a certain way if they want to get ahead ( Delpit, 1988).

Though code-switching can be an effective way to gain access to traditionally white-dominated spaces, the downside of this type of survival code-switching is Black children are being taught to leave parts of themselves behind when entering academic or professional spaces, and by continuing to uncritically affirm the dominance of Standardized English ( Lippi-Green, 1994), we reinforce it as the norm.

Here's where examining our own implicit biases is crucial. Do we think of language in terms of "right" and "wrong?" Constantly fight the urge to correct people's grammar or dismiss someone outright because they sound "uneducated"? Equate English speaking (especially non-accented English) with being American? A bulk of this harmful thinking is the result of our own schooling which we now as adults have to work to unlearn.

We should want better for our students. The fact is, code-switching is not a sign of linguistic incompetence, but a normal occurrence for a multilingual brain. ( Yuhas, 2021). Rather than attempt to micromanage how they use their language, we can guide students to the realization that they can decide for themselves when and how they code-switch.

Setting the Record Straight: Common Questions About Language in Schools

Let's be honest. Sometimes it feels like as soon as we've begun to master this teaching thing, another element gets thrown into the mix that has us feeling like a rookie all over again. Adding strategies that specifically address equity of language into our repertoire may seem like a daunting task, but if we know it can help our students, it's worth a try. Hopefully in time it will become clear that even small changes can have a big impact.

My students need to learn English, and fast. Won't code-switching slow down their progress?

Short answer: it won't.

If you want to create a language-inclusive classroom for your multilingual learners, don't expect or enforce "Standardized English only" policies in your classroom ( Ethical Englishes, 2019). It's fine to encourage them to take risks, but actively limiting or making rules about how they're allowed to talk will shut down communication and damage your relationship with them.

It's a myth that allowing students to speak their home language in school slows down their acquisition of English ( Kamenetz, 2019). Regular practice of both languages will help maintain their bilingualism. In the beginning stages, use scaffolds to make the material more accessible. They'll eventually transfer their conceptual understanding to their new language once they have the vocabulary.

If I don't correct my students when they make an error, how will they learn?

Short answer: It's fine. Just let them talk.

Some believe we should take every opportunity to address errors. We even have a term- teachable moment -for stopping to correct a student in the moment. But cutting someone off in the middle of a thought is not only an ineffective instructional tactic, it's disruptive to the flow of conversation. It's unnecessary to interrupt their train of thought just because they said "goed" instead of "went." They probably won't remember the correction anyway, and their classmates who were listening attentively also have to refocus. If it truly is an error (and not a language difference) you can always make a mental note to do a lesson on it at another time.

What about the standards?

Short answer: Yes, you still have to teach the standards.

While it's true we have English language standards in our curriculum, we don't need to prioritize Standardized English at the expense of all other forms of language. Making space for linguistic diversity doesn't mean eliminating what already exists; it's about creating a balance. Teachers can teach the standards without asking students to compromise their identities, and ultimately, language-inclusive instruction will only advance rather than jeopardize their academic growth.

I only speak English-won't that limit my ability to do all of this?

Short answer: Start with a curious mind.

You don't need to be able to speak every language in order to support students who code-switch in our classrooms. Showing genuine interest in your students' language skills can go a long way. Also, demonstrate an appreciation for languages in general. Whether you teach history, music, or algebra, there are plenty of interesting and fun connections you can make to your subject area.

Instructional Practices that Support Multilingual Learners

Multilingual learners (MLLs) are often assumed to be at a disadvantage in a school setting, but this cannot be further from the truth ( Bialystok, 2011). Nor are they a monolith: Every one of them comes to us with unique strengths, needs, and gifts. That's why there's no single strategy that works for everyone: Some of the following suggestions will feel more appropriate for learners of English as a new language while others make sense for more fluent speakers. As always, do what makes sense for your particular class.

Get Them Talking

MLLs need lots of opportunities to engage in meaningful conversations in class. This can be challenging if they tend to sit quietly during discussions and let others do the talking. Sometimes they're just listening, but other times fear of critique or correction truly stops them from participating. If we want everyone talking, we need to build inclusive talk structures into our lessons.

