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English Language Proficiency Standards - these are important to include in the language objectives when lesson planning and for determining which language domains are begin addressed with the lesson.

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Proficiency Level Descriptors - these are important to refer to when monitoring the progress of the English learners. They also serve as reminders of what students can do at each level of proficiency within each domain of language.

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This website provides six different ways to enhance English Language Learner's oral language which align closely with the strategies we have gone over this semester.

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Reflections on Teaching Multilingual Learners

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I came across an interview with the author of the book, Tell Me More, who was discussing the value of simply listening. It occurred to me that much of what was being discussed also applies to teaching. Students, like any individual, want to be heard, understood, listened to. How often do we as teachers (or administrators) quickly move to "fix it" mode without really listening to what a student is trying to convey? In these situations, oral expression is hampered.

Why is that an issue? Because developing oral language skills is a big deal.

Research shows that oral language has a significant impact on students' success throughout their academic careers. In particular, oral language is closely tied to reading achievement. English learners have a knowledge gap in oral language because these students didn't grow up speaking and listening to words in English about the world around them. Specific time in class must be dedicated to developing their oral language skills, especially use of academic language.

Here are six ways to enhance academic oral language for English learners. These ideas are drawn from our book, Developing Academic Language.

1. Create a positive, respectful and supportive classroom environment. English learners are more likely to talk to the teacher and peers, and to participate in academic discussions when they are comfortable doing so. The teacher sets the tone in the classroom and for oral language to be enhanced, the right tone is one of acceptance, encouragement, respect for differences of opinion or perspectives, and welcoming of all attempts to use the new language. Students benefit from teachers' use of relationship-building language such as, "I'm listening, go on..." and "I'd like to hear what else you have to say about ____________."Valuing and validating student contributions goes a long way in creating a positive learning environment and reducing the risk involved when using a new language in front of others.

2. Select interesting topics for discussion. One of the best ways to engage students - or anyone for that matter - is to discuss a topic of interest. Topics need to be appropriate for their age and related to the curriculum so that English learners are exposed to key topics covered at their grade level. Think of ways to tie students' personal experiences and background to the topic so that they make personal connections. Show a picture or video clip to generate discussion and ask, Does this remind you of anything? What do you recognize? How does this relate to our topic? Also, be sure to encourage students to express their own opinions using techniques such as Take a Stand where students move to a corner of the classroom marked with a sign that reflects their view on a given topic: Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree. Small groups at each corner discuss a plan for presenting their ideas to the group, then each group shares their position.

3. Encourage active listening. English learners need instruction in developing strong listening comprehension skills such as learning how to filter out some of the "English noise" they hear by focusing in on specific information and listening with a purpose. One way to develop active listening is through note-taking. Show students that as they listen for the purpose of taking notes, they can pick up teachers' speech cues that reveal important information. Cues that signal key information include change in intonation, emphasizing a word or phrase, and repetition. Also, teach students common phrases teachers say to help them home in on important information such as, "Ok, this is important," "Be sure to remember this," "Make a note of what I'm saying," "Here's something important." Knowing what to listen for encourages active listening.

4. Provide scaffolds for expressing ideas. Sentence starters, language frames, sentence frames and/or scripts have become commonly used scaffolds to support English learners' oral expression. They provide a model of correct English grammar as well as giving a boost to oral participation since some of the words are provided. For example, the frames, In the text ________________ is arguing _______________ , but I think ________________. and, If ________________ then ________________ provide authentic language for English learners to use as they express their own ideas and draw conclusions. Remember to provide scaffolds that match students' English proficiency levels and to remove scaffolds as needed. As I discussed in a previous post, advanced speakers should not be asked to use frames designed for those at the beginning stages of English proficiency. Some English learners may not require much scaffolding at all as their fluency increases.

5. Plan for multiple opportunities to practice using English. To improve oral proficiency, English learners need to engage in lots of meaningful practice activities that link to content and language objectives. But high-quality practice is unlikely to happen unless it is part of lesson planning. On-the-fly "turn and talk" about a topic is less effective than planned activities with small groups or partners discussing content topics using targeted vocabulary and/or specific grammatical structures. There are innumerable resources online and in books where teachers will find fun, interesting, and meaningful activities for developing academic oral language. Make sure that lessons have sufficient time devoted to such instructional activities.

6. Reduce teacher talk. The best way to get someone to talk is to listen. Teachers of English learners need to reign in their instincts to talk - to share more and more information, and to go into "fix it" mode when students have questions. Prompting ("Ok, what else?" "And so....") and pausing (remaining quiet and allowing students to finish their thoughts) are much more effective for encouraging extended oral expression. Consistently using techniques such as prompting and pausing creates a classroom environment that has a balance of teacher talk and student talk, one in which students feel comfortable expressing themselves. English learners are apt to use English more when they are confident that they won't be cut off and when the teacher genuinely wants to hear their ideas.

From: Short, D. & Echevarria, J. (2016). Developing Academic Language Using the SIOP Model. Boston: Pearson.

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6 Ways to Enhance English Learners' Academic Oral Language

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I came across an interview with the author of the book, Tell Me More, who was discussing the value of simply listening. It occurred to me that much of what was being discussed also applies to teach...

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Supporting Oral Language Development for EB/EL Students 

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Supporting Oral Language Development for EB/EL Students 

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This video provides excellent ways to support oral language development for EB/EL students and provides the stages students go through while learning English. These steps are important for future educators to understand so we can adapt our teaching strategies and developing strategies that preserve these students first language.

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CECE Early Childhood Videos at Eastern CT State U.

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Supporting Oral Language Development in Dual Language Learners

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This website provides insightful strategies for enhancing ELL students writing skills. These strategies are intended for educators as they guide students through the writing process and provides worksheet links.

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Model Writing
Seeing how to write before jumping into a writing assignment is beneficial for all students and even more so for multilingual learners. Consider modeling to expose students to specific writing styles, like narrative or persuasive, as well as demonstrate the writing thought process. Write a piece using age-appropriate language, share your thinking aloud, and read the model writing to students. Then display the model writing so students can refer to it later.

Incorporate Dialogue Journals
Make writing practice meaningful and interactive with dialogue journals. Through dialogue journals, students get to have regular written conversations with their teacher or peers. This student-centered approach creates an authentic way for students to build writing fluency and letter writing skills. Plus, it allows ELL students to build relationships with their teachers and classmates. As for teachers, dialogue journals serve as a great way to assess students' progress and provide direct feedback and praise.

Drafting Stage

ELLs come into the classroom at varying language levels, so writing will look different for every student. It's important to differentiate writing assignments for English language learners during the drafting stage.

Have Students Label Pictures
In the early stages of literacy and language development, ELLs will need additional support in building their vocabulary. Picture labeling provides students with visual representations and allows them to gain familiarity with vocabulary words.

Use Journals as Drafting Tools
With journals, students don't need to worry about adhering to strict writing guidelines. They can jot down thoughts in their primary language, use new vocabulary, and explore different types of writing. Therefore, journals are great for drafting. Encourage students to free write in their journals, and later, have them look through entries to select a draft they want to polish.

Provide Writing Prompts
Figuring out what to write about all while learning a new language can be overwhelming. Writing prompts alleviate that struggle by offering ELL students a framework for their writing. With prompts, students can focus their writing efforts on a given topic. Some writing prompts even provide a story starter, an opening sentence to guide students in developing their writing. Find a collection of helpful writing prompts on Shaped.

Use Sentence and Paragraph Frames
ELL students may have a limited vocabulary and knowledge of the English language, preventing them from stringing words together to form a sentence or paragraph. Plus, sentence structure varies from language to language, so ELL students can benefit from strong guidance and scaffolding to construct clear and grammatical English sentences. Sentence and paragraph frames are great tools to scaffold writing during the drafting stage. Sentence frames provide students with a framework to build a sentence using English grammar. Sentence frames can also be used to teach comprehension skills like cause and effect, for example, "If _______, then _______." Paragraph frames provide students with transitional words to piece together a strong paragraph. Display paragraph and sentence frames around the classroom for students to use.

Revising and Editing Stages

Multilingual learners may feel self-conscious when having their writing reviewed. Incorporate technological tools and a collaborative review process to help students feel more at ease.

Implement Peer Review
Peer review is a great way for ELL students to reflect on key writing skills and improve their writing proficiency. During the peer review process, students receive and provide clear, constructive feedback. Both the reviewer and the reviewee benefit from the process, as the reviewee learns how to improve their writing and the reviewer builds awareness of the writing process. For multilingual students, peer review is especially helpful as they practice listening to, reading, and writing English. Model the peer review process with students and give students a guideline on how to provide specific feedback.

Leverage Technology
After a peer review, ELL students may get caught up in misspellings and grammatical mistakes. Consider using assistive technology to ease any possible editing anxiety. Assistive technology, like word prediction and spell-check, helps students come up with words to complete a sentence and flag misspellings or errors. Tools like digital dictionaries allow students to easily look up a word's meaning and pronunciation to build spelling, speaking, and vocabulary skills.

When teaching writing, remember to meet students where they are and create a classroom culture where students feel encouraged to explore writing.

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Set multilingual learners on an accelerated path to writing proficiency with Guide all students in Grades 3-12 through the writing process with Writable. English 3D, our dedicated ELD curriculum.

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Support your ELL students with writing strategies to build confident and capable writers.

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I found this website very helpful in providing strategies for teaching reading development as it gave specific scaffolding techniques. "Scaffold story retells" was a great strategy that I can implement in my future classroom.

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Reading comprehension is a skill every student needs to succeed in school-and it's especially important for the English learners (ELs) in your classroom. While ELs often develop the fundamentals they need to read, issues like an underdeveloped vocabulary base can sometimes cause breakdowns in reading comprehension that can cause bigger academic problems down the line.

