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These core beliefs highlight the critical role of our content teachers. They are vitally important to our instructional mission. With all of this said, training is essential to ensure that our teachers and administrators have the knowledge and skills to serve our EL students appropriately.

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Practices for English Learners-Interview with Aida Walqui

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Practices for English Learners-Interview with Aida Walqui

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Practices for English Learners - Season 2 Episode 23

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Consider this interaction between a teacher and his students, most of them English language learners, in a ninth-grade English language arts class:

Teacher: Who wrote The Pearl, Carmen?

Carmen: Steinbeck wrote The Pearl.

Teacher: Very good. And Rosa, who is the main character in this novella?

Rosa: I guess the main character is Kino, although his wife, Juana, is also important.

Teacher: That's right. And why do we say The Pearl is a novella? Jim?

Now contrast it with the interaction other ninth-graders had in their English language arts/English language development class:

Teacher: As we begin to explore this short story, "The Necklace," written by a French author from the 19th century, Guy de Maupassant, I am inviting you to read the first four paragraphs with your partner using types of "Question-Answer Relationships."* We have practiced this process several times, so unless we require some explanation-[students signal they do not]-then, please get started. As you engage in reading and discussing, I would like you to focus on the character Mathilde and think about what kind of person she is. We will then focus on the problem she faces.

Rodrigo (after reading the first paragraph of "The Necklace" aloud to his partner, Martha): OK, I am going to ask you a "think and search" question. Did Mathilde grow up in a rich family?

Martha: I am not sure. I think no, because the paragraph says she could not marry a "rich and distinguished man" and had to marry a little clerk. Is that an employee? [Rodrigo nods his assent.] I guess it is because she is not rich. But she was very pretty and charming, right?

So now I am going to read the second paragraph. [She proceeds to read aloud to Rodrigo, then pauses and thinks.] I am confused, so I guess I will ask you a think and search question. The text says "with women there is neither caste nor rank, for beauty, grace and charm take the place of family and birth." Is the author saying that for women, money does not matter? Why did she marry a clerk then?

Rodrigo: Yeah, I agree. I don't fully understand. You said she was pretty but not rich. Now the second paragraph says that's in place of family and birth, so does that mean richness? Does it not matter if women are pretty? Does it matter or doesn't it matter? [Both students decide to raise these questions later during the whole-class discussion. Then Rodrigo proceeds to read the third paragraph to Martha.]

We have all observed classes resembling the first example, where the teacher already knows the answers to the questions being asked, as do most students. The exchange is just an exercise in reiterating the known using complete sentences. In contrast, students in the second example must actively consider the possibilities related to the text, by asking and responding to questions that reveal their understanding.

How do we ensure that all English language learners have opportunities to productively use oral language in academic settings? And how do we ensure that teachers leverage the power of classroom interactions to simultaneously foster language development, content knowledge, and analytical practices? In this article, we offer answers to these questions-and clarify common misconceptions-by presenting guidelines supported by both research and classroom practice.

A Framework for Oral Language

If English language learners (ELLs) are going to productively engage in classroom discourse and express their thinking related to content learning goals, teachers must create a trusting classroom culture in which students feel that whatever level of language they can produce, their contributions will be valued by their teacher and peers and will never be subject to ridicule, sanctions, or negative comparisons. ² Establishing classroom norms such as close listening to understand the ideas ELLs are conveying and showing respect to each other during their interactions (learning, of course, from the models their teachers provide) is essential for successful oral language use. Students need to know that interrupting their peers as they are formulating ideas and finishing their sentences for them are not desirable classroom norms.

As teachers plan to engage students in oral interactions, the framework shown in Figure 1 below can help guide their support for their students' work and language development. The framework comprises six interconnected levels.
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First, teachers need to ensure that students clearly understand the purpose of the interaction they are being asked to undertake. For example, are they supposed to read a text and elaborate their thinking, highlighting what they understand and what they don't? Are they engaged in describing a scene to somebody who has not seen it? Are they being asked to make a prediction after observing phenomena they will later investigate?

Second, teachers need to make sure students have ideas upon which they will elaborate. For example, have they noticed the most important aspects of the scene (the background, main character(s) presented, what they are doing, other relevant details) on which they will center their description?

Third, teachers need to help students organize their thoughts and ensure their language follows specific patterns. For example, descriptions of a scene from a text cannot begin with sentences such as, "He kicks it, it breaks." Students need to first indicate the setting of the scene, then introduce the characters, describe them, and explain what they are doing. This sequence is essential to help participants engaged in a conversation paint pictures in their minds. Organization is marked by phrases that can be provided to students as formulaic expressions (which we discuss later in this article) to use: ³ "The picture we have shows a..." "We can see a..." "Our scene takes place in a..." "Based on my observation..." "The two historical contexts are..."

Fourth, teachers need to consider the types of sentences students produce and judiciously highlight how they may be combined and expanded to produce more complex language. Increasing complexity can be accomplished with the use of connectors and conjunctions, such as "besides," "furthermore," "additionally," "however," etc.

Fifth, teachers must pay attention to the words students use. Is one word repeated several times in an interaction? If so, teachers can take the opportunity to introduce a synonym. Do students incorrectly or imprecisely use a term? Teachers can take a moment to clarify usage and meaning.

Finally, when students are ready to present their work to others, teachers can focus on the pronunciation of carefully selected elements-only those that interrupt understanding.
Traditionally, many educators have been taught to focus on correcting student utterances by zeroing in on form and not on meaning. As a result, our framework may initially feel counterintuitive, but the more educators rely on it, the more it will assist them in supporting students' language growth.

Productive Talk

As a general pattern, we educators often talk too much, no doubt influenced by our "apprenticeship of observation" that began when we were students ourselves. ⁴ However, given the centrality of talk in learning, this pattern needs to change. By some estimates, ELLs spend less than 2 percent of their school day in oral interaction. ⁵ Teachers must find ways to provide students learning opportunities that engage them in productive talk and then listen carefully to the language they use in order to support their continued growth.

By productive talk, we mean speech that has the following characteristics:

Has depth: the specific idea being discussed is central to the theme of the lesson, is presented in interconnected ways, and engages students' analytical thinking.

Is sustained: one student's statement is followed by another student's response, which extends, refutes, or questions what was first said.