To do this, vary the different types of discussion. Students who never raise their hand in whole class discussions will open up once they're in a small group, while others prefer to share their thoughts with a trusted partner. Offering variety in talk structures increases student-to-student interactions and generates opportunities for us to informally assess understanding, but most of all, it lets students talk in ways that are comfortable for them.

Processing ideas can take longer for students used to speaking two or more languages, so we need to make effective use of "think time." That's when you ask a question and pause. Don't rephrase the question. Don't call on anyone. Let students absorb the question and formulate an answer. This is especially helpful for MLLs because they often have to mentally rehearse their response before saying it out loud. If they appear hesitant, see if they need more time and then circle back after the next speaker. Once they do start speaking, resist the urge to interrupt or speak on their behalf. If there is any confusion, you can always ask them to repeat or rephrase, but more often than not, those few extra seconds can be a game-changer.

Make Text Accessible

The literacy block is typically one of the most demanding times of the day for multilingual learners. Many encounters with texts end in frustration and confusion because students weren't properly supported throughout the lesson. Not only do they need multiple chances to absorb new information, three additional points to consider when making a text accessible are background knowledge, representation, and means of delivery.

Background Knowledge: If students are having trouble accessing informational texts, consider pre-reading activities that activate and build background knowledge. It may be useful to show a short video or have students click through a slideshow of images related to the topic. Have them preview key vocabulary words they'll find in the reading (ideas for building vocabulary are linked here). Take time during lessons to identify cognates or root words related to the topic. A multilingual word wall is also a great way to help MLLs share their word knowledge with their peers. New words can be collected in a personal dictionary as a side project.

Representation: Part of making texts accessible is choosing stories our students can relate to both in terms of language and message. We should be regularly selecting culturally diverse texts, especially those that use languages or dialects other than Standardized English. In addition to learning about other cultures, students should see themselves reflected in the literature they read. We also need to vet our instructional materials for potential issues with the representation or portrayal of cultural and racial groups. There are a lot of questionable resources out there-be vigilant!

Means of Delivery: Multi-modal instruction makes content engaging and accessible to all our learners. Station teaching is a perfect way to differentiate for MLLs using varying levels of text complexity. One way this could work is while one group reads a grade-level text, another group can have a simplified version of the same text. (Newsela offers texts in multiple languages and on differing Lexile levels for this exact purpose). Combine that with a video station and a vocabulary station and you have a robust multi-modal work session that can be repeated at any time with a new text or topic.

Additional Scaffolds: If students are not yet proficient enough in English to follow along, they can still participate in other ways: Providing translations of text or subtitles in a video can help students keep up with the material, and offering credit for work in languages other than English is always an option, too. They may benefit from a paired text or video or some other way to reconnect with the material. Later, have students review what they've learned using retrieval techniques (listed here) to solidify concepts and help make new words stick.

Be Flexible with Assessments

When so many assessments require a level of English proficiency that may not even be relevant to the assignment, how do we ensure we're getting an accurate snapshot? By using a variety of assessment formats such as open-ended prompts, performance tasks, or projects and adjusting our own assessments to ensure they're culturally relevant.

You can also employ flexibility in reviewing and grading students' written work. Focus the majority of assignments on content, not conventions, and remember variations in language shouldn't result in a lower grade. Obviously, every language has grammar, syntax, and spelling conventions that can be taught, practiced, and mastered, so this is not to say conventions don't matter. It's just that not all assignments need to be graded against the conventions of Standardized English. If a student shows consistent need for explicit instruction with grammar or spelling, you can always offer targeted instruction during small group lessons.

Finally, progress-based assessment criteria such as checklists and rubrics clarify your expectations for each task and make feedback actionable. It's especially helpful to co-create those with your class. Not only will they have a better idea of what you're looking for but they'll be encouraged by seeing what they already can do.

Translanguaging

If you're looking for a bolder way to incorporate students' existing language abilities into your lessons, translanguaging is a great way to develop literacy skills in multiple languages (España & Yadira Herrera, 2020). That's the practice of designing activities to allow students agency over their languaging practices. For example, students might read a text in Spanish and respond to a discussion prompt in English. This gives them access to the material while supporting their conversation skills. Or, they might watch a video in subtitles, discuss what they learned, and write a response, all using both languages. The idea is that alternating between forms of input, processing, and output supports fluency in multiple languages at once. The advantage of translanguaging (Otheguy, García & Reid, 2015) over code-switching is that it eliminates any artificial or teacher-controlled separation of languages.