So what should teachers do to support reading comprehension in English learners? In today's post, we're sharing four important strategies you can put into action in your classroom. Excerpted and adapted from the book Literacy Foundations for English Learners, edited by Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, these strategies will help you incorporate effective practices that sharpen reading comprehension skills of ELs and help them understand and learn from text.

Teach and model routines

What are the best ways to help ELs make meaning from reading? These three comprehensive routines should be explicitly taught and modeled throughout the reading process:

Preview the text. Taking a tour of the text before reading it is a good way to activate students' background knowledge, identify elements that will be helpful in overall understanding, and engage them in active reading from the onset. Teach students to look at the overall organization of the text, including the structure; notice chapter headings and words or phrases that are in bold or underlined; and think about how photographs, illustrations, and other visuals will relate to the story or content.

Apply context clues and word analysis. Show students how to use context clues when they encounter words, phrases, and concepts or ideas that may be confusing or unclear. Teach them how to deduce the meaning by studying how the word in question is used, looking at the meanings of the words that surround it for clues, and breaking an unknown word apart and looking for word parts that can help clarify the meaning.

Generate questions and answers. Generating questions can help improve students'
knowledge, understanding, and memory of what was read. After students read a passage, help them formulate questions about what they have learned and review the text to answer those questions. Try modeling this by using question stems such as "What was the turning point in _________?," "Who was __________ and what did they do?," "What were some of the reasons for _________?," and "Why do you think _________ happened?"

Integrate metacognitive awareness strategies

Metacognition involves an awareness, understanding, and control of one's learning and thought processes. Proficient readers use one or more metacognitive strategies to comprehend text. Try teaching the following procedures to promote active reading and engagement with text-before, during, and after reading. These procedures can help all students, but they may be especially important for ELs who need extra support to make meaning from text.

Make a prediction before reading. Making predictions before reading ("I think I am going to find out why volcanoes erupt") provides an opportunity for students to gain an understanding of the purpose for reading the text. They can also check and reflect on their predictions while reading and after reading.

Monitor understanding and ask questions during reading. As students read, ask questions to help students to recognize when their comprehension breaks down and identify the knowledge they need to repair their comprehension. You might ask about a word or phrase that some students might not understand (e.g., What kind of toll is the author referring to?). Asking ELs to explain their processes for making meaning while reading and their strategies used to overcome difficulties can also increase opportunities to produce language (e.g., What clues did you use to figure out the meaning of siege? Which fix-up strategy helped you figure out that word?).

Create a main idea statement after reading a passage. To stay engaged in reading and making meaning as they read, students should develop a main idea statement after reading sections of text. This helps teach students to restate in their own words the most important point as a way of making sure they have understood what they read. As a bonus benefit, it can also improve students' memory of what they've just learned.

Scaffold story retells for English learners

Oral retelling of stories is an effective way to promote language learning and boost comprehension and engagement for ELs. Story retelling can be used with both narrative and expository (informational) text.

For narrative text, model the retelling by identifying key story elements-main characters, setting, problem, and resolution. It's a good idea to teach these elements separately and then assist students in combining them. Give students opportunities to work in small groups to identify retell components and practice retelling parts of the story with their peers. If a child is unable to retell the story, or if the retelling lacks sequence and detail, then provide scaffolds by prompting the retelling step by step:

Who was the story about?

When did the story happen?

Where did the story happen?

What was the main character's problem? (if applicable)

How did he or she solve the problem?

What was done first/next?

How was the problem solved?

How did the story end?

Retelling expository text can help students see the relationships between key facts and ideas. When students are learning to identify information to recall from this type of text, you can use the following questions to provide a scaffold for the important elements to be retold:

Who/what is the most important subject in this passage/article?

What is important about that subject?

When does/did this take place?

Where does this take place?

Why is the subject important?

How does/did this occur?

Story retelling is a great strategy because it requires children to focus on the big ideas in a story and gives you insight into how well a child understands what was read. By having your students tell stories in their own words, you can identify children's strengths and monitor specific areas of difficulty for individual students over time.

Teach summarizing skills with graphic organizers

Summarizing involves identifying the most important ideas in a text. It helps students

learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate important details that support them

notice and remember key words, ideas, and phrases of an assigned text

take a large selection of text and reduce it to the main points for more concise understanding

Graphic organizers are an ideal summarizing tool to help support ELs. These visual and spatial displays of information highlight important points and are associated with improving learning and reading comprehension for students of varying academic ability. With the right instruction, graphic organizers can help your students organize information or depict relationships, and they provide the ideal scaffolding for helping students summarize.

Use the tips in today's post to help strengthen comprehension skills for the English learners in your classroom-and for more research-based guidance, check out the book Literacy Foundations for English Learners.

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4 Key Strategies for Teaching Reading Comprehension Skills to English Learners - Brookes Blog

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Reading comprehension is a skill every student needs to succeed in school-and it's especially important for the English learners (ELs) in your classroom. While ELs often develop the fundamentals they need to read, issues like an underdeveloped vocabulary base can sometimes cause breakdowns in reading comprehension that can cause bigger academic problems down the line.

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Strategies for Teaching Academic Language 

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Strategies for Teaching Academic Language 

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This article provides information about understanding Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) and their important role in the development of academic language.

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Strategies for Teaching Academic Language to ELLs | Continental

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It’s important for mainstream teachers to know the basics of academic language and develop strategies for teaching academic language to ELLs.

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I found this article very helpful as it provides a "what to do" section followed by a "how to do it" which I find useful as an educator because I can use this resource in my lesson plan. There are several topics with instructions on the strategies provided.

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In college I enrolled at a university in Spain - all courses were taught in Spanish. My comprehension of my courses went something like this... (translated into English and the accompanying gibberish I heard.)

"So it is obvious from the way qyuekfksno , that the Greco style was qyueuoammo . If you look closely you notice xawoeirje and it reminds you of woieysksdufe ."

The only clue I had to aid my comprehension was a slide of the famous painting. I struggled to make meaning of the language, but I could not comprehend the professor's points. I was able to correctly answer in Spanish when asked a question such as, "What is a characteristic of the Greco style?" I would answer, "It is qyueuoammo ." I knew this because I had " qyueuoammo " written in my notes, but I still had no idea what the word meant.

I believe many ELL students have a similar experience in their classes, and that many of them are able to manipulate the English language to supply a correct answer, but still not understand the content. This does not become apparent until the student fails the unit test. The teacher may think the student wasn't listening or didn't try, when actually the student needed more explicit instruction in the academic language connected to the content. When teachers introduce and reinforce academic language they can see some amazing changes in ELL student learning.

There are three things to keep in mind when teaching academic language.

1. Academic language must be introduced and then reinforced.

2. Academic language can be more than content area vocabulary.

3. It is important to create assessments that measure knowledge in a meaningful way.

Introduce and reinforce academic language

What to do

1. Preview the text or topic and identify vocabulary or sentence structures that might be new for the students.

2. Write these words and phrases on the board and have students write them in their notebooks or on index cards.

3. Use visuals, acting, translation or synonyms to relay the meaning of the word to the students.

4. Reinforce the newly learned language by asking the students to draw it, act it out, or use it in an appropriate sentence. You can also ask for a translation if you speak the student's first language.

How to do it

Here are the steps demonstrated in a science lesson on the life cycle of a frog:

1. Preview the lesson and identify academic language vocabulary such as:
Write the words on the board and/or ask students to write them in their notebooks or on index cards.

2. Teach the academic vocabulary.
Science lends itself easily to visuals and hands on learning, so many words would be easily taught through labeling parts and identifying terms by examining frogs. In addition to teaching the vocabulary by labeling items, make sure students understand vocabulary concepts such as "cycle." A visual such as a bike tire that goes around is useful. The stages of the frog's life cycle can be taped to the wheel while explicitly using the vocabulary first, second, third and fourth to describe the life cycle.

3. Have students demonstrate the vocabulary concepts by using them in explanations, or drawing pictures in their journals.
It is important that students be given the opportunity and guidance to use the academic language to answer discussion questions or complete group work. Listen for the use of vocabulary words and praise students who attempt to use it. Follow up with the class by sharing examples, "I heard some really good discussion in the groups. I heard someone correctly describe a step in the life cycle by saying, 'The eggs get fertilized." Reinforce vocabulary not heard by fishing for "other ways" to say it. For example, "Who can tell me another way to say, 'The tadpole turns into a frog?" Encourage students to look at the academic vocabulary on the board, and say, "A tadpole develops into a frog."

Go beyond vocabulary

What to do

In the example above, there were many vocabulary words. Some of them were directly related to visual clues, but some were more abstract such as "cycle" and "developing." Words such as these may be overlooked by teachers because content lessons tend to focus on the "new vocabulary," that is, the specialized vocabulary related to that particular lesson, while assuming knowledge of what I call "functional" vocabulary. Functional vocabulary is the language needed to use the new words meaningfully. The teacher must model the correct use of content and functional vocabulary. ELL students may not feel comfortable using new language phrases in the classroom and benefit from more support and structured opportunities to begin using and fully comprehending academic language and phrases.

Guide students by asking them to repeat a phrase and complete the sentence. "In the life cycle..." Students fill in the blank, and have an opportunity to use the academic sentence structure verbally. It may also be useful to guide students in the use of appropriate academic discussion phrases. If a student says to another, "That's not right," ask them if they can think of another way to say it (using more academic language - maybe referring the student to the word wall or notebook). The student may then offer, "I don't agree with you." Or, "Could you show me evidence of that?"