Is student controlled: students control what they say, not the teacher. But teachers set up parameters for the interactions, sometimes framing questions that start the conversation. These questions are intended to communicate new related ideas, propose counter ideas or examples, and in general enhance the theme at work.⁶

Now consider these characteristics in an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) class, which comprises students with varied levels of English competence. ⁷ "Language" is the theme of the students' exploration, and this was the third class on the topic. Table 1 below shows the deliberate moves of the teacher, Mr. DeFazio, during the lesson and the students' interactions. The text in the table indicates the multiple instances of productive talk that he promotes with his directions and actions.
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Let us look more closely at a specific interaction that occurred in the lesson after a student, Lavinia, reads the beginning of a letter she wrote about animal communication, and another student, Julio, reacts to one of her statements that animals do not have language.

Julio: Animal communication is not a language? It is a language-that's what I think-because they are communicating with each other.

Lavinia: But they don't speak.

Class: [Many students agree with Julio, saying "Yes, they do," or nodding.]

Julio: You said a language can have words, sounds, gestures, and everything.

Class: [Many students are in agreement with Julio's ideas once again.]

Lavinia: But they don't have words. They don't say "mama."

Julio: They don't need to. They have other characteristics. In animal language, some of the characteristics that you said are present-sound, pitch, gestures-so it is a language.

Mr. DeFazio: Julio is arguing very strongly that animal communication is language. Lavinia is saying that it's not. What do you think would be a way to help them resolve that argument in their writing?

Class: [The discussion continues and a resolution emerges. Then Julio reads a section of his letter.]

Mr. DeFazio: A lot is going to depend on how you define language, OK? You can define it in such a way as to exclude what animals do; you can define it in a very broad way, as a system of communication that includes everything. You are going to find linguists and zoologists who disagree, and if you are interested, I can give you some readings that were in the journal Science last year, people arguing back and forth.

Julio (reading his letter): First of all, I think that language is a way to inform others around you, your feelings, or just a simple thing that you want to let people know what is the deal. And it can be expressed by saying it, looking at a picture, or hearing it, you know what I'm saying? I don't know if you have heard about the kangaroo rat that stamps its feet to communicate with other rats. It's really funny 'cause we humans have more characteristics to communicate to each other, but we still have problems to understand other people. Characteristics like sound, grammar, pictures, and body language are some of them, while the rat only uses the foot. [Julio stamps the ground.]

Mr. DeFazio: Excellent! [The class applauds.] I never even heard about the kangaroo rat. Nice job, nice job. [Mr. DeFazio shakes Julio's hand.]

Applying the framework illustrated in Figure 1 to this interaction, we notice that students are clearly aware that the purpose of this exercise is to compare diverse positions on communication and to debate whether animals have language or not, providing evidence for their positions. They have ideas, and they choose which ones to debate based on a diversity of opinions. Mr. DeFazio's opportunity to correct student work, suggest changes, ask for elaboration, and so forth comes in the letters he is asking his students to construct. This written product is intimately tied to oral production. Oral activity feeds into writing, and writing produces oral activity.

In terms of productive talk, in Mr. DeFazio's class, students' analytic thinking is engaged, their interaction is sustained, and they control what they say. Mr. DeFazio has chosen a theme for the lesson that appeals to the students, and he has deliberately planned their active engagement throughout. As a result, the interaction engages students in deep thinking as they compare views on language.

Now that we have seen the characteristics of quality interactions for ELLs in practice, in the next section, we provide guidelines for promoting quality interactions during content lessons.

Six Guidelines for Promoting Quality Interactions

1. Design lessons that involve ELLs' participation in subject-specific and substantive oral practice to accomplish clearly defined lesson goals: Planning a lesson always begins with establishing the destination: Where do teachers need to lead students? Teachers should ask: Are my goals closely related to content standards? What is the knowledge that will be constructed? Which analytic practice will be promoted? What is the language (beyond isolated words or sentences) that will need to be developed? Unless teachers themselves are clear about the goals of a lesson, they will not be able to plan the tasks and activities that support students' language and conceptual development.

2. Construct tasks that appropriately scaffold student participation and growth: Tasks need to be deliberately constructed to engage students in working beyond their current competence. Such tasks should promote worthwhile interactions for students to acquire new conceptual understandings and analytical skills and language. They should also have appropriate scaffolds, which entail teachers closely observing students to ascertain whether the support is working, whether it is still needed, or whether it needs to be modified or replaced.

3. Make sure the task is designed to meet its purposes and the materials used are appropriate to support students working at the edge of their competence successfully: Learning is most effective when tasks are designed to match students' current competencies and also challenge them to move forward, with support.

4. Make sure that activities or tasks follow and precede others logically to build coherent lessons: Leading students to increasingly more complex demands is essential if teachers want their lessons to flow smoothly and to incrementally build ELLs' understanding.

5. Integrate reading and writing into oral development activities: Oral interaction while reading texts not only allows ELLs to understand the text more deeply but also helps them develop awareness of what they understand as they read and what they can do to solve problems in reading.

6. Be selective in addressing errors and intentional in providing feedback: When ELLs use English to develop their understanding of content and their use of analytical practices, often their language will be neither accurate nor fully formed, although the intent of their communication will be apparent. Imagine, for a moment, the impact on ELLs' motivation and self-esteem if teacher responses to inaccuracies constituted a constant flow of error correction. Instead, consider formative feedback to students as invitations to understand how they are progressing in language development and to provide a resource for how they can advance. When feedback is given to students about language while they are learning discipline-specific content, the feedback should focus on language so that students can make sense of the academic content, rather than on correcting errors of language production. As such, feedback can increase the students' awareness and help them troubleshoot their own performance and eventually correct their own language.⁸

There is no hard and fast rule about how much feedback students should receive or how often it should be provided; this is a decision teachers will need to make for themselves, given their knowledge of their students, their language and content goals, and the students' current language use. However, because of the powerful impact that feedback can have on learning, ⁹ we advise teachers to make providing feedback a regular and routine part of their classroom practice.

Common Misconceptions

Designing and facilitating meaningful classroom talk is essential for ELLs-indeed for all students-to develop more extended and sophisticated language use while simultaneously learning subject matter. Yet in too many U.S. classrooms, we find ELLs sitting silently, watching their teachers do all the work, and waiting for opportunities to fully engage cognitively and linguistically.

By way of concluding thoughts, we outline five pitfalls to avoid in thinking about language learning, and we provide suggestions for how teachers can engage students in sustained, high-quality classroom talk.

Misconception 1: Sentence frames that provide students with a way of expressing their ideas about specific situations are helpful to them.