Other Inclusive Practices

In addition to the instructional strategies outlined above, there are a handful of other practices that might happen more casually alongside the pedagogy. Creating language-inclusive classrooms is more than a technique; it's a mindset.

That mindset means we never mock or criticize anyone's accent or grammar. It means we support our students' languaging practices. It means moving away from the idea that there's a right and wrong way of speaking, that Black English and other dialects are "slang" or "informal" versions of the true and proper English. It means affirming, not just tolerating, language diversity.

An inclusivity mindset also means expanding the walls of the classroom. Field trips, service projects, and community events are a great way to tie learning to the real world. It means inviting families to publishing parties and heritage celebrations. It means conversations without judgment and relationships that matter.

Inclusivity means we make space for diversity: diversity of thought, experience, culture, language, and more. It means we make sure our students know they belong.

"Respect is Just the Minimum"

As we commit to becoming more culturally responsive educators, we need to not only respect, but nurture and protect our students' cultural, racial, and linguistic identities. How we talk about language and what we allow (and don't allow) to go unchallenged in our classrooms is hugely influential and the choices we make as teachers carry weight. We may not always know the right thing to do in every situation, but as long as we make ongoing, conscious efforts to include all voices in the conversation, well, we're on the right path.

References

Baker-Bell, A. (2017). I can switch my language, but I can't switch my skin": What teachers must understand about linguistic racism. The guide for White women who teach Black boys, 97-107.

Baker-Bell, A. (2020) Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. (1st edition). Routledge.

Bialystok, E. (2011). Reshaping the mind: the benefits of bilingualism. Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie experimentale, 65(4), 229-235. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025406

Casesa, R. (2013). "I Spoke It When I Was a Kid": Practicing Critical Bicultural Pedagogy in a Fourth-Grade Classroom. Schools: Studies in Education, 10(2), 171-191. https://doi.org/10.1086/673329

Delpit, L. (1988). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people's children. Harvard Educational Review, 58(3), 280-298.

España, C. & Yadira Herrera, L. (2020). Heinemann Blog. What is Translanguaging? https://blog.heinemann.com/what-is-translanguaging

Ethical Englishes (2019, August). The Dangers of "English-Only" Policies (for ESL students) in School. https://www.ethicalesol.org/blog/hhryxasqrobl9b8gzcza24aj6x5w5q

Kamenetz, A. (2019). 6 Potential Brain Benefits Of Bilingual Education. Npr.org. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/11/29/497943749/6-potential-brain-benefits-of-bilingual-education

Kamm, O. (2015, March). There Is No 'Proper English' Wall Street Journal.

Ladson-Billings, G.J. (2014). Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2.0: a.k.a. the Remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84, 74-84.

Lippi-Green, R. (1994, January). Accent, Standard Language Ideology, and Discriminatory Pretext in the Courts. Language in Society, 23(2), 163-198. https://rosinalippi.com/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Lippi-Green1994Accent-standard-language-ideology-and-discriminatory-pretext-in-the-courts.pdf

Otheguy, R., García, O., & Reid, W. (2015, October). Clarifying Translanguaging and Deconstructing Named Languages: A Perspective from Linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review, 6(3): 281-307 https://ofeliagarciadotorg.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/otheguyreidgarcia.pdf

Yuhas, Daisy. (2021, November). How Brains Seamlessly Switch between Languages. Scientific American.

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Words Matter: Language-Affirming Classrooms for Code-Switching Students

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Rather than micromanaging how they use their language, we can guide students to decide for themselves when and how they code-switch.

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In this edition of Conversations with Tim, Tim speaks with Rosalie Lincoln and Cathy Moses about their work in the Lower Kuskokwim School District in Alaska to preserve and revitalize the Yugtun language.

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WIDA develops and provides proven tools and support to help multilingual learners, and their educators, succeed.

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WIDA Student-Friendly Can Do Descriptors, GRADES K-12

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WIDA Student-Friendly Can Do Descriptors, GRADES K-12

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English Language Learners

These techniques for creating a positive learning environment help students adapt to a new culture and acquire a new language.