Measure knowledge in a meaningful way

What to do

Assessments that let students "show what they know" may take some time and practice to develop and teachers may want to start with just one unit in order to practice this new skill. Many textbook series include unit tests that may have a number of multiple choice and fill in the blank questions that may or may not allow the student to demonstrate his/her understanding of the content. A teacher may have observed a student who was very engaged in the lessons and seemed to understand it, yet didn't do well on the test. This is frustrating to the teacher and the student. A meaningful assessment directly addresses the objectives of the lesson and will also measure the student's use of appropriate academic language. Here are a few suggested ways to do this.

How to do it

1. Students write a response to a question following rubric guidelines telling them what will be evaluated. Students tell the teacher in their own words what they learned in the unit regarding the concepts and the language.
In the science example above the rubric may be as simple as:

1. include all the steps in the life cycle

2. use five of the vocabulary words we studied

3. correctly explain why the life cycle is important in our environment

2. If students' verbal skills are stronger than their literacy skills, a teacher may have the students do a presentation - again using the rubric to evaluate their work. The rubric may include a guideline that each person in the group must speak and use a key vocabulary word.

3. Students can work in small groups and respond to some true and false sentences such as, "A frog lays eggs and then they hatch into baby frogs." The students need to explain why that is not true (using the academic vocabulary they learned). For example, a student might say, "That's not true because first a frog lays eggs, then they are fertilized, and then the cells begin to divide until a tadpole develops." Once again, a rubric would be used and students get credit for correct answers and the use of academic vocabulary.

In summary, explicitly instructing students in the academic language needed to be successful in the lesson will be rewarded with engaged students who are able to interact meaningfully with the content taught. If the lesson content is a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs, then the academic language is the plate and silverware needed to digest it. When teachers increase students' academic language knowledge, they are giving them the tools they need to digest a lifetime of learning and continue to expand the limits of their world.
Webcast: English Language Learners and Academic Language
Featuring Dr. Robin Scarcella, providing an overview to academic language instruction for English language learners, as well as teaching strategies, activity ideas, and recommended resources.
ESL/Bilingual Resource Guide for Mainstream Teachers
For a quick guide to working with ELL students, check out this resource from the Portland Public Schools (OR). You'll find useful, practical information in an accessible format that you'll return to again and again, including an excellent language acquisition chart and a glossary of ELL terms.
Catherine Snow: Word Generation
Catherine Snow's new website provides information and resources for educators who would like to learn more about Word Generation and how it is implemented. Includes links to comprehensive academic word list that students need to master to comprehend academic content.
Benefits of Using Sentence Frames
Sentence frames are one easy way to focus on a language structure, provide scaffolded support for ELLs and explicitly teach English language structures.
Best Evidence Encyclopedia: ELLs
The English-language Learners section of the Best Evidence Encyclopedia summarizes the impact of a few online reading programs for English-language learners and other language minority students in the elementary grades.
Vocabulary Activity: Prediction and Confirmation
An activity for vocabulary prediction and confirmation featured on the Florida Center for Instructional Technology website.
Teaching English Language Vocabulary
Here you will find a variety of activities and lesson plans designed specifically for vocabulary instruction for English language learners.
The Clarifying Routine: Elaborating Vocabulary Instruction
From our sister site, LDOnLine.org, comes this excellent article by Edwin Ellis outlining effective techniques for teaching vocabulary.
Building Academic Vocabulary
This site by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) offers lots of information about how to help students build academic vocabulary. Although designed to promote instructional materials sold by ASCD, the site has information that any teacher could use to enhance vocabulary instruction.

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Increasing Academic Language Knowledge for English Language Learner Success

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In college I enrolled at a university in Spain - all courses were taught in Spanish. My comprehension of my courses went something like this... (translated into English and the accompanying gibberish I heard.) "So it is obvious from the way qyuekfksno , that the Greco style was qyueuoammo .

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This article provides great examples of effective language objectives and also provides notes on the importance of writing good language objectives that ELL students will understand. The examples provide great objectives for different grade levels and focus on ELL students.

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Ellevation: ML Program Management Tools for K-12

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The introduction of new standards for English Language Learners has resulted in an increase in rigor and a focus on academic language. With this shift, language service models that isolate language objectives from content, such as pull-out or ESL classes, are becoming less common as school districts refocus on language instruction that is embedded within high-quality, well-scaffolded content instruction.

When creating content-based language instruction, educators must develop unit and lesson content that allows ELs to access the same rigorous, standards-based, grade-level content. In particular, educators need to develop content-based language objectives, which clarify how students will develop language within content instruction.

Alison Balter, an EL leader from Lawrence Public Schools in Massachusetts, worked with Jordan Meranus to share effective strategies that she uses to develop language objectives and integrate them into lessons and units. Below we have outlined some of these key strategies.

What are language objectives?

Language objectives clarify how language instruction is integrated with content, and specifically identify:

1. The way ELL students will use language objectives to engage with the content of the lesson and accomplish the content objectives

2. The specific components of academic language (vocabulary, language structures, etc.) that students will need to learn to accomplish the language objectives

With advanced planning, language objectives help to identify the scaffolds that teachers must have ready to support differentiated instruction for their ELs.

How do I create language objectives?

When creating language objectives you should begin by clarifying and identifying the following:

Content objective - identify the content objective that you plan to supplement with language objectives. While you may not create a language objective for every content objective, Alison recommends that you identify the "power objectives", or essential objectives, within a broader unit and use those to create language objectives.

Knowledge of ELL Student Levels - build an understanding of students' language proficiency levels so that you know how to adjust the language objectives, differentiate instruction, and apply accommodations for multilingual learners.

Domain - identify the domain (Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing) that you plan to focus on. It often helps to think about what you are asking students to do (e.g., a debate-focused content objective would lend itself to a Speaking language objective).

Next, you will use this key information to craft a language objective composed of the following three components:

1. Language function - the purpose of the language or linguistic processes required in conveying a message, which includes a verb or action that describes what a student should do (e.g., identify, interpret, evaluate, describe)

2. Support - identifies the supports and scaffolds (sensory, graphic, interactive) that the students will need (e.g., vocabulary sheets, visuals, etc.)

3. Link to Content - the link to the content topic

Within this structure you will be able to adjust the language function and supports to match students' different language proficiency levels.

Content Objectives

SWBAT solve word problems involving unit rates

SWBAT justify their decisions based on unit rates in real-life scenarios (e.g., choosing which car to buy based on gas mileage in miles/gallon)

Language Objective -Levels 4-5
Create multiple paragraphs analyzing the effect of figurative language in a poem.

* Support was not provided, as most of the advanced students in this group were working at grade level.

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Crafting Language Objectives for English Language Learners (ELLs)

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The introduction of new standards for English Language Learners has resulted in an increase in rigor and a focus on academic language. With this shift, language service models that isolate language objectives from content, such as pull-out or ESL classes, are becoming less common as school districts refocus on language instruction that is embedded within high-quality, well-scaffolded content instruction.

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This video explains a model that teachers can use to write language objectives. There are two simple structures that use the same three components which are a language function, context, and a language target.

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Creating Language Objectives with English Learner Portal

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This video is important because she provided examples of what ESL students may hear when they are read a word problem. She focuses on the importance of vocabulary words and how it relates to math and word problems.

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This blog post was helpful as it provides a video and explanation of four practices for ELL math instruction. The practices include scaffolding techniques and examples for each one, which I found helpful in understanding the strategies.

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Elevate ELL Math Achievement With These Top Tips and Strategies | Continental Educational Publisher

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This blog will discuss specific ELL math best practices and math instructional strategies that you can use to boost student learning.

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This article focuses on how the language used in science can be hard for ELL students to comprehend and repeat. Two teachers teamed up to create resources to support students as they grow as both scientists and English speakers.

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How science teachers can use ELL strategies to help students have a better grasp of the vocabulary of science.

Middle school science students filter into the classroom, gradually transitioning to speaking English as they finish conversations in their first language, Korean or Chinese. One of a series of slides is up on the board, each cuing an activity to get them talking about the subject in the target language, preparing them for the challenge of the vocabulary-dense content area of science.

The volume of science terms discourages many students early on, especially students who don't often see themselves reflected in the content, particularly girls and students of color. To address the needs of the large language learner population at our school, the two of us-English language learner teacher Kent and science teacher Gina-teamed up to create resources to support students as they grow as both scientists and English speakers.

While these resources were designed with language learners in mind, the activities have proven highly effective in increasing confidence with science vocabulary for native English speakers as well.

Teachers can easily modify each of the resources below to fit different science units or even different content areas and support learners as they transition away from figuring out what to do and instead focus on content, skills, and vocabulary, reducing the amount of time needed for instructions. For example, when students see a vocabulary puzzle in class, they discuss with a partner or small group (in English or their first language) the multiple ways to approach it and then immediately get to work.

Supporting English Language Learners in Science Classes

Interactive student-to-student talk: Using the target language for frequent student vocalizations and student-to-student interactions is a primary goal and the main area we focused on when we developed these resources. Each class starts with an opportunity for students to warm up their science vocabulary, activate schema relevant to the day's lesson, or retrieve previously learned content, all while practicing their academic interpersonal English skills. We have slides and activities to engage students in partner talk using unit vocabulary, and teachers can easily adapt them for a range of content.

Vocabulary puzzles: Vocabulary puzzles tap visual, kinesthetic, and interpersonal modalities and can be differentiated with little difficulty. Teachers can scaffold the puzzles for different linguistic levels by cutting them into fewer larger pieces before tackling all the pieces separately. Students can also lay pieces on top of the completed puzzle, using it as a key. Once students are confident with the vocabulary, they can use the cards in a dominoes-style game where students make connections between different terms to build an interconnecting board.