A sentence frame is basically a fill-in-the-blank type of activity that invites only one correct answer. Sometimes it can be open and provide starters for students (also called sentence starters for this reason) to be filled in any way. However, these starters may not provide students with phrases they can use time and time again in academic situations. ¹⁰ For example: "The main character in The Pearl is a modest and loving man, furthermore..." "His wife, Juana, loves Kino and Coyotito, their baby, and because of that..."

In addition to using sentence frames, we suggest teachers use formulaic expressions, which are phrases that help start or link ideas and can be used in many situations. Initially, students learn them as unanalyzed chunks, almost as if they were one word. Later on, as students learn more English, they begin to realize the formulaic expressions are formed by several words. Formulaic expressions are extremely useful in students' development of English and in making their interaction with peers possible and more effective. Examples of formulaic expressions are: "I agree with you, and I can add that..." "May I suggest a couple of other ideas? One example I can offer..."

Misconception 2: Correct mistakes students make as they talk or they will "fossilize."

Historically, correctness has been regarded as paramount in second language learners' use of English. More recently, however, researchers' attention has shifted to the larger components of communication, as discussed before: purpose, ideas, organization, types of sentences, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Fossilization, a concept popular in the 1980s, refers to the inability of second language learners to learn the correct forms of language if they continually misuse them. Our perspective, consistent with that of multiple applied linguists, is that language keeps evolving as a result of continuous practice. It may fossilize if it is no longer used productively or receptively. However, in their schooling, students will be invited to engage in uses of language continuously, and thus, they will have ample opportunities to correct themselves or be corrected by others.

Misconception 3: Rather than correcting students' ungrammatical oral language, it is better to provide them with recasts, which model correct English in response to students' mistakes.

It is common for teachers to believe that rather than correcting a student's mistakes-and putting him or her on the spot-it is better to repeat what a student has said, this time changing the student's utterance into grammatical English. They think that recasting saves a student's face and that it is a less authoritarian approach.

Research, however, shows that these implicit corrections may not be productive. ¹¹ Students do not take teachers' recasts as corrections, but rather as reiterations of the idea and as acceptance of students' comments as being right. When the time is appropriate to focus on selected language forms to study and correct, the correction and expansion activity needs to be made explicit.

Misconception 4: Sustained, focused interactions are possible starting in fourth or fifth grade, but lower elementary students are not mature enough to carry them out because they get too impatient with the task and with each other.

Recently, during an open house at an elementary school in Portland, Oregon, one of us (Aída) had the opportunity to visit three classes. The first one was a kindergarten class. The teacher, Mr. Andanen, was preparing students to read and discuss Julius, the Baby of the World, a book by Kevin Henkes, an author the students were already familiar with because they had enjoyed reading three of his other books in class.

To introduce the book, Mr. Andanen set up nine stations around the room and invited students to walk through them. At each station, a picture illustrating a scene from the book was prominently displayed. Students were asked to rotate around the stations every three minutes. At each station, students needed to stop, look at the picture, and explain what they noticed. The teacher had asked students to use a "talking stick" so that the turns to speak were democratically divided within the group at each station. Peers had to listen attentively to the speaker and agree with, disagree with, or expand on what the student said. Formulaic expressions such as "In this picture, I notice..." and "I noticed that, too, and I want to add..." were familiar to the group. At one station, Aída heard the following exchange:

Student 1: I notice a woman holding a big baby. Her mouth is open. I think she is crying.

Student 2: I also noticed she had her mouth open, but I don't think she is crying. I think she is singing.

Student 3: I also noticed the woman with the big baby, and I want to add that he is very heavy. Perhaps that is why she is screaming.

The exchange shows that Mr. Andanen has created an environment that enables young children to notice and use language in purposeful ways. Although the students were only in kindergarten, they clearly articulated their ideas and listened to others. They showed they will soon be ready to start exploring the book more deeply so that they can eventually write an opinion piece based on evidence from the text about which Henkes book was their favorite.

Misconception 5: All students in a class need to master the same levels of oral development as a result of participating in lessons.

Because not all students in a class will be at the same starting point, a robust activity provides multiple entry points for all students to engage as they learn. The important idea is that they should all be gaining-not that all of them will arrive at the same point, in exactly the same way, developing at exactly the same level. This would only be possible if what is learned is limited, and if the learning demands recall. This is not necessarily what we want in education. Rather, we want to produce individuals who are thoughtful, engaged, and conscious of their own development.

English language learners bring valuable assets and immense potential to school. The role of educators is to realize that potential in deep and accelerated ways. Each classroom teacher must ensure the path to that development is paved with meaningful interactions to help students develop language skills, gain conceptual understanding, and learn academic content. Our students deserve no less.
Aída Walqui is the director of the teacher professional development program at WestEd. Previously, she taught in the Division of Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Margaret Heritage is a senior advisor at WestEd and was previously an assistant director at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at the University of California, Los Angeles.
*Taffy Raphael's Question-Answer Relationships framework ¹ is intended to call students' attention to the kinds of questions that may be asked about a text. In this class, students work in pairs, announcing first the type of question he or she will ask to increase the other student's awareness of the types of meaningful connections the question seeks. ( back to the article)

Endnotes

1. Taffy E. Raphael, "Teaching Question Answer Relationships, Revisited," The Reading Teacher 39 (1986): 516-522.

2. Alison L. Bailey and Margaret Heritage, Progressing Students' Language Day by Day (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2018).

3. See Rod Ellis, Instructed Second Language Acquisition: A Literature Review (Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education, 2005).

4. Dan C. Lortie, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

5. Diane August, referenced in Ivannia Soto-Hinman, "Increasing Academic Oral Language Development: Using English Language Learner Shadowing in Classrooms," Multicultural Education 18, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 21-23.

6. Aída Walqui and Leo van Lier, Scaffolding the Academic Success of Adolescent English Language Learners: A Pedagogy of Promise (San Francisco: WestEd, 2010).

7. Anthony DeFazio and Aída Walqui, Where Do You Want to Go Next? (San Francisco: WestEd, 2001), DVD.

8. David J. Nicol and Debra Macfarlane‐Dick, "Formative Assessment and Self‐Regulated Learning: A Model and Seven Principles of Good Feedback Practice," Studies in Higher Education 31 (2006): 199-218.

9. See, for example, John Hattie and Helen Timperley, "The Power of Feedback," Review of Educational Research 77 (2007): 81-112.