Each year, teachers across the country open their doors to new students at the start of the new academic year. Being a new student is overwhelming when it's your first year, but can you imagine the added fear and anxiety that goes with being an English language (ELL) or multilingual learner (MLL)? On top of designing interactive bulletin boards and planning lessons, teachers who are new to working with ELLs/MLLs also wrestle with the concern of how to appropriately support their newcomer students both linguistically and culturally while also delivering content that's meaningful.

Over the years, I've turned to simple strategies to encourage my students and help them to become better acclimated with our new school culture. For me, the best way to do this was to begin by acknowledging theirs first.

1. Make a Good First Impression

Introductions matter. Learn students' names and nicknames. Learning how to pronounce your students' names or using their preferred names shows them that you value their identity. Using icebreakers or name games is a fun way to learn students' names. Be sure to model the instructions for the class before you begin. When I did this, I could visibly see my students becoming more comfortable with one another by making eye contact and smiling when they spoke and giving a thumbs-up or high five to encourage their peers.

A friendly greeting and a smile is a simple way to acknowledge newcomer students. Smiling is a universal language, which directly sends a message that you're there for your students. It's one way to give a warm welcome and invite them to feel relaxed and ready to learn.

2. Cultivate a Supportive and Caring Environment

As a teacher, I found that an easy way to support my high school students with classroom vocabulary was to use signage. Posters with sentence stems and labels of classroom supplies are one way in which students can internalize the English language through visuals and real objects.

Clear and consistent classroom routines also help newcomers to understand what is expected. Whether they are presented on a classroom agenda or introduced through modeling, predictable classroom routines help students feel safe. For example, introducing students to common classroom expressions accompanied by a visual can reinforce routines and give students the opportunity to practice the target language. Teaching students to ask and answer questions about classroom actions, such as finding the page number or asking for a writing utensil, supports newcomers in expressing their needs to others. When their questions are answered, their needs are met because they know they were heard.

Creating a caring climate means that care is used to prepare the physical space and contents within the classroom that make it easier for newcomers to transition into school. Preparing a welcome folder with access to important information such as Google Classroom codes or codes and passwords to websites that are used throughout the year says "We've been expecting you" to your new student and fosters a sense of belonging.

3. Use Effective Language Strategies for Newcomers

I frequently use the following strategies with my students to build their vocabulary, practice pronunciation, and strengthen the use of their receptive and expressive language skills.

Choral repetition: This is a technique whereby the teacher models reading fluency, pace, and pronunciation. Choral repetition creates a low affective filter or safe low-risk environment where newcomers can participate in whole-class reading.

Wait time: Newcomers need time to translate the question they're given, think about a response, translate the answer into English, and then verbalize the response. I like to silently count to 15 seconds when I ask one-word-or-longer phrased questions based on vocabulary or to check my students' understanding. If I notice that more time or clarification is needed, then I begin to repeat or sometimes rephrase the question to assist my students. Usually activities with text-based or inferential questions require the use of a timer for seven minutes or more, depending on the length or complexity of the activity.

Visual representations: These provide another way for students to express their thoughts and ideas. Accompanying these drawings with short sentences validates students' perspectives and encourages them to share their stories. It's vitally important that students feel seen and heard. Illustrations and artistic projects allow newcomers experiencing a silent period to express themselves without the fear of presenting to the whole class. Language researcher Stephen Krashen described the silent period as the first stage of language acquisition, where the language learner is silent for several weeks or more as they begin to adjust and acquire the new language.

4. Use Tech and Peer Support to Help Students Take Risks

This is where technology comes in handy. Newcomers are often uncomfortable with speaking or reading aloud. Our class has enjoyed the use of Flip, Classkick, and Book Creator to record their presentations or answer questions. While technological apps have made it easier for students to create and record their presentations, newcomers may need additional time to work on projects and presentations.

Some students may need an extra class day or an extra week. I use discretion based on my students' needs as they strive to complete the assignment and on the demands of the activity itself. The truth is that a tech-friendly environment can help learners take language risks in a way that makes them feel comfortable.