Student roles in jigsaw discussions: Dividing up content using a jigsaw strategy gives students the chance to dig in more deeply with a smaller amount of information and offers all learners the opportunity to feel more like an expert about specific content material. This also allows for the leveling of source material to give every student an entry point into the topic. Clear student roles in the discussion ensure that every student is contributing and is engaged during the interactive portion of the jigsaw.

These tools also support effective collaborative talk as students are tasked with asking questions, summarizing main ideas, and using a recording tool to offer a window into their conversations. The teacher can easily change the roles to meet the needs of the students, content, or task.

Fishbowl discussions: Once students feel comfortable with the content vocabulary, it's important that they get an opportunity to apply it. Fishbowl discussions consist of a small group of students conversing about a unit-related topic while another group of students observes the discussion. Topics are designed to prompt debate, deep thinking, and connections to student experiences, as well as promote the application of unit content and vocabulary.

Tailoring both the student preparation sheet and the observation sheet gives the teacher the opportunity to guide students toward the right content and discussion norms. For example, after noticing that girls were often excluded from discussions involving groups that had a majority of boys, we added an "invites quieter member to share" section to the observations sheet.

The fishbowl format facilitates high-level discussions in the target language and supports students in developing academic and collaborative discussion skills. In classroom reflections, students often point to fishbowl discussions as the activity that really pushes them and helps them learn.

Students thrive in learning spaces where they can be engaged and successful-where they can feel themselves learning. Integrating activities like those above into a science or other content class gives every student entry points for success and the tools to support them in making progress. We encourage teachers to give these strategies a try, measure how classroom interactions shift, and plan their next steps in supporting all learners in communicating about scientific topics.

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Using ELL Strategies in the Science Classroom

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How science teachers can use ELL strategies to help students have a better grasp of the vocabulary of science.

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Tips for Teaching Science to ELL Students 

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Tips for Teaching Science to ELL Students 

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This blog post focuses on how to make science content accessible to ELL students. The tips provide examples of how to help ELL students learn science and resources like links to download worksheets and activities that correspond to the tips.

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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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These 12 tips for preparing social studies lesson plans are important because they engage students in history lessons and using their personal background knowledge. I like this post because it focuses on allowing students to use their own unique background knowledge of history.

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There are many ways to engage English language learners (ELLs) in Social Studies and History instruction, as well as in related subjects, such as Geography, Civics, and Economics. Many of these strategies can also support students' access of grade-level content while drawing on their own unique background knowledge and perspectives. Here are some ways to get started!

Background Knowledge and Key Concepts

1. Assess students' background knowledge

One of the most important areas to prioritize in Social Studies and History instruction for ELLs is the role of background knowledge. ELLs bring their own valuable experiences to the classroom, and their background knowledge may differ than their peers. Students may also still be learning to show and share that knowledge in English.

You may find the following:

Students have relevant experiences and/or knowledge related to the content you are studying - even if the context is different from their peers. For example, students may have experienced elections in their home countries, and that experience may be different from U.S. elections. These differences provide an important opportunity for class discussion and learning as long as they are handled in a sensitive and respectful ways.

Students have limited background knowledge on the content you are studying, including on topics that might seem well-known to their peers.

Note: For students with interrupted schooling, knowledge on certain academic topcis may be limited; however, these students are likely to have important " funds of knowledge" and strengths, such as resourcefulness and resilience.

First and foremost, it's important to determine what your students know about a topic. How? There are several ways, including:

These steps will give you an idea of the connections your students may be already making, as well as areas that you need to fill in.

How To Build Social Studies Background Knowledge

Teacher Amber Prentice Jimenez explains how she builds her ELLs' background knowledge in a lesson about the 50 states.

2. Identify key concepts necessary for understanding the lesson

When choosing your key concepts, keep in mind the following:

What are the key objectives for this lesson?

What are the key concepts and points they need to learn?

How might you connect this topic to students' experiences?

What references or concepts to history, pop culture, or other topics may need to be explicitly explained?

Are there any tough topics or controversies that might come up in your discussions? If so, prepare for these topics with our in-depth guide, Navigating Tough Topics in the Classroom: Tips for ELL Educators.

Content and language objectives

Another way to focus your instruction is through objectives. Content objectives focus on the material, while language objectives focus on vocabulary or language structures that students should be able to use throughout the lesson (Haynes and Zacarian, 28).

Think about how you are going to:

Introduce these concepts using simple language

Break the concepts down into the most basic elements

Keep the objectives visible to students during the unit (i.e., post them on the board or provide a simple outline to keep in binders)

Translate them if possible into students' languages

Here is an example of content and language objectives together:

4th History-Social Sciences, California

Content Area Standard

Content Objective

Language Objective

Distinguish between the North and South Poles; the equator and the prime meridian; the tropics; and the hemispheres, using coordinates to plot locations.

Students will be able to identify key points on a map or globe.

Students will be able to verbally use key vocabulary to identify specific points on a map or globe.

3. Identify key skills needed to complete the lesson

Think about what students will be asked to do in order to meet their learning objectives. Will they need to read a timeline or a map? Will they need to compare two pieces of text? Will they need to examine a primary source? These skills may need to be taught explicitly in order for students to be successful.

See more ideas in the following:

Language and Literacy

4. Identify key vocabulary and academic vocabulary

Another important element of Social Studies and History instruction is academic language and vocabulary. ELLs must learn the academic language and vocabulary needed to comprehend and produce new content - all while learning the new content and concepts at the same time!

Start by identifying key terms, words, idioms and phrases - TWIPS, according to Dr. Zacarian (19). Choose the vocabulary that your students need to know in order to support their reading development and content-area learning, in addition to key content vocabulary. Remember to prepare student-friendly definitions for TWIPS ahead of time. It may be helpful to look at other Social Studies vocabulary lists as well. (This is also an area where content-area teaches and ELL specialists can work together!)

On the 4th-grade standard above, that might include examples such as the following:

Terms: pole, Equator, meridian, hemisphere, latitude, longitude

Words: map, globe, North, South, East, West

Idioms: on the Equator

Phrases: Degrees North, Degrees South, Degrees East, Degrees West

In addition, look for words that have multiple meanings or homonyms:

Word with multiple meanings: prime, pole, plot, key, degree

Homonyms: pole/poll

Other tips include the following:

Include signal and directional words: Remember that students may also need explicit instruction in signal or directional words ("because" and "explain"), especially since those words that are likely to appear frequently in the content materials or activities.

Don't overlook the basic words: There may be many words used through a lesson that native English-speaking students will understand but that ELLs don't know. Keep an eye out for these words, no matter how basic, and make a list of words that your students have questions about so that you can refer back to it when teaching the lesson in the future.

Use visuals and realia when possible: Having a reference for new words is particularly helpful for ELLs, whether through visuals or (real objects).

Keep words visible and accessible to students: Post words on a word wall, or try using a "portable word wall" chart that students can put in their binder. The chart might include categories such as new words, old words, people, everyday words, words to review, etc. (Haynes and Zacarian, 59-60).

Remember to include lots of student practice: For students to really know a word, they must use it - or they will lose it. Use new words in class discussions or outside of class in other contexts if appropriate, such as on field trips. Give the students as many opportunities to use and master the new vocabulary as possible, both in writing and speaking activities. You may find this six-step process for teaching academic vocabulary from Dr. Robert Marzano helpful.

5. Draw upon students' home languages

Students' home languages are a valuable resource that you can tap into, even if you don't speak those languages. Using students' home language can give them an opportunity to identify content they already know or master new concepts before transferring those ideas and learning how to express them in English. Ideas include the following:

Use bilingual glossaries, such as these content-focused glossaries from New York University.

Draw on cognates, words that are related in two languages. They have a similar pronunciation, spelling, and meaning. Many academic English and Spanish words are cognates, such as geography/geographía.

Plan group work in which students can use their language with peers to discuss main ideas or vocabulary words, brainstorm ideas, or write summaries.

Look for related content materials in the students' native language from publishers like Scholastic or National Geographic/Cengage.

Collaborate with a bilingual paraprofessional and identify areas where bilingual language support will be most helpful.

6. Prepare to preview the text

It can be helpful to preview the text with students before diving in. Here are some strategies:

Chapter Walk: In a "chapter walk", students predict what the chapter will be about based on pictures and highlighted features of the textbook. An activity like this may take some time at first, but if you use it with regularity, however, it will become easier and quicker, and students will be able to do this on their own at the beginning of a new chapter.

Navigating Textbooks: In addition, at the beginning of the school year, teach your students how to navigate a textbook effectively so that students can pick out and use textbook tools throughout the year.

You may also consider pre-teaching vocabulary or content in mini lessons or small group work before introducing the lesson to the whole class.

Student Engagement

7. Prepare multimedia, visuals, and related readings

These resources can be used to build background knowledge and provide context for ELLs, especially when students are learning new concepts and words. Ideas include:

Using visuals, such as photos from books, magazines, or the Internet to supplement textbooks.

Showing brief, focused video clips of history or social studies programs.

Listening to a short podcast or radio clip of an interview or speech.

Discussing additional readings such as related articles, poems, letters, and graphic novels.

8. Plan plenty of opportunities for students to interact with the content

Give students lots of opportunities to engage with and review the material in different ways:

Graphic organizers: Use graphic organizersto review key concepts and vocabulary words.

Flash cards: Have students make their own flash cards with pictures, definitions, key facts, etc.

Working with the text: Teach students to underline, highlight, and make notes. You may also find that sticky notes, Wikki Stix, and highlighting tape are a big hit with students (68). According to Haynes, some school districts order extra textbooks for their ELL classes so that teachers can keep a highlighted copy on hand as a student reference.