10. For more on sentence frames, see Ellis, Instructed Second Language Acquisition.

11. Ahlem Ammar and Nina Spada, "One Size Fits All? Recasts, Prompts, and L2 Learning," Studies in Second Language Acquisition 28 (2006): 543-574; Ellis, Instructed Second Language Acquisition; and Roy Lyster, "Differential Effects of Prompts and Recasts in Form-Focused Instruction," Studies in Second Language Acquisition 26 (2004): 399-432.

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Consider this interaction between a teacher and his students, most of them English language learners, in a ninth-grade English language arts class: Teacher: Who wrote The Pearl, Carmen? Carmen: Steinbeck wrote The Pearl. Teacher: Very good. And Rosa, who is the main character in this novella?

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QTEL-Quality Teaching for English Learners

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QTEL-Quality Teaching for English Learners

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Publications and Articles from QTEL

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Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL)

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Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL) - Publications

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QTEL is a vision for what is possible for English Learners in order to compete in the 21st century.

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SupportEd Free Resources to help educators and administrators better serve English learners

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SupportEd Free Resources to help educators and administrators better serve English learners

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SupportEd has developed some free tools to help educators and administrators better serve English learners.

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Distance Learning for ELs-Diane Staehr Fenner

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Distance Learning for ELs-Diane Staehr Fenner

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In an ongoing effort to provide educators with relevant, timely resources to support distance learning for ELs, we are happy to share our Padlet titled Practical Strategies and Resources to Teach ELs Online. We originally created this Padlet to support our March 2020 webinar Practical Strategies & Resources to Teach K-12 ELs Online. The materials we've compiled span ten different categories, including communicating with EL families, distance learning content resources for ELs, and equity and social-emotional resources.

Please scroll from left to right to view all columns within this Padlet. Scroll vertically to explore resources within each column. You may click on individual items to have access to them to print and/or save them. Please check back as we update this compilation regularly.

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In an ongoing effort to provide educators with relevant, timely resources to support distance learning for ELs, we are happy to share our Padlet titled Practical Strategies and Resources to Teach ELs Online. We originally created this Padlet to support our March 2020 webinar Practical Strategies & Resources to Teach K-12 ELs Online .

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Getting Started With Culturally Responsive Teaching

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Getting Started With Culturally Responsive Teaching

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Getting Started With Culturally Responsive Teaching

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Understanding students’ lives can help teachers foster a sense of belonging and ensure that all students feel respected and challenged.

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Language Literacy and Learning

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School districts have sought to create systemic plans for multilingual learners that move beyond compliance to insure coherence across their programs, policies and practices for their students and families. Understanding Language partners with districts to co-create, implement and refine their plans based on student evidence.

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Articles by Zaretta Hammond from the Teaching Tolerance website

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Articles by Zaretta Hammond from the Teaching Tolerance website

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Zaretta Hammond is a teacher educator and the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students . She has a passion for books and teaching reading. She blogs at www.ready4rigor.com.

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21 Anti-Racism videos to help you learn how to talk to kids about racism

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21 Anti-Racism videos to help you learn how to talk to kids about racism

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The United States has a racism problem. The idea of tackling such complicated and hurtful topics in our homes and classrooms is daunting, but we can't look away. We MUST face it. Fortunately, we live in a time when technology provides resources, such as the anti-racism videos below, designed to support us as we navigate these difficult and painful conversations.

For Parents and Educators

It's crucial that you feel confident and prepared to lead important discussions about what it means to be not only "not racist," but resolutely anti-racist. Here are some resources to help you get ready.

Be Boldly Anti-Racist

Elementary school educator, Naomi O'Brien, asks: "How did I become boldly anti-racist? By following my mom's example. How can you be bold and set an example for your kids and students?"

How to Talk to Kids About Race

In a new episode of Home School, The Atlantic's animated series about parenting, author Jeremy Tisby offers advice on how to have a conversation with children about race, from experiential learning to watching classic animated films.

How I Teach Kids About Racism (Kindergarten and 1st Grade)

This video is about elementary school teachers sharing the lessons they teach each year to introduce the topic of racism to their kindergarten and first grade students.

How Parents Can Help Kids Understand the Protests and Fight Racism

Dr. Janet Taylor shares advice with parents who may be struggling to talk about racism and the unrest that has erupted after the death of George Floyd.

For Kids and Students

Whether you're curled up with your kids at home or leading a group of students, here are some educational anti-racism videos to help get the conversation started.

Let's Talk About Race

The Tutu Teacher made this video for kindergarten students. In the video, she discusses what racism is and how it's impacted the lives of Black and Brown people. She also reads aloud the story Let's Talk about Race.

Sesame Street: Color of Me Song

Sesame Street explores: "What is the color of 'you?' Is your skin color tan, light brown, milky white, or dark dark brown? Whatever color you are, be proud and sing along."

Sesame Street: Song: I Love My Hair

Sesame Street invites children to "...sing along and make the world aware that YOU love your hair!"

Systemic Racism Explained

Systemic racism affects every area of life in the U.S., from incarceration rates to predatory loans, and trying to solve these problems requires changes in major parts of our system. This video offers a closer look at what systemic racism is, and how we can solve it.

Discrimination Explained for Kids

In this video, Pop'n'Olly discover what discrimination means and provide a few examples. They also talk about discrimination and the law.

Sesame Street Explains Racism and Protesting

Sesame Street and CNN worked together to create the "Coming Together: Standing Up to Racism" town hall for kids and families.

Woke Read Alouds: Wings

In this video, Ki reads the story Wings by author/illustrator Christopher Myers. They take readers on a fun, animated, and thoughtful journey through the book, leaving time for think alouds and responses from kids. They also include reading strategies, resources, and tips for parents throughout. This resource serves as a full academic read aloud.

Kids Talk About Segregation

It's been 62 years since Brown v. Board of Education, but the percentage of racially segregated schools in the United States has been growing steadily over the past 15 years. New York has the most segregated schools in the country. This video talks to Bronx 5th graders about what segregation looks like today.

A Kids Book About Racism

This read aloud is, as the title suggests, a kids' book about racism. Inside, you'll find a clear description of what racism is, how it makes people feel when they experience it, and how to spot it when it happens.

A Kids Book About Belonging

This read aloud tackles what it's like when you feel like you belong to a group or family or team and what it's like when you don't. It addresses what it feels like when you don't fit in, or when others don't want you around. This book teaches kids how to belong to themselves and how that helps them belong anywhere.

SAY SOMETHING Read Aloud

This read aloud of SAY SOMETHING helps explain race to kids as well as the importance of speaking up.

Students Learn A Powerful Lesson About Privilege

Using a recycling bin and some scrap paper, this video showcases a powerful exercise about privilege. Do all students have the same opportunities?