To facilitate collaboration and communication, clock buddies or map buddies is a buddy system where students are paired up to support newcomers by translating for teachers or helping them to acclimate to their new school environment. Whether it's a buddy or small group collaboration, these interpersonal activities equip newcomers to decipher language and content. Online translators, dictionaries, and visual dictionaries allow students to access the definition, image, and pronunciation of words in the target language. Students can also create their own glossaries using Quizlet.

Teachers can practice these simple strategies with the intention of constructing a safe and inclusive environment so that newcomer learners know that they are cared for and valued. The classroom becomes a space where all learners feel self-acceptance and a sense of belonging. It's a place of purpose where all learners can fearlessly be who they are and confidently take on challenges together.

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4 Effective Strategies for Supporting Newcomer English Learners

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These techniques for creating a positive learning environment help students adapt to a new culture and acquire a new language.

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Colorin Colorado for Teachers of MLLs! Website

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Colorin Colorado for Teachers of MLLs! Website

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This site is GOLD!

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Across the country, teachers and other educators share the exciting but sometimes difficult challenge of teaching English, literacy skills, and academic content to a growing number of English language learners (ELLs).

This is a rich section filled with strategies, ideas, recommendations, resources, videos, and news from the ELL field. Resources are organized by the topics below and additional Resources by Grade are also available in our ELL Basics section.

What You'll Find in This Section

The first year of working with ELLs can be full of challenges. Fortunately, there are a number of resources to help! Colorín Colorado has compiled this list to help new ELL teachers navigate their experiences in the classroom. These resources may also be helpful for veteran teachers who are new to teaching ELLs.

How can we help English language learners successfully meet the Common Core State Standards? This resource section offers ideas and materials including classroom videos, teacher interviews, and bilingual parent tips.

Learn more about how schools and families can collaborate to ensure that ELLs, including those with special needs, have the appropriate support and services to meet their unique needs.

Resource Library

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Across the country, teachers and other educators share the exciting but sometimes difficult challenge of teaching English, literacy skills, and academic content to a growing number of English language learners (ELLs). This is a rich section filled with strategies, ideas, recommendations, resources, videos, and news from the ELL field.

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Thank you, Martha Calderon at NHS!

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The following resources are available to assist you in using the practice and training tests.

To access the online Practice and Training Tests, please select one of these buttons.

Select this button to access resources, including Directions for Administration (DFAs) and Scoring Guides.

Note, these resources are available for Parents or Guardians as well.

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Administration of Practice and Training Tests is optimized in supported versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari web browsers. The following resources are available to assist you in using the practice and training tests.

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Many newcomers have a unique experience with core stressors compared to their native U.S. born peers and other international newcomers.

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Integrating Language into Early Childhood Education Practice Brief

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Integrating Language into Early Childhood Education Practice Brief

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Chapter 4: Providing High-Quality Instruction for Newcomers

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Chapter 4: Providing High-Quality Instruction for Newcomers

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This includes CONCRETE strategies for all kinds of bilingual education: DLI as well as MLL-inclusive education at elementary and secondary levels.

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Teacher Lesson Plan Template for Content and Language Objectives

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Teacher Lesson Plan Template for Content and Language Objectives

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Recommendations for Assigning Report Card Grades to English Learners

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Listening and Reading Strategies to Help Clarify Input

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Listening and Reading Strategies to Help Clarify Input

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Five Listening and Reading Strategies to Help Clarify Input

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This is from ELRISE!

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The new question-of-the-week is:
What are effective teaching strategies for newcomers?
Newcomers to the United States often have low-proficiency in English but, depending upon their age, might have had considerable education in their home language.

What are the most effective teaching strategies educators can use with this population, which is certain to grow under President Biden's immigration policies?

Several experienced educators are contributing responses to this question: Michelle Shory, Irina McGrath, Luisa Palacio, Sean McWherter Ed.D., and Ciera Walker. Michelle, Irina, and Luisa were also guests on my 10-minute BAM! Radio Show. You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

Before we get to today's guest contributors, I'd like to share a few of my favorite strategies:
1. Picture Word Inductive Model (PWIM)
In the PWIM, students and teachers first label an image with words, then categorize them, followed by using the words to write sentences about the picture. They next categorize the sentences, turn them into paragraphs, and finally, write a title.