Use acting: Have the students write skits about the material they are learning, or create an activity in which students provide a physical representation of a particular event or vocabulary word.

Samantha describes her approach for checking understanding and offering some differentiated assignments in a third-grade Social Studies lesson about different types of economic resources: natural, capital, and human.

9. Plan to include group work throughout the unit

Peer learning activities such as Reciprocal Teaching and Think-Pair-Share can be powerful tools for engaging ELLs with content learning.

In peer work, use modeling and clear instructions to ensure students understand:

How the activity works

Their role in group work

The objective of the activity

Any key vocabulary or phrases they should be using.

Here are some other tips on group work for ELLs from Haynes and Zacarian:

Assign students group roles that match their language ability (37).

Promote students to new roles as their language skills improve (42).

Make sure that mainstream students understand that they will be working in diverse groups, and that everyone's contributions are important (41).

Keep an eye on the balance of student participation; if some students are speaking more than others, ask them to think of some ways to even participation out (42).

Ask students to reflect on their group work after they have finished an activity. Haynes and Zacarian include a chart in their book with some guiding statements for student reflection (48).

10. Use inquiry- and project-based learning

Look for ways to make learning hands-on through project-based learning (PBL) and inquiry-driven assignments. These avenues can give ELLs different kinds of opportunities to explore a topic that interests them in different modalities and formats.

Assignments and Assessments

11. Be creative and flexible with writing assignments

Writing can be an important way for students to show what they've learned:

Be creative and flexible: When choosing writing activities for students, be creative and open to different ways for students to express their new knowledge. I have seen students successfully convey what they learned by writing letters, poems, news articles and mosaics with vocabulary key points. Writing an essay may be more difficult for ELLs, and although they will need to learn to write an essay, they should be allowed to demonstrate their learning through a variety of writing activities.

Look for writing exercises that relate to the topic at hand: This may include a biography or autobiography, a letter from the point of view of a historical figure, or a short news article about a famous event.

Provide models: Give ELLs explicit structures and sentence frames to follow. Frames may vary in complexity and specificity, but they will help students to model correct structures and usage from the beginning.

12. Plan to adapt homework and assessment as needed

While it's important to have high expectations of ELLs, it is also important to have realistic expectations of the amount of work they can do. Haynes and Zacarian note, "The teacher's goal should be to making learning accessible and meaningful for every student without lowering expectations or sacrificing rigor" (104-105).

They continue in Chapter 7 of their book to provide a number of helpful rubrics and step-by-step procedures for evaluating your homework and assessment activities with ELLs in mind. And Haynes also suggests that teachers "adjust homework assignment to your ELLs' English language proficiency (and) modify assessment so that your ELLs have an opportunity to show what they have learned."

As you look for ways to help your students learn this new content, remember that you aren't just teaching them required social studies standards - you are helping your students adjust to a new life and country. That preparation has a potentially significant ripple effect because your students may be helping their own parents navigate this new country as well, and they may need to prepare for a U.S. Citizenship exam one day in the future.

Through social studies lessons, you also can prepare your students to be engaged and well-informed participants in our society and democracy, an opportunity they might not have had in their own country due to their religion, gender, or ethnicity. When you think about it that way, teaching ELLs to master new social studies content is so much more than adapting a lesson plan - it's a chance to prepare a new generation of young people to lead us into the future.

In addition, I recommend taking a look at the following resources:

Note: Lesson Planning to Ensure Optimal Engagement of ELLs (Chapter 2 of Teaching English Language Learners Across the Content Areas) provides a number of helpful resources, including a checklist for modifying lesson plans for ELLs. In addition, Appendix Two of the book (not available online) provides a lesson modification worksheet.

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Preparing an Engaging Social Studies Lesson for ELLs: 12 Tips for Educators

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There are many ways to engage English language learners (ELLs) in Social Studies and History instruction, as well as in related subjects, such as Geography, Civics, and Economics. Many of these strategies can also support students' access of grade-level content while drawing on their own unique background knowledge and perspectives.

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This is an example of a history worksheet/activity that is accessible for ELL students. The worksheet uses simple vocabulary and uses visuals (pictures) for the fill in the blank instruction.

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Engaging Multilingual and Multicultural Students in the Classroom

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Engaging Multilingual and Multicultural Students in the Classroom

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This article primarily focuses on identifying several ways to better support learners across linguistic and cultural differences through the ways we design and enact classroom assessments.

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Linden Global Learning

By Dr Erin Furtak

In recent years, schools have increasingly moved to student-centered classroom environments. In these settings, students and their ideas and questions drive learning and teaching. Students have the chance to create ways of showing what they know that align with these ways of teaching; portfolios, performances, and other ways of doing things that are aligned with/more authentic to students' experiences in their lives/future work.

We also know that the ways that we assess what students know - both while their learning is still in progress, and at the end of instructional units - doesn't always align with these student-centered ways of knowing. Modern approaches to assessment are based on efforts to sort, rank, and measure students in ways that provided access to further opportunities, or excluded students from these opportunities . These outmoded ways of doing assessment can constrain the curriculum in ways that limit students' access to learning & opportunities. In addition, we know from research that language and culture influence how learners take assessments (Arbuthnot, 2020; Solano-Flores, 2016). We also know that the traditional 'canon' of knowledge taught in schools comes from White, Western ways of knowing. This makes it more important than ever that we take the time to rethink how we design and use subject assessments in schools with kids - particularly in multilingual and multicultural settings.

As a visiting scholar with Linden Global Learning and Support during March 2022, I visited many teachers, school leaders, parents and students working and learning at International Schools. They shared their experiences, which align with many research-based findings, to identify several ways to better support learners across linguistic and cultural differences through the ways we design and enact classroom assessments.

Five ways to support learners in classroom assessment

1. Make it safe

Perhaps the most important place to start is to help students know they are safe to share their ideas. A complication of classroom assessment is that teachers have the dual role of both supporting and evaluating students' learning. In order to help students learn, teachers need to let students know that it is safe to talk with them and let them know where they need support. Students might need more encouragement to ask for help or will need support to bridge different cultural or linguistic differences. In turn, teachers can also let students know that their ideas, their experiences, and their questions all have a place in the classroom. Building on a foundation of trust - which means opening up classroom space for student ideas, rather than shutting students down - can help students feel comfortable to take risks and ask questions.

2. Make it relevant

We all know that when we are planning lessons for students, it's important to make connections with students' ideas and experiences. The same is also true for assessment - rather than switching into unfamiliar contexts, we want to build on what students know and invite them to apply their learning to questions, scenarios, and problems that are relevant to their lives. Mandy Watson, science teacher and Vice Principal of Teaching and Learning at Berlin Metropolitan School, invites students to study human demographics in a community they connect with, and then places students in pairs to share their presentations. This creates a low-stakes learning environment where a student from Costa Rica can connect with a student from Sweden, and Ms. Watson drops in to find out what students learned. This can help to motivate the students to share what they know, and to make connections with other learners in class.

3. Make it accessible

International schools serve a wide spectrum of students from various linguistic backgrounds, but are not designed/intended to assess students in all these languages. As students develop competency in English, we need to be aware that assessing them in this language will require design features of those assessments so that all students can show what they know. Fortunately, we know a lot about how assessments can be designed to be more accessible by bi/multilingual learners (Fine & Furtak, 2020). You can find a sample of a modified middle school science assessment with annotations here .

Allow students to use all their linguistic resources, not just English. This means that they might occasionally mix a word from their home or other language into a sentence with English words; this is a natural way of communicating at the hybrid space between languages, and doesn't limit students as much. You can also invite students to share relevant vocabulary words in their own languages, so that they can draw on (and celebrate) their expertise in their own language to inform what they're learning about at home.

Avoid complicated sentence structure/words in assessment questions and instructions. Over complicated sentences and vocabulary can hold students back from sharing everything they know. If there's a simpler way to ask a question, use it!

Using graphics to support the text. When possible, use graphical representations, pictures, and other visuals to support the text. Students can use these together with the words they know to interpret what's being asked.

Provide support not just around vocabulary, but also the 'action' words in assessment questions. While students might be able to figure out the meaning of science vocabulary, the other words in the instructions - like compare, describe, deduce - might be less familiar. You can pre-teach these words or, like Ms. Watson does, use brackets after the word to describe what the word means in simpler terms. Students who already know the word will skip over the bracketed text, but it will provide crucial support to others who need it.

4. Use multiple modalities

While our default method of assessment is often to ask students to write down their responses, there are many ways to capture all they know and are able to do. As the ways we think about learning shift to be more inclusive of students' varying knowledge and experiences, the kinds of assessments we use in schools should also reflect ways of learning and doing that mirror the most important ideas and competencies we hope students will learn. We can create multiple kinds of spaces where students can show what they know; this means they should be able not just to write their responses but to draw, diagram, and otherwise represent their thinking. Teachers I spoke with use whiteboards, tables, posters - all sorts of ways for students to capture these ideas. These representations can serve as a way for students to show teachers their ideas, and then talk about them.

5. Build bridges, not gates

Christine Orkisz Lang, A former elementary international school teacher and principal, encourages us to think about where we "meet in the middle" between the summative assessment that students experience in schools, and what we do in our own classrooms at the start of and throughout the learning process to support improved understanding.

At the end of the day, we want to provide all learners with opportunities to build on their current ideas and to grow in new directions in school. In order to do this, we need to help students make many connections between those ideas and the goals for their learning. This means we seek to use assessment in classrooms in ways that build bridges, not gates that can close out learning opportunities for some students.

What can school leaders do?

While these shifts may seem small, they can make huge differences in students' ability to learn through classroom assessment. School leaders can create spaces for teachers to come together and talk about how to make these changes in small, grade-level or content-specific groups. In this way, ongoing conversations about diversity and inclusion at international schools can extend to assessment as well.