Black Parents Explain How to Deal with the Police

Brave parents and their curious kids confront some of life's biggest and most uncomfortable lessons.

Film Kits for Classrooms

These classroom-friendly films and user guides will help you bring social justice topics to life. Incredibly, Teaching Tolerance offers these film kits for FREE for use in K-12 schools, public libraries, schools of education, houses of worship, and youth-serving nonprofit organizations.

Designed for in-service programs, this training tool for early grades educators profiles classrooms in which peace, equity, and justice are guiding themes. (Available for order.)

This film takes viewers to the very communities where heinous acts of violence took place, offering a painful look back at lives lost to lynching and a critical look forward. (Available for streaming only.)

The film tells the story of a courageous group of students and teachers who, along with other activists, fought a nonviolent battle to win voting rights for African Americans in the South. (Available for order.)

This special teachers' edition of the Oscar-winning documentary film tells the heroic story of the young people in Birmingham, Alabama, who brought segregation to its knees. (Available for order.)

A Time for Justice, an Oscar-winning documentary, captures the spirit of the civil rights movement through historical footage and the voices of activists who sat, sang, and marched. (Available for order.)
What anti-racism videos do you feel are important to education? Share in the comments below. Also, 19 Black Teachers on Instagram to Listen To and Learn From.

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21 Anti-Racism Videos To Share With Kids

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The United States has a racism problem. The idea of tackling such complicated and hurtful topics in our homes and classrooms is daunting, but we can't look away. We MUST face it. Fortunately, we live in a time when technology provides resources, such as the anti-racism videos below, designed to support us as we navigate these difficult and painful conversations.

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You have reached the meat (or hummus, if you'd rather) inside the sandwich that is Cult of Pedagogy. This is where most of this site's accumulated wisdom lives.

To help you find what you need, I've chunked all the posts into three big buckets. Start there, or scroll down to see an index of topics. If you want to get more specific, use the search bar at the top of this page. Still can't find what you're looking for? Contact our support staff. If they can't help you find it, they'll add your topic to our list of future blog posts.

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You have reached the meat (or hummus, if you'd rather) inside the sandwich that is Cult of Pedagogy. This is where most of this site's accumulated wisdom lives. To help you find what you need, I've chunked all the posts into three big buckets. Start there, or scroll down to see an index of topics.

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Building Constructive Conversation Skills

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Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School

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Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School

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Baker, et. al, 2014

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Discourse in US/Social Change

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Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom

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Amazon.com: Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom: 9781595580740: Delpit, Lisa

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A tool to help you meet students where they are in their language development

The Can Do Descriptors highlight what language learners can do at various stages of language development as they engage in the following contexts:

Bilingual and English-immersion early care and education programs

Bilingual, Spanish-immersion and English-immersion K-12 language programs

Bilingual, Spanish-immersion and English-immersion K-12 content-area classrooms

Similar to the WIDA English Language Development Standards Statements, the Can Do Descriptors describe what learners can do with language across different content areas. Although the Can Do Descriptors relate to the ELD Standards Statements, they don't replace them but are used to supplement the standards statements during instruction.

Educators and early childhood practitioners can use the Can Do Descriptors to

Better understand what students at different levels of language proficiency can do with language

Expand their understanding of what the process of language development can look like

Collaborate around scaffolding that students need to engage in content-area learning and develop language at the same time

Differentiate instruction and classroom assessment for language

Interpret ACCESS for ELLs test scores

The Can Do Descriptors have not yet been updated to reflect the 2020 Edition; however, they remain available as a valuable tool for communicating with stakeholders about what students can do at each language proficiency level. WIDA is monitoring educator use to help inform the timing for updating the materials.

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A tool to help you meet students where they are in their language developmentThe Can Do Descriptors highlight what language learners can do at various stages of language development as they engage in the following contexts:

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Educating ELLs: A Review of the Latest Research

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Educating ELLs: A Review of the Latest Research

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It's October in the Rio Grande Valley; the summer heat has receded and the school year is in full swing. Rolando Diaz teaches sixth-grade science at Del Valle Middle School. His class is a mix of English language learners (ELLs) with varying levels of English proficiency. He also has a few newcomer students, mostly from Mexico and Central America. Although all the students are Latino, they have varying degrees of Spanish proficiency.

Today, Mr. Diaz is teaching a lesson on ecology. To prepare for it, he has added several scaffolds to the district-mandated science curriculum. He presents slides to guide the lesson, providing students with visual support for what they hear him say.

Students also have a workbook that corresponds to the slides. For each slide, students engage in an activity that helps them process information. In this case, it is "partner talk" requiring them to describe a variety of habitats in terms of food, shelter, and temperature. They also use a bilingual glossary with pictures and English and Spanish definitions for the lesson's target vocabulary words. The glossary asks students to answer a question about each word and draw a picture or provide an example. For instance, for "ecosystem," they describe one near their house.

Mr. Diaz begins the lesson by introducing the content and language objectives for the day. Next, he explains several general and domain-specific words using the slides.

He quickly gives each definition in English, asks a student to read the definition in Spanish, presents an example for each definition, and asks students to discuss each word's meaning. A few weeks ago, he taught a mini-lesson on recognizing English-Spanish cognates, so they discuss whether "habitat" and "ecosystem" are also cognates.

Students then form groups to explore the schoolyard habitat. In each group, students are assigned various roles-mapmaker, bug collector, vegetation inspector, soil sampler, or data collector-and they complete a corresponding chart. For example, the vegetation inspector measures and records the height of the tallest vegetation and works with the mapmaker to record the location.

At the end of the lesson, students listen and follow along as Mr. Diaz reads the section of the grade-level text that discusses features of the ecosystem in Yellowstone National Park. After each section of text, students answer questions orally about the text, illustrations, and other visual displays. Mr. Diaz provides sentence starters and sentence frames to scaffold responses for his students with lower levels of English proficiency.* He intentionally pairs newcomers with bilingual peers so they can converse in Spanish before writing in English.

A longtime teacher, Mr. Diaz has effectively planned and carried out instruction on a specific science topic. He has ensured that students with varying degrees of English proficiency can access the academic content, strengthen their literacy skills, and engage with and learn from their peers.

I've worked with Mr. Diaz and many others like him to incorporate these best practices into their teaching. His teaching reflects the latest research on educating ELLs. In this article, I discuss this research, which includes seven principles from a recent consensus report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. ¹ The report, Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth Learning English: Promising Futures, examines what the research tells us about learning English from early childhood through high school, identifies effective practices for educators, and recommends steps policymakers can take to support high-quality educational outcomes for children and youth who are learning English.