You can learn more about the PWIM here and here.
2. Games
You can't go wrong with games. In the classroom, zillions of different ones can be played with mini-whiteboards, and they can be modified for online use by using a tool like Whiteboard.fi. Quizizz is also great for online use, and it has countless games already premade for just about any topic you want to teach!
3. Dialogues 4.Freire's Learning Sequence 5. Language Experience Approach (LEA)
Promoting Interaction
Michelle Shory and Irina McGrath are Google Certified trainers and co-creators of ELL 2.0, a website that offers tools and resources for teachers of English-learners. Irina V. McGrath, Ph.D., works for the Kentucky education department as an education recovery specialist. She is also a co-director of the Louisville Writing Project (LWP) and the University of Louisville and Indiana University Southeast adjunct who teaches ESL/ENL instruction as well as assessment, literature, and cultural- and linguistic-diversity courses. Michelle Shory, Ed.S., is a district ESL instructional coach in the Jefferson County public schools, Louisville, Ky. She is passionate about literacy and helped establish Dolly Parton's Imagination Library in Louisville.
Teaching students who are newcomers (students in their first year of enrollment in a U.S school) is a privilege-it changes an educator's outlook, practice, and heart forever; however, working with newcomers requires a lot of cognitive, physical, and emotional energy. But we challenge you to find a more rewarding experience in all of education. Where else do you get to see such incredible growth and change? And you will probably keep relationships with these students long after they leave your classroom.
Research
In order to support newcomers in the most effective way, teachers should do their homework on students-research their cultures, history, language, and education systems. You can find resources here and here.

Learning about newcomers will help you connect with your students and their families, give you ideas on how to make your curriculum culturally relevant, and help you address your own assumptions and misconceptions.
Relationships, Self-Advocacy, and Routines
Before starting with the first "real" lesson, begin with relationships, self-advocacy, and routines.

When focusing on relationships, start with names. Teachers should know how to pronounce student names-and students should know how to pronounce each other's names. Also, students need to be fully seen. Educators must take time to learn about their students' interests, families, and topics they love to study. Teachers should also share about themselves-share hobbies, family pictures, etc. Classrooms (especially newcomer classrooms) need to feel safe because we are encouraging students to be vulnerable each day when they are using a new language.

Dr. Stephen Krashen instructs educators to "lower the affective filter" as a way to increase comprehension. Lowering the affective filter includes helping kids feel comfortable by speaking more slowly, using gestures, and including high-interest materials. All of this is most effective when classrooms are warm and comfortable.

Educators will want to begin by teaching independence on day one. Show students how to use technology like Microsoft's Immersive Reader, Google Translate, or Socratic from Google. Demonstrate planning and organization skills (like using a digital calendar or Google Keep). It is also a good idea to make sure that students know how to ask for help from a teacher when they don't know the answer to a question.
Instructional Supports and Considerations
One last addition is to set up strategies to support interaction. WIDA researchers found that ELs spend on average less than 10 minutes per day speaking in class. This is unacceptable from a social-emotional and academic lens-ELs need to engage frequently in classroom conversations. When thinking about structures, consider Kagan structures or QSSSA from Seidlitz.

When facilitating lessons, always remember to include visuals, gestures, and repetition. ESL consultant and teacher Carol Salva's students report these strategies as the most helpful.

It is also important to consider teaching themes. Krashen's research demonstrates the power of "deep reading" on a topic and how it supports ELs in acquiring language. Themes boost engagement and confidence because students are continually building their expertise about a topic. Additional research (highlighted in Natalie Wexler's work) has proven that reading comprehension is largely based on background knowledge. So, whenever teachers build students' knowledge of the world, they are also supporting comprehension.

Finally, when teaching newcomers, educators should not discount the expertise in the room. Be sure to tap into students' "funds of knowledge," a term coined by Dr. Luis Moll that represents cultural resources and knowledge that students bring to the classroom. Always include at least one entry point for newcomers to bring in their cultural and linguistic expertise. One example might be a unit on religions, holidays, or education systems around the globe.

In conclusion, teachers play an important role in ensuring social, emotional, and academic success of newcomer students. The more effort teachers put into getting to know their students, teaching them self-advocacy skills, and building on their funds of knowledge, the greater chance their students will have of reaching their highest potential and succeeding personally and professionally.