We might think about assessments as something that is curriculum-based or administered by an external authority, but teachers actually have a lot to do with how students access learning - and particularly how they experience assessment - in their classrooms. Our own histories and identities influence the way we see and hear students. We need to be aware of how our own instructional decisions and responses to students in assessments can open up their opportunities to learn. As teachers, we ask students questions and respond to them in ways intended to support their learning; we must be aware of the filters of our own ideas and experiences, and how those intersect with the ideas and identities of the learners in our classes.

In regular meetings - think weekly or monthly - teachers can talk about learning goals, their own identities as teachers conducting assessment, and their students' interests and what assets they bring to the classroom. Then teachers can select and adapt assessments together that better encapsulate these changes, and come together to look at student responses to determine next steps for instruction.

About the author:

Erin Marie Furtak is Professor of STEM Education at the University of Colorado Boulder . A former high school science teacher, she studies the design and practice of classroom assessments; her recent research has sought to determine ways to design assessments that better support multilingual students in sharing what they know, as well as in supporting teachers in listening to and supporting students through formative assessment. Her partnership with Linden Global Learning and Support is supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation .

References

Arbuthnot, K. (2020). Reimagining Assessments in the Postpandemic Era: Creating a Blueprint for the Future. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 39(3), 97-99. https://doi.org/10.1111/emip.12376

Fine, C. G. M. C., & Furtak, E. M. (2020). A framework for science classroom assessment task design for emergent bilingual learners. Science Education, 104(3), 393-420. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21565

Solano-Flores, G. (2016). Assessing English language learners: Theory and practice. Routledge.

By Dr Erin Furtak

In recent years, schools have increasingly moved to student-centered classroom environments. In these settings, students and their ideas and questions drive learning and teaching. Students have the chance to create ways of showing what they know that align with these ways of teaching; portfolios, performances, and other ways of doing things that are aligned with/more authentic to students' experiences in their lives/future work.

We also know that the ways that we assess what students know - both while their learning is still in progress, and at the end of instructional units - doesn't always align with these student-centered ways of knowing. Modern approaches to assessment are based on efforts to sort, rank, and measure students in ways that provided access to further opportunities, or excluded students from these opportunities . These outmoded ways of doing assessment can constrain the curriculum in ways that limit students' access to learning & opportunities. In addition, we know from research that language and culture influence how learners take assessments (Arbuthnot, 2020; Solano-Flores, 2016). We also know that the traditional 'canon' of knowledge taught in schools comes from White, Western ways of knowing. This makes it more important than ever that we take the time to rethink how we design and use subject assessments in schools with kids - particularly in multilingual and multicultural settings.

As a visiting scholar with Linden Global Learning and Support during March 2022, I visited many teachers, school leaders, parents and students working and learning at International Schools. They shared their experiences, which align with many research-based findings, to identify several ways to better support learners across linguistic and cultural differences through the ways we design and enact classroom assessments.

Five ways to support learners in classroom assessment

1. Make it safe

Perhaps the most important place to start is to help students know they are safe to share their ideas. A complication of classroom assessment is that teachers have the dual role of both supporting and evaluating students' learning. In order to help students learn, teachers need to let students know that it is safe to talk with them and let them know where they need support. Students might need more encouragement to ask for help or will need support to bridge different cultural or linguistic differences. In turn, teachers can also let students know that their ideas, their experiences, and their questions all have a place in the classroom. Building on a foundation of trust - which means opening up classroom space for student ideas, rather than shutting students down - can help students feel comfortable to take risks and ask questions.

2. Make it relevant

We all know that when we are planning lessons for students, it's important to make connections with students' ideas and experiences. The same is also true for assessment - rather than switching into unfamiliar contexts, we want to build on what students know and invite them to apply their learning to questions, scenarios, and problems that are relevant to their lives. Mandy Watson, science teacher and Vice Principal of Teaching and Learning at Berlin Metropolitan School, invites students to study human demographics in a community they connect with, and then places students in pairs to share their presentations. This creates a low-stakes learning environment where a student from Costa Rica can connect with a student from Sweden, and Ms. Watson drops in to find out what students learned. This can help to motivate the students to share what they know, and to make connections with other learners in class.

3. Make it accessible

International schools serve a wide spectrum of students from various linguistic backgrounds, but are not designed/intended to assess students in all these languages. As students develop competency in English, we need to be aware that assessing them in this language will require design features of those assessments so that all students can show what they know. Fortunately, we know a lot about how assessments can be designed to be more accessible by bi/multilingual learners (Fine & Furtak, 2020). You can find a sample of a modified middle school science assessment with annotations here .

Allow students to use all their linguistic resources, not just English. This means that they might occasionally mix a word from their home or other language into a sentence with English words; this is a natural way of communicating at the hybrid space between languages, and doesn't limit students as much. You can also invite students to share relevant vocabulary words in their own languages, so that they can draw on (and celebrate) their expertise in their own language to inform what they're learning about at home.

Avoid complicated sentence structure/words in assessment questions and instructions. Over complicated sentences and vocabulary can hold students back from sharing everything they know. If there's a simpler way to ask a question, use it!

Using graphics to support the text. When possible, use graphical representations, pictures, and other visuals to support the text. Students can use these together with the words they know to interpret what's being asked.

Provide support not just around vocabulary, but also the 'action' words in assessment questions. While students might be able to figure out the meaning of science vocabulary, the other words in the instructions - like compare, describe, deduce - might be less familiar. You can pre-teach these words or, like Ms. Watson does, use brackets after the word to describe what the word means in simpler terms. Students who already know the word will skip over the bracketed text, but it will provide crucial support to others who need it.

4. Use multiple modalities

While our default method of assessment is often to ask students to write down their responses, there are many ways to capture all they know and are able to do. As the ways we think about learning shift to be more inclusive of students' varying knowledge and experiences, the kinds of assessments we use in schools should also reflect ways of learning and doing that mirror the most important ideas and competencies we hope students will learn. We can create multiple kinds of spaces where students can show what they know; this means they should be able not just to write their responses but to draw, diagram, and otherwise represent their thinking. Teachers I spoke with use whiteboards, tables, posters - all sorts of ways for students to capture these ideas. These representations can serve as a way for students to show teachers their ideas, and then talk about them.

5. Build bridges, not gates

Christine Orkisz Lang, A former elementary international school teacher and principal, encourages us to think about where we "meet in the middle" between the summative assessment that students experience in schools, and what we do in our own classrooms at the start of and throughout the learning process to support improved understanding.

At the end of the day, we want to provide all learners with opportunities to build on their current ideas and to grow in new directions in school. In order to do this, we need to help students make many connections between those ideas and the goals for their learning. This means we seek to use assessment in classrooms in ways that build bridges, not gates that can close out learning opportunities for some students.

What can school leaders do?

While these shifts may seem small, they can make huge differences in students' ability to learn through classroom assessment. School leaders can create spaces for teachers to come together and talk about how to make these changes in small, grade-level or content-specific groups. In this way, ongoing conversations about diversity and inclusion at international schools can extend to assessment as well.

We might think about assessments as something that is curriculum-based or administered by an external authority, but teachers actually have a lot to do with how students access learning - and particularly how they experience assessment - in their classrooms. Our own histories and identities influence the way we see and hear students. We need to be aware of how our own instructional decisions and responses to students in assessments can open up their opportunities to learn. As teachers, we ask students questions and respond to them in ways intended to support their learning; we must be aware of the filters of our own ideas and experiences, and how those intersect with the ideas and identities of the learners in our classes.

In regular meetings - think weekly or monthly - teachers can talk about learning goals, their own identities as teachers conducting assessment, and their students' interests and what assets they bring to the classroom. Then teachers can select and adapt assessments together that better encapsulate these changes, and come together to look at student responses to determine next steps for instruction.

About the author:

Erin Marie Furtak is Professor of STEM Education at the University of Colorado Boulder . A former high school science teacher, she studies the design and practice of classroom assessments; her recent research has sought to determine ways to design assessments that better support multilingual students in sharing what they know, as well as in supporting teachers in listening to and supporting students through formative assessment. Her partnership with Linden Global Learning and Support is supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation .

References

Arbuthnot, K. (2020). Reimagining Assessments in the Postpandemic Era: Creating a Blueprint for the Future. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 39(3), 97-99. https://doi.org/10.1111/emip.12376

Fine, C. G. M. C., & Furtak, E. M. (2020). A framework for science classroom assessment task design for emergent bilingual learners. Science Education, 104(3), 393-420. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21565

Solano-Flores, G. (2016). Assessing English language learners: Theory and practice. Routledge.

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Five ways teachers can engage multilingual & multicultural learners in classroom assessment

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As a visiting scholar with Linden Global Learning and Support during March 2022, Dr Erin Furtak visited many teachers, school leaders, parents and students working and learning at International Schools. They shared their experiences, which align with many research-based findings, to identify several ways to better support learners across linguistic and cultural differences through the ways we design and enact classroom assessments.

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This article provides seven strategies that embrace a culturally responsive classroom environment that celebrates diversity and fosters a sense of belonging for all learners.

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Embrace a culturally responsive classroom environment that celebrates diversity and fosters a sense of belonging for all learners. Scaffold language instruction by providing visual aids, graphic organizers, and opportunities for authentic language practice in context. Engage multilingual families as partners in their child's education through regular communication, translated resources, and community events that showcase their cultural heritage. Explicitly teach academic language and vocabulary across content areas, using strategies like word walls, sentence frames, and peer discussions to support comprehension and usage.