These principles and practices build on findings from previous reviews on the same topic, ² as well as U.S. Department of Education best-evidence syntheses. ³ While dual language programming for ELLs is effective for developing English proficiency and content-area knowledge in English-with the extra benefit of maintaining and developing students' first language, validating their culture, and providing opportunities to enhance cross-cultural understanding4-this article focuses on instruction delivered in English, an important component of dual language programs. (For more on dual language programs and early childhood education, see " Encouraging the Development and Achievement of Dual Language Learners in Early Childhood.")

1. Provide Access to Grade-Level Course Content

For ELLs, exposure to grade-level course content provides crucial access to the language required for academic achievement and for becoming fully proficient in English. ⁵ This exposure helps students develop the concepts and skills needed to master grade-level coursework as they move up through the grades. Grade-level coursework, in turn, helps ensure students perceive the materials as worth working on, engaging, and meaningful. ⁶

In the reviewed studies that focus on the elementary grade levels, a variety of authentic materials were used to support learning. For example, in an English language arts intervention, newspaper articles, diaries, and historical and fictional accounts were used to teach students about immigration across different time periods. ⁷ In an intervention for young children, the read-aloud books and videos focused on habitats. ⁸ A middle-grades science intervention used the same texts and experiments used with gifted and talented students. ⁹

It is important to keep in mind that many skills and types of knowledge transfer from students' first language to their second, and that ELLs may have already acquired core content in their first language. ¹⁰ For example, students who have learned math concepts and skills in their first language do not need to relearn the concepts and skills, but do need to learn the English academic language associated with them. ELLs whose first language shares cognates with English do not need to learn meanings for cognates whose meanings they know in their first language-only English labels for these cognates.

Because grade-level materials in English are challenging for ELLs, instruction using these materials must be coupled with methods that support ELLs. The following principles elaborate on this theme.

2. Build on Effective Practices Used with English-Proficient Students

Many of the practices that have proved effective for ELLs are adapted from practices that have proved effective for English-proficient students. For example, in the area of literacy interventions, it is helpful to teach ELLs the same skills as their English-proficient peers-the skills of hearing the individual English sounds or phonemes within words (i.e., phonemic awareness); using the letters and spelling patterns within words to decode the pronunciation (i.e., phonics); reading text aloud with appropriate speed, accuracy, and expression (i.e., oral reading fluency); using strategies to learn new words; thinking about what they are reading (i.e., reading comprehension); and writing with the organization, development, substance, and style appropriate to the task and audience. ¹¹

Effective practices for middle-grades students similarly build on practices that have been effective with English-proficient students. For example, in science, the 5-E approach-Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate-has been used to guide successful interventions for ELLs. ¹² Approaches deemed effective for building vocabulary in English-proficient students have also been used in successful interventions for ELLs. ¹³ Examples include teaching vocabulary in the context of rich and varied language experiences, teaching individual words, teaching word-learning strategies, promoting word consciousness, and using words in writing. ¹⁴ In social studies, approaches include reading and writing about informational passages that provide multiple perspectives on historical events. ¹⁵

That said, not all practices deemed effective for English-proficient learners are effective for ELLs. For example, one study16 found that the use of literacy practices that included only higher-level questioning and discussion about the meaning of text had a strong relationship to improved reading comprehension for English-proficient students, but had little discernible benefit for ELLs. The study also found differences with respect to teacher-student interactions. "Telling"-defined as the teacher providing students with information, rather than engaging them in the creation of information through coaching, recitation, or other forms of interaction-had a statistically significant positive effect on ELLs' reading comprehension, but a negative effect on the comprehension of English-proficient students. The researcher posits that in the first case, the literacy practices (e.g., higher-level questioning and discussion) may have been at too high a level for ELLs to benefit without the appropriate supports. In the case of "telling," the researcher suggests that ELLs benefited because they were provided with more support for engaging with core content in English-a level of support that was not necessary for English-proficient students.

3. Provide Supports to Help ELLs Master Core Content and Skills

ELLs also benefit from visual and verbal supports. ¹⁷ For students in the elementary grades, visual supports include the strategic use of pictures, short videos, and graphic organizers to represent complex vocabulary and concepts. ¹⁸ Verbal supports include student glossaries; words glossed in context by the teacher; and whole-class, small-group, and partner discussions that focus in part on clarifying key ideas. ¹⁹ In the middle grades, visual supports include graphic organizers such as diagrams, tables, and concept maps for science, and illustrations and multimedia for language arts. Verbal supports include bilingual glossaries, as well as sentence and paragraph frames. In several studies, students were taught strategies to support learning; ²⁰ in one such study, students learned strategies to help them write. ²¹

For ELLs who are newcomers, especially those in the upper grades, core content provided in their home language will support them in developing their knowledge and skills while they are acquiring proficiency in English.

4. Develop ELLs' Academic Language

Academic language is defined as language used in school, in written communications, in public presentations, and in formal settings. ²² Academic proficiency is "knowing and being able to use general and academic vocabulary, specialized or complex grammatical structures, and multifarious language functions and discourse structures-all for the purpose of acquiring new knowledge and skills, interacting about a topic, and imparting information to others." ²³

It is important to note that academic language differs across content areas. In science, for example, the challenges of mastering academic language apply to vocabulary (e.g., learning everyday words with science meanings, general academic vocabulary, and discipline-specific vocabulary); syntax (e.g., passive voice, compound and complex sentences, and the nominalization of verbs, adverbs, and adjectives); and discourse (e.g., learning to attend to precise meanings in science text and talk). Students must also learn to master the nonlinguistic forms of language prevalent in content areas like science and math (e.g., diagrams, graphs, charts, maps, and equations). ²⁴

One series of experimental studies developed academic language in the context of teaching mainly science content. ²⁵ The studies used the types of visual and verbal supports previously described to help students make sense of content, develop general academic and domain-specific vocabulary, engage in opportunities to talk in pairs and small groups, and practice writing to extend their learning. These studies are well reviewed in two U.S. Department of Education practice guides for educators. ²⁶

With regard to vocabulary instruction, recent research indicates embedded instruction is a promising technique for developing ELLs' vocabulary when that vocabulary is not conceptually complex. ²⁷ In embedded instruction, students are given access to word meanings through on-the-spot child-friendly definitions of the target words (and, in some cases, examples and gestures). The research also indicates that instructional condition interacts with word type, with conceptually complex words much harder for students to acquire and thus needing more instructional support. ²⁸ (For more on helping students with their oral language development, see " Meaningful Classroom Talk.")