ELLs 'Need to Feel Safe'
Luisa Palacio is an ESL and Spanish teacher from Colombia with 19 years of teaching experience. Luisa holds a bachelor's degree in modern languages: English and French, and an M.A. in TESOL from Greensboro College. Currently, she teaches K-12 at Northampton County schools in North Carolina and Spanish with South Carolina Virtual Education:
We always consider content relevancy, the use of visuals, vocalization, facial expression, among others. However, what ELs need at first is to feel safe, comfortable, and confident in their new environment.

The school system works in a completely different way in every country. I believe one of the first things we need to do with newcomers is to show them how school works, classroom routines, how to sign in and out of school, how to move around campus, how to get their meals, how to login on their technological devices, explain schedules, share possible extracurricular activities in which newcomers could participate, etc. Newcomers need modeling, not only for the language but also for the culture. Newcomers need to be shown what to do and how to do it, what to say and how to say it. As teachers, we need to be aware of the cultural shock newcomers go through so that we can help the process to run a bit smoother.

Every newcomer should have a mentor to shadow him/her during the first days of school, someone who can introduce them to their teachers, who makes teachers aware that this EL is in their class and will need some extra attention. In my opinion, cultural awareness should be the first teaching strategy. Newcomers are facing a new culture, and they also need to feel their own culture is valued. Thus, it is important to generate activities that allow students to share their culture, so they make comparisons and connections by sharing about a subject they master and a subject that is relevant.

'Language-Learning Goals'

Sean McWherter, Ed.D., is the director of restart programs for the Guilford County schools in North Carolina. He is the author of A Road Map to PLC Success published by Routledge Eye on Education, 2017, and Unpacking your Learning Targets: Aligning Student Learning to Standards, published by Routledge Eye on Education, 2020:

With the rapidly increasing population of English-language-learners in many schools across the U.S., it is becoming ever more important for regular education teachers and administrators to know how to support these students and their families.

I feel that oftentimes educators mistakenly believe that ELLs have trouble learning or that they learn differently from native English speakers and that their education is best left to the English as a second language or ELL teacher. This could not be further from the truth; the educational barriers ELL students face are accentuated by language and cultural barriers, not an inability to learn.
Utilize Language-Learning Goals
Many educators are aware that the use of learning targets in the classroom is an instructional best practice and that students learn better when teachers utilize clear daily learning goals (Marzano, 2009; Reeves, 2010; Kareva & Echevarria, 2013). For ELL students, it is especially important to include both lesson and language-learning goals.

The lesson objectives should be focused on the grade-level content while the language objective should align to one of the four domains of English-language development (ELD), which are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. A teacher's experience with creating and using language objectives in their instruction is important to ensure that ELLs have equal access to the curriculum (Hudson, Miller, & Butler, 2006; Short, Echevarría, & Richards-Tutor, 2011; Marcos and Himmel 2016). When planning a lesson, everything should intentionally lead students to mastery of the learning targets while providing students with a variety of meaningful activities and high-quality instruction.
Increase Student Engagement and Interactions
To support student engagement, as well as the lesson and language objectives, liberally employ the use of visuals to reinforce both spoken and written words. Capitalize on the use of gestures, often exaggerated, for added emphasis, speak slower and be sure to enunciate your words, repeat important words or phrases, and be sure to use fewer idioms. Many ELL students have not attended schools in their new county and may be unfamiliar with cultural references. Take the time to thoroughly review texts to identify potentially confusing language and concepts so that you can build the background knowledge of your ELL students prior to exposing them to potentially confusing material (Kareva & Echevarria, 2013).

Incorporate high-frequency vocabulary words throughout all content areas and be sure to provide instructions and other important information in multiple formats. Don't just tell the students what you want them to do, write it, provide an example/exemplar, and act it out or model the activity if possible.

Provide multiple opportunities for ELL students to interact with their peers in small groups where they can practice speaking and listening in low-risk settings that will produce language-learning outcomes (Saunders & Goldenberg, 2010).
Build Positive Relationships and Cultural Connections
Building relationships with your students is the foundational component of successful teaching and learning, and there is a multitude of research that supports this idea. According to a review of 46 research studies, students that feel valued and appreciated are more likely to demonstrate both short- and long-term improvements in academic engagement, attendance, grades, and behavior, while also having a reduced dropout rate (Sparks, 2019).