Cultivate a Welcoming Classroom Environment

Diverse group of students smiling and talking in a classroom

Celebrate Cultural Backgrounds

Celebrating the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of multilingual learners is essential for creating an inclusive classroom environment. By acknowledging and valuing the diverse experiences and knowledge these students bring, educators foster a sense of belonging and empower learners to engage more fully in their education. Incorporating elements of students' cultures into lessons, such as literature, art, and traditions, not only validates their identities but also enriches the learning experience for all. Additionally, providing opportunities for multilingual learners to share their language skills and cultural insights promotes cross-cultural understanding and respect among peers. By celebrating the unique backgrounds of multilingual learners, educators create a supportive and inclusive community that nurtures academic success and personal growth.

Foster a Safe Space for Language Use

Encouraging multilingual learners to use their native languages in the classroom creates a safe, inclusive environment that values diversity. Incorporate students' home languages into lessons and activities, such as multilingual word walls, bilingual books, and translation exercises. Establish a "language buddy" system where students with the same native language can support each other. Model respect and appreciation for all languages spoken in the classroom, and invite students to share their linguistic and cultural knowledge with peers. By fostering a positive attitude towards multilingualism, educators empower students to leverage their language skills as valuable assets in their learning journey.

Teacher using visual aids to explain a concept to students

Provide Language Scaffolding and Support

Visual Aids and Graphic Organizers

Visual aids and graphic organizers are powerful tools for supporting language comprehension in multilingual learners. By presenting information in a visual format, educators can help students make connections between their native language and the target language. Visuals such as pictures, diagrams, and charts can clarify complex concepts and vocabulary, making content more accessible. Graphic organizers like Venn diagrams, concept maps, and timelines can help students organize their thoughts, identify relationships between ideas, and break down language barriers. When using visuals and graphic organizers, it's important to ensure they are culturally relevant, age-appropriate, and clearly labeled. Incorporating these tools consistently across lessons can provide a scaffold for language learning, enabling multilingual students to engage more deeply with content and express their understanding in creative ways. By combining visuals with other language support strategies, educators can create a rich, inclusive learning environment that empowers all students to succeed.

Differentiated Instruction Strategies

To effectively support multilingual learners, educators must employ differentiation strategies that cater to diverse language needs. One key approach is to provide multiple ways for students to engage with content, such as visual aids, hands-on activities, and translated materials. Teachers should also scaffold language by using simple, clear vocabulary and gradually increasing complexity as students' proficiency grows. Incorporating students' home languages and cultures into lessons can foster a sense of belonging and validate their identities. Additionally, offering choices in assessment methods, such as oral presentations or written projects, allows multilingual learners to demonstrate their knowledge in ways that suit their strengths. By consistently implementing these strategies and creating a supportive, inclusive classroom environment, educators can empower multilingual learners to thrive academically and socially.

Collaborate with Families and Communities

Parents and teachers meeting to discuss student progress

Engage Parents as Language Partners

Partnering with parents is essential for multilingual learners' success. Encourage parents to continue using their native language at home, as a strong foundation in the first language supports second language acquisition. Share resources like bilingual books, educational apps, and community language programs that families can enjoy together. Invite parents to volunteer in the classroom, showcasing their cultural expertise and language skills. Regularly communicate with families about their child's progress, using translation services when needed. Host family workshops on strategies for fostering language development at home, such as storytelling, songs, and games. By collaborating with parents as valued partners, educators create a supportive network that nurtures multilingual learners' linguistic and academic growth.

Connect with Community Resources

To better support multilingual learners, educators should actively seek out and connect with community resources. Reach out to local organizations that work with immigrant and refugee populations, as they may offer valuable insights, translation services, or cultural liaisons. Collaborate with public libraries, which often provide language learning materials, classes, and events that celebrate diversity. Invite community members who speak your students' home languages to share their experiences and serve as role models. Partner with nearby colleges or universities that have language departments or teacher training programs. By leveraging these community assets, educators can create a more inclusive and culturally responsive learning environment for their multilingual students.

Promote Academic Language Development

Teach Word Analysis Skills

Teaching word analysis skills, such as morphology, can greatly support multilingual learners' academic language growth. Morphology involves understanding how words are formed using prefixes, suffixes, and root words. By explicitly teaching these word parts and their meanings, educators equip students with tools to decode unfamiliar vocabulary encountered in academic texts. For example, knowing that the prefix "bio-" means "life" can help students figure out the meaning of words like "biology" or "biodiversity." Providing opportunities for students to practice identifying and using morphemes in context reinforces their understanding and builds confidence in tackling complex language. Additionally, highlighting cognates (words that are similar in two languages) can help multilingual learners make connections between their primary language and English, enhancing comprehension. By dedicating time to word analysis instruction and incorporating it across content areas, educators create a supportive environment that fosters academic language development for all learners.

Incorporate Language Objectives

When designing lessons, thoughtfully incorporate language objectives that support multilingual learners' English development alongside content objectives. Consider the key vocabulary, sentence structures, and language functions necessary for students to engage with the lesson content and demonstrate their understanding. For example, if the content objective is for students to compare and contrast two historical figures, the language objective could be for students to use comparative language structures like "both," "similar to," "different from," and "while" in their writing or discussion. Provide sentence frames and model the use of these language structures to scaffold learning. Consistently integrating language objectives creates an inclusive classroom environment that values and supports language development in tandem with content mastery. By making the language of learning explicit, educators empower multilingual students to confidently participate and succeed academically.

Conclusion

Supporting multilingual learners is a complex but rewarding task that requires dedication, empathy, and a commitment to ongoing learning. By creating an inclusive classroom environment, scaffolding language effectively, engaging families as partners, and explicitly teaching academic language, educators can empower their multilingual students to thrive academically and socially.

Remember, every multilingual learner brings unique strengths, experiences, and perspectives to the classroom. Recognizing and valuing these assets is essential to building strong relationships and fostering a sense of belonging. As you implement these strategies, remain flexible and responsive to your students' individual needs.

Your role as an educator is crucial in shaping the trajectories of multilingual learners. By providing the right support and opportunities, you can help them develop the language skills, content knowledge, and confidence they need to succeed in school and beyond. Embrace the challenge, celebrate the diversity in your classroom, and watch your students flourish.

Take action today by choosing one or two strategies to focus on and gradually incorporate others over time. Collaborate with colleagues, seek out professional development opportunities, and advocate for policies and resources that benefit multilingual learners. Together, we can create equitable and inclusive learning environments where every student has the chance to reach their full potential.

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Empowering Multilingual Learners: 7 Strategies to Help Them Thrive - Teach Find

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Embrace a culturally responsive classroom environment that celebrates diversity and fosters a sense of belonging for all learners. Scaffold language instruction by providing visual aids, graphic organizers, and opportunities for authentic language practice in context. Engage multilingual families as partners in their child's education through regular communication, translated resources, and community events that showcase their cultural heritage.

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I thought this poster was important because it focuses on how when we advocate we help to provide equity and access to multilingual learners and their families.

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This blog post provides great examples, tips, and resources on ways to advocate for Multilingual students. It also provides ways that teachers can educate themselves and others in advocating for these students.

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How to be an advocate for your English Learners.

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This article is important because it defines what a summative assessment is and how to chose what skills should be assessed.

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Explore the different types of assessments to monitor ELL students’ growth and progress and learn how to best use these assessments in your classroom.

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This article explains why summative assessments are important for ESL students and how to record the assessments.

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In most educational contexts, summative assessment - to evaluate student learning by comparing it against course objectives at the end of a period of study - is firmly entrenched.

In elementary and high schools, very few argue with the concept that grading students with summative assessment is important and necessary. Academic accomplishment is the primary method through which society determines a student's future potential.

This continues in tertiary education, where you need to achieve passing grades in a course in order to get your certificate, diploma or degree to be considered for employment.

But English language schools often don't have the same expectations around summative assessment.

One key reason why is because they have non-standardised curriculums, course objectives and testing. Unlike the educational institutions mentioned above, each school can do things their own way - they deliver 'non-accredited courses.'

This has led to the development of a school of thought amongst some English Language Teaching professionals who work in English language schools that summative assessment isn't that important when it comes to ESL students.

'If a course isn't accredited, why go to the trouble of giving tests and exams?' is the argument given. 'It's just a lot of unnecessary work for the teacher and unnecessary stress for the students.'

However, I believe this view to be severely flawed. There are several compelling reasons why summative assessment is important for ESL students.

Reasons Why Summative Assessment is Important

1. Students need to know where they stand

It's a good thing when students receive feedback through summative assessment on their achievement and rate of progress.

Feedback empowers them - after seeing where they currently are when it comes to learning English, they are able to make an informed decision (or their parents can, in the case of children) about how they want to respond.

2. Teaching Life Skills

An ESL course that includes summative assessment doesn't just teach English. It also teaches important life skills. When students know they will be graded, they are more likely to try harder in the classroom, thereby developing the following skills:

Decision making: choosing an answer or how to explain an opinion.

Problem solving: how to improve in a particular area of study

Time management: finding time to complete homework and studying outside the classroom.

Working as a team: in pair or small group exercises and activities.

3. Better job prospects

Even if a potential employer knows that a promising job candidate has completed an ESL course that isn't accredited, they are still likely to be interested in seeing a certificate or transcript that shows the candidate's current level of English if one's available.

How to Record Summative Assessment

It's important for a teacher to provide a clear and comprehensive record of a student's summative assessment when they complete their studies. This should be done in the form of a transcript. It can be added to a certificate or given as a stand-alone document.

Below, I've added a transcript template that includes all of the important elements. Student test scores (or an average of scores) are recorded on the transcript, along with a participation grade, attendance percentage and comments from the teacher.