5. Encourage Peer-to-Peer Learning Opportunities

One of the key principles of instruction in a second language is enabling students to interact via speaking, listening, reading, and writing with peers in their second language. ²⁹ Speaking is important to generate feedback, encourage syntactic processing, and challenge students to engage at higher proficiency levels. As a result, it is no surprise that in many of the studies cited thus far, peer-to-peer learning was an important component of the intervention. In fact, in some studies, it was the focus.

For example, in one study implemented in the elementary grades, peer-to-peer learning was used to develop first-graders' literacy skills in a dual language program. ³⁰ Using the Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS) program, the peer-to-peer learning classrooms provided a structured routine in which the teacher modeled the language activities of the day; students practiced the activities in pairs for 15 minutes while the teacher supervised; and students then turned to story sharing, a partner reading activity that lasted for another 15 minutes. Teachers paired high-performing readers with low-performing readers and then taught the students to use the PALS procedures. During each segment of the session, the high-performing students performed the role of coach first, and the low-performing students followed. On average, PALS students demonstrated significantly greater growth than control students in phoneme segmentation, nonsense word fluency, and oral reading fluency.

In the middle grades, many of the interventions that had positive outcomes for ELLs also provided opportunities for collaborative peer learning. ³¹ An important feature of these studies is that peer talk, in pairs or small groups, focused on course content.

In planning for peer-to-peer interactions for adolescents, teachers need to consider students' growing awareness of their social status in peer groups in school and their community. ³² For ELLs, this includes how they are perceived by peers proficient in English. ³³

6. Capitalize on Students' Home Language, Knowledge, and Cultural Assets

Studies on cross-language transfer ³⁴ indicate significant relationships between performance in ELLs' first and second languages in word reading, spelling, vocabulary, comprehension, and reading strategies. Findings from evaluation studies comparing bilingual programs with mostly English-only programs indicate that, over time, ELLs instructed bilingually either perform on par with or outperform ELLs instructed only in English, ³⁵ providing indirect evidence of positive transfer.

Experimental studies ³⁶ conducted with elementary school children suggest that instructional routines that draw on students' home language, knowledge, and cultural assets support literacy development in English. Examples of the instructional routines include previewing and reviewing material in children's first language, storybook reading in students' first language, ³⁷ providing opportunities for students to engage in conversational exchanges during instruction that permits some interpretation to take place in their first language, ³⁸ providing first-language definitions for the targeted vocabulary, ³⁹ providing instruction in word-learning strategies that help ELLs uncover the meanings of cognates when encountered in English texts, ⁴⁰ and introducing key concepts by connecting them with children's prior knowledge or experiences at home and in their community. ⁴¹

As was the case for studies conducted with children in grades K-5, middle-grades studies that showed positive effects capitalized on ELLs' assets. While none of the studies were implemented in bilingual settings, the interventions included bilingual glossaries, background materials in students' home languages, teacher explanations in students' home languages, partner work in students' home languages, and instruction to help ELLs take advantage of their home-language knowledge and skills. ⁴²

7. Screen for Language and Literacy Challenges, Monitor Progress, and Support ELLs Who Are Struggling

Historically, ELLs have been both overidentified and underidentified as having a disability. ⁴³ Both cases-identifying students as having a disability when they do not in fact have one (i.e., overidentification) and failing to identify students for special education services that they need (i.e., underidentification)-are problematic. Measures used to assess ELLs for reading and language challenges must distinguish language development from disability.

Most intervention research has focused on ELLs with reading difficulties. Findings from numerous studies cited in previous reviews of promising and effective instructional practices for ELLs ⁴⁴ suggest that districts should establish procedures and provide training for schools to screen ELLs for reading challenges, consider collecting progress monitoring data more than three times a year for ELLs at risk, and use data from screening and progress monitoring assessments to make decisions about necessary instructional supports.

The studies also suggest the types of reading skills that should be assessed at different grade spans to determine whether ELLs are in need of additional instructional support. For kindergarten and first grade, skills include phonological awareness, familiarity with the alphabet and alphabetic principle, the ability to read single words, and knowledge of basic phonics rules. For children at the end of first grade and in the next few grades, skills include the ability to read connected texts accurately and fluently. For students in grades 2-5, oral reading fluency should also be assessed. However, these grade spans are predicated on ELLs beginning their schooling in kindergarten and must be adjusted for students entering U.S. schools in later grades and who may have already acquired these skills in their first language.

The studies provide two other recommendations: first, districts with performance benchmarks should use the same standards for ELLs and English-proficient students in the early grades, but should make adjustments in instruction when ELL progress is not sufficient; and second, teachers should be trained to use formative data to guide instruction. ⁴⁵ With regard to formative data, one study suggests that students' writing samples should be used on an ongoing basis to determine areas for improvement. ⁴⁶ Students' writing samples are excellent sources for formative assessment because they shed light on language challenges common to all children, as well as challenges and opportunities related to primary language influence on English. ⁴⁷

Almost all studies related to screening, monitoring, and intervening are studies of ELLs in elementary grades. ⁴⁸ Recommendations based on these studies include implementing intensive small-group interventions for at least 30 minutes in small homogeneous groups, and providing training and ongoing support for teachers, interventionists, and other school personnel on how to deliver small-group instruction effectively, as well as how to implement effective teaching techniques that can be used outside small-group instruction (e.g., instructional pacing, error corrections, and modeling). ⁴⁹ Another important recommendation is that additional supports should be provided to ELLs struggling in English literacy that address the other skills crucial for success in school, such as vocabulary, listening, reading comprehension, and writing. ⁵⁰

Where Additional Research Would Help

While there are some studies on effective practices for ELLs in science, studies focused on math and social studies are still very limited, compared with studies of English-proficient students. More research is also needed on promising and effective teaching methods for developing ELLs' home language, knowledge, and skills, and equalizing the social status of students from different ethnic/language backgrounds with the social status of white and native English-speaking students in schools.

For bilingual programs in particular, research is needed on the features that influence the successful acquisition of language and content. These features should include student ratios of English speakers to partner-language speakers in two-way programs, the number of instructional hours allotted to each language, the proportion of school staff and leadership who are bilingual, and the use of target languages within and across content areas. ⁵¹ And since most of the intervention research focuses on ELLs in grades K-2, and on pre-reading and reading skills, additional research is needed to understand how to intervene with older ELLs struggling in reading and with ELLs at all grade levels struggling in math, science, and social studies.