Begin forming relationships with your ELL students by learning about their individual culture, traditions, religion, hobbies, family dynamic, and background. Stay respectful of their personal boundaries and understand that they may need time to settle into their new environment before opening up. (National Clearing House for English Language Acquisition, n.d.). Having a positive relationship with a student's family can also help support their education.

Remember some of the families may only have very little or even no formal schooling experience in this country, so taking the time to show them what school is like and how they can get involved are critical first steps to forming a parent partnership. (Short & Boyson, 2012)

Stations
Ciera Walker is a sixth-year systemwide ELL teacher in east Tennessee:
Newcomers that might have the same level of English do not necessarily grow and learn at the same rate. This is due to many factors, such as previous schooling experience and the background of the student and their family. I use stations as a strategy to meet the needs of all of my newcomers.

What? Stations provide students with an opportunity to work with a partner on specific skills to boost their language learning and language acquisition.

When? We do stations most Thursdays and every Friday.

How? Students eventually work their way up to a goal of 12-15 minutes per station. The teacher starts a timer, and students rotate through the stations with their partner.

Who? I generally group my students by ability in English (homogeneous groups), but occasionally, if they have a great ,I will let them choose their partners (in more heterogeneous groups).

Why? The purpose of stations is to provide students with practice in skills they are learning in the ESL classroom and the general education classroom. Students have opportunities to practice skills during stations while the teacher provides individualized mini-lessons to help with the language-learning process. Stations are practical and provide teachers with opportunities to use best practices in teaching students a new language. It is extremely important to be purposeful, organized, and use a system to make stations go smoothly! It takes a lot of planning to teach students the stations so they can work independently. I take a lot of time to "front-load" the expectations and provide students time to practice. Students generally start stations independently after fall break.

Each year, I change up my stations depending on my students' needs or new ideas I find. Below are some of my favorites that are easy to maintain and enjoyed by the students. I recommend teachers keep stations simple and choose one activity per station, especially in the beginning. As students become more familiar, you can add on to the complexity of each station.

Teacher: Students meet with the teacher and work on individualized needs (letter work, word work, reading stories, fluency, comprehension, etc.). I like to use Reading A-Z or ReadWorks to help structure this station.

Listening: Students work on EPIC books, Unite for Literacy, or listen to books on tape/cd. You can get a headphone splitter from Amazon for pretty cheap if you have limited devices so students can listen together.

Library: Students read a book and complete a simple graphic organizer about what they read.

Computer Station: Choose a safe website for students to play on. I like starfall.com for my primary students and I am hoping to implement typing websites for my older students next year.

Speaking: I use Vocaroo or Flipgrid. For Vocaroo, I usually have picture cards with vocabulary words students might need; students retell the story. For Flipgrid, I usually have a video for students to watch or I ask them a question and they must respond.

Writing: This station is the one that evolves the most throughout the year. Using picture prompts, sentence stems/frames, and word banks is crucial for the writing station.

Word Work Games: This station has many games that work on foundational reading skills. Eventually, students have different boxes/baggies they pull from (depending on their level).

1. Bang: Have different sets of 10-12 words (letters, sight words, vocabulary words, etc.). Label 1-2 cards "Bang." Students pour cards out of baggies into a box. They reach in the box and grab a word, say the meaning or read the word. If they pull "bang," then all their cards must go back in the box.

2. Roll, read, write: Create a 7x6 table. Type in the target words that correspond with a number on a die. Put the sheet in a pocket protector and have students write the word with an Expo marker when they roll the die.

3. Oodlu.org: Create vocabulary sets. Students answer questions and get to play premade video games. Easy to use and create-a class favorite!

Stations are a versatile and practical way to provide students with practice on new skills they are learning and to differentiate instruction for newcomers with varying levels of language acquisition.

Thanks to Michelle, Irina, Luisa, Sean, and Ciera for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.
Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email (The RSS feed for this blog, and for all Ed Week articles, has been changed by the new redesign-new ones won't be available until February). And if you missed any of the highlights from the first nine years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below. I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column.

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Thirteen Instructional Strategies for Supporting ELL Newcomers (Opinion)

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Five educators share effective instructional strategies to use with English-language-learner newcomers, including using images and games.