The level descriptors on the second page of the transcript are linked to Common European Framework of Reference Global Scale Common Reference Levels ( Council of Europe English Language Portfolio, 2011).

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Importance of Summative Assessment For ESL Students | Templates

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Summative assessment is important in any course. BUT...this view is not universally held in the ESL community, but this view is severely flawed.

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By implementing formative assessments for ELLs, educators can develop a “language lens” that uncovers and showcases the growth of this culturally and linguistically diverse population. This is important because ELLs are a diverse group of students with unique assets and varying factors affecting academic performance.

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By Sarah Ottow
The Latin root word for "assessment" is assidere which means to sit beside. In my work as an English Language Learner (ELL) specialist, I advocate for educators to intentionally sit beside their students to more deeply understand and support their learning trajectory at the classroom level. That is to say, I strongly advocate for an intentional formative assessment approach for ELLs.
Schools can go beyond traditional summative and interim measures to ensure a more balanced assessment approach that brings to light the nuanced and complex process of academic language development. By implementing formative assessments for ELLs, educators can develop a "language lens" that uncovers and showcases the growth of this culturally and linguistically diverse population.

Where do we start?

First, we can examine what comprises our current assessment systems in place. We have large-scale, "big data" summative assessments that give us "big data" once a year on student proficiency. We also have interim assessments that measure growth against benchmarks periodically throughout the year, often with the audience largely being district and school-level stakeholders.
These summative and interim assessments provide "snapshots" of ELL performance and are not always reliable or valid on the ELL population. Therefore, we need to ask ourselves if we have systemic, systematic formative measures in place that provide feedback on teaching and learning specifically for our ELLs? Do we have a "photo album" approach of ELL development? If not, we can add specific formative practices into our assessment system that celebrate student growth and provide next steps for instruction at the classroom level.

What are some effective formative assessment practices for ELLs?

What's important to remember is that formative assessment is flexible and intended to focus on feedback for both the teacher and the student. As an initial step, I highly recommend that teachers keep portfolios of student writing samples to show individual student growth over time. Through portfolios like journals and learning logs, student work can be the centerpiece in conferences and school data meetings.
Next, I suggest that teachers work with students to co-create appropriate goals for using more sophisticated academic language. It's critical to promote student ownership of the assessment process through goal setting, self-assessment as well as peer assessment opportunities.

How can collaboration strengthen formative assessment?

A critical step in strengthening ELL formative assessments is to create and sustain collaborative time to analyze student work. Evidence-based conversations between educators about what students are producing can directly lead to ideas for effective student feedback and instruction. Professional learning communities are also opportunities for collaboration with ELL specialists to deepen content teachers' understanding of language and literacy. One final tip is to consider building data walls of multiple measures of ELL data quarterly to facilitate data-driven coaching cycles and team planning. In these ways, we can offer a "photo album" approach to show progress over time, celebrating students' journey of academic language development.

We know that ELLs are a diverse group of students with unique assets and varying factors affecting academic performance. Many educators need support in reaching ELLs and teaching academic language yet they often don't know where to start. By implementing more formative assessments for ELLs with the appropriate language supports, teachers can better understand their students and become stronger teachers of academic language. After all, all teachers are indeed language teachers!

Formative Assessment Ideas

Journals or learning logs to show growth over time in a portfolio

Academic conversations to explain new learning

Cornell notes or graphic organizers to structure note-taking

Student-teacher conference or small group discussions to recount learning

Exit slips to show "I think..", "I wonder...", "I still want to know..."

Fill-in-the-blank or "cloze" activity using sentence frames

Reciprocal teaching

Recording student language through technology

Drawing or role playing

Gallery walk of student work where students give each other feedback on stickies

Word or concept sorts based on unit themes or student-created categories

One word or one phrase response using whiteboards

Self-checklist or peer-checklist

Label or sequence visuals like pictures, photos or realia (real life objects)

Student-generated questions for peers

This blog is part of the Supporting English Language Learners Series with support from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For more, stay tuned for the culminating podcast, infographic and publication.
For more, see:
Sarah Ottow is the founder, director and lead coach at Confianza: Educating for ELL Equity. Follow Confianza on Twitter: @ELL_Confianza Stay in-the-know with all things EdTech and innovations in learning by signing up to receive the weekly Smart Update. This post includes mentions of a Getting Smart partner. For a full list of partners, affiliate organizations and all other disclosures please see our Partner page.

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Supporting English Language Learners with Formative Assessments

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By Sarah Ottow - By implementing formative assessments for ELLs, educators can develop a "language lens" that uncovers and showcases their growth.

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I found this video to be a very helpful resource at it explains step-by-step on how to use the application "Peardeck" for a formative assessment.

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Formative Assessments for ELLs Using Pear Deck

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This presentation discusses TABS and provides scenarios to help identify the basic or core attributes associated with the giftedness construct.

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TABS: Observable Gifted Behaviors "How many times do I have to tell you...you're not supposed to read ahead." Motivation GOAL! What's Next! https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/72d27ecb-7c26-471c-8bdf-1115ebb1b774 < Gifted student Thank you! Scenario 4 Jason typically sleeps in Social

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This document is a classroom observation checklist used to evaluate students. It includes scales to rate students on traits such as motivation, interests, communication skills, problem-solving ability, imagination, humor, and insight.

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This video provides a personal experience of how a teacher discovered her ELL student had special needs. Amanda Talton shares her experience collaborating with an ESOL teacher to support an English learner with special needs.

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Supporting an English learner with special needs

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This article discusses how teachers can improve upon identifying special education needs in English language learners.

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Identifying Special Education Needs in English Language Learners | Continental Educational Publisher

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In this blog, we’ll discuss how teachers can improve upon identifying special education needs in English language learners.

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Different tools to use in future classroom that foster language development

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Technology options to support ELL students in the classroom

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English-language learners (ELLs) come into our classrooms with a wide variety of specific and unique needs for language acquisition. It's hard to talk about them all as one group -- ELLs represent a diverse range of students in every sense. It's needless to say: Working with ELLs is often challenging and also highly rewarding.

Because there are so many apps and edtech tools available today, you might expect to find lots of them made specifically for English language development (ELD), bilingual, or dual-immersion classrooms. Unfortunately, this isn't the case: Tools designed specifically for English-language learners are few and far between (though there are definitely some out there).

There are, nevertheless, a lot of great edtech tools and strategies you can use with your ELLs, even if the tools themselves aren't ELL-specific. Some might even be tools you've already heard of or used -- with an ELL-specific use case that's been hiding in plain sight.

So, what's the best way to find and use great digital tools with your ELLs? A lot will depend on your students' specific needs, but here are a few things to think about when finding the best tools for your classroom.

1. Look for ELL-friendly supports in the tools you're already using.

Lots of online tools have built-in features to support differentiated instruction for a variety of learners. Newsela offers texts at five variable Lexile levels, many in both English and Spanish. ThinkCERCA offers leveled texts with scaffolding for students reading at different levels, including audio versions of texts. Though ELA-focused tools are most likely to have the best English-learning supports, plenty of other tools support ELLs' learning in other subject areas. Khan Academy is one popular example; the site offers a translated version of its curriculum in 12 languages. As you search, keep in mind that these tools are usually aimed at a more general student audience, so they may be better suited to intermediate or advanced ELLs, and beginning-level ELLs may need more robust support.

2. Build basic online resources and productivity tools into daily routines.

From basic translation to productivity tools for consumers, a lot of everyday apps and websites can be great for supporting ELL-centered learning activities. A note-taking tool with recording features like Microsoft OneNote offers opportunities for speaking and listening practice. Simple English Wikipedia is just like it sounds: an adapted version of the standard Wikipedia site but for ELLs, younger students, or anyone else who might struggle with reading. A translation tool is an obvious choice, and Google Translate is generally thought to be the most accessible free option around.

3. Get creative and repurpose a digital-storytelling tool.

Storytelling is an excellent, interactive learning activity for ELLs and bilingual learners of all ages and language abilities. Even though these apps tend to be aimed at younger kids (and not specifically at ELLs), they still offer opportunities for kids to express themselves while they build new language skills. Don't be afraid to age these tools up; they're great even for older ELLs. And for beginning-level English-language learners, creative projects tend to offer opportunities for low-stakes (yet still high-concept) communication-based activities. Also, keep in mind that lots of other digital-creation mediums can offer fun language-building practice, from video production to podcasting and digital design. Find something that suits your students' ages, language abilities, and interests.

4. Find tools that specifically address your ELLs' needs.

As mentioned earlier, tools designed only for ELLs are somewhat scarce, but there are definitely some options. These ELL-centric tools run the gamut. BrainPOP ELL offers a comprehensive online curriculum aimed at improving kids' language skills from beginning to advanced levels. Read&Write is a helpful text-to-speech app for students with a variety of literacy needs, including English-language learners. On the flip side, a platform like Ellevation is designed for teachers and uses robust data to track and monitor students' progress and language growth. As time goes on, we're bound to see more edtech solutions specifically for ELLs. It will be interesting to see what the future holds in this space.

5. Supplement instruction with an online language-learning tool.

Language-learning tools for travelers and consumers are everywhere and easy to find. Although these tools should never replace quality classroom instruction, for some students they could be a helpful option for extra practice or out-of-class enrichment. Because they're often aimed at a general -- mostly adult -- audience, these won't all be the best choice for kids' learning. Nevertheless, in certain situations, some language-learning apps could be appropriate depending on your students' needs. If you do go this route, look for free options that offer adaptive features that challenge students as their language skills grow. If recommending out-of-class use, keep your students' devices and level of network access in mind.

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How to Use Technology to Support ELLs in Your Classroom | Common Sense Education

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Quality edtech for ELLs isn't easy to find, but great options do exist.