Finally, the social and emotional factors that influence student dispositions toward learning and academic performance (e.g., student motivation and engagement) must also be studied. More effective instruction, positive teacher attitudes toward teaching ELLs and high expectations that they can succeed, and engaging school climates can foster ELLs' motivation to learn and commitment to their educational success in the elementary school years and beyond. ⁵²

Experienced teachers knowledgeable about supporting ELLs, such as Mr. Diaz, already incorporate many of these principles in their instruction. But more needs to be done to make sure this research gets into the hands of all classroom teachers, and to ensure additional research is conducted that can strengthen teaching and learning.

Diane August is a managing researcher and the director of the Center for English Language Learners at the American Institutes for Research. Previously, she was a senior research scientist at the Center for Applied Linguistics and a senior program officer at the National Academy of Sciences. This article is drawn from chapters 7 and 8 of the report Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth Learning English: Promising Futures, published in February 2017 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which is available online.

*For more on scaffolding, see " One Sentence at a Time" in the Summer 2017 issue of American Educator. ( back to the article)

†A useful resource for finding reading and math programs deemed effective for all students is this website created by the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University. ( back to the article)

‡Nominalization refers to using a word that is not a noun (e.g., a verb, adjective, or adverb) as a noun or as the head of a noun phrase (e.g., using the adjective "rich" as a noun, as in "the rich"). ( back to the article)

§For more on ways English language learners bring cultural assets to schools, see " The Potential and Promise of Latino Students" in the Spring 2017 issue of American Educator. ( back to the article)

Endnotes

1. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth Learning English: Promising Futures (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2017).

2. Diane August and Timothy Shanahan, eds., Developing Reading and Writing in Second-Language Learners: Lessons from the Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth (New York: Routledge, 2008); Fred Genesee et al., eds., Educating English Language Learners: A Synthesis of Research Evidence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 245; and Claude Goldenberg, "Unlocking the Research on English Learners: What We Know-and Don't Yet Know-about Effective Instruction," American Educator 37, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 4-11, 38.

3. What Works Clearinghouse, which has particularly high standards for evidence of effectiveness, has two publications related to English language learners: Scott Baker et al., Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School, NCEE 2014-4012 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2014); and Russell Gersten et al., Effective Literacy and English Language Instruction for English Learners in the Elementary Grades: A Practice Guide, NCEE 2007-4011 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2007).

4. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth.

5. Lily Wong-Fillmore and Charles J. Fillmore, "What Does Text Complexity Mean for English Learners and Language Minority Students?" (Stanford, CA: Understanding Language, Stanford University, 2014), http://ell.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/academic-papers/06-LWF%....

6. Ellen A. Skinner and Jennifer R. Pitzer, "Developmental Dynamics of Student Engagement, Coping, and Everyday Resilience," in Handbook of Research on Student Engagement, ed. Sandra L. Christenson, Amy L. Reschly, and Cathy Wylie (New York: Springer, 2012), 21-44.

7. Maria S. Carlo, Diane August, and Catherine E. Snow, "Sustained Vocabulary-Learning Strategy Instruction for English-Language Learners," in Teaching and Learning Vocabulary: Bringing Research to Practice, ed. Elfrieda H. Hiebert and Michael L. Kamil (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2005).

8. Rebecca Silverman and Sara Hines, "The Effects of Multimedia-Enhanced Instruction on the Vocabulary of English-Language Learners and Non-English-Language Learners in Pre-Kindergarten through Second Grade," Journal of Educational Psychology 101 (2009): 305-314.

9. Diane August et al., "The Impact of an Instructional Intervention on the Science and Language Learning of Middle Grade English Language Learners," Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness 2 (2009): 345-376; and Diane August et al., "Helping ELLs Meet the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in Science: The Impact of an Instructional Intervention Focused on Academic Language," Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness 7 (2014): 54-82.

10. Cheryl Dressler and Michael L. Kamil, "First- and Second-Language Literacy," in Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, ed. Diane August and Timothy Shanahan (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 197-238.

11. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth.

12. August et al., "Impact of an Instructional Intervention"; and August et al., "Helping ELLs."

13. Michael F. Graves, The Vocabulary Book: Learning and Instruction, 2nd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2016).

14. Nonie K. Lesaux et al., "Effects of Academic Vocabulary Instruction for Linguistically Diverse Adolescents: Evidence from a Randomized Field Trial," American Educational Research Journal 51 (2014): 1159-1194.

15. Sharon Vaughn et al., "Enhancing Social Studies Vocabulary and Comprehension for Seventh-Grade English Language Learners: Findings from Two Experimental Studies," Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness 2 (2009): 297-324.

16. Jennifer O'Day, "Good Instruction Is Good for Everyone-or Is It? English Language Learners in a Balanced Literacy Approach," Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk 14 (2009): 97-119.

17. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Promoting the Educational Success of Children and Youth.

18. Bryan A. Brown, Kihyun Ryoo, and Jamie Rodriguez, "Pathway towards Fluency: Using 'Disaggregate Instruction' to Promote Science Literacy," International Journal of Science Education 32 (2010): 1465-1493; Silverman and Hines, "Effects of Multimedia-Enhanced Instruction"; and Lorena Llosa et al., "Impact of a Large-Scale Science Intervention Focused on English Language Learners," American Educational Research Journal 53 (2016): 395-424.

19. See, for example, Maria S. Carlo et al., "Closing the Gap: Addressing the Vocabulary Needs of English Language Learners in Bilingual and Mainstream Classrooms," Reading Research Quarterly 39 (2004): 188-215; and Fuhui Tong et al., "Integrating Literacy and Science for English Language Learners: From Learning-to-Read to Reading-to-Learn," Journal of Educational Research 107 (2014): 410-426.

20. August et al., "Impact of an Instructional Intervention"; August et al., "Helping ELLs"; Vaughn et al., "Enhancing Social Studies Vocabulary and Comprehension"; and Lesaux et al., "Effects of Academic Vocabulary Instruction."

21. Jung-In Kim and Kara M. Viesca, "Three Reading-Intervention Teachers' Identity Positioning and Practices to Motivate and Engage Emergent Bilinguals in an Urban Middle School," Teaching and Teacher Education 55 (2016): 122-132.

22. Catherine E. Snow and Paola Uccelli, "The Challenge of Academic Language," in The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy, ed. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 112-133.

23. Alison L. Bailey, The Language Demands of School: Putting Academic English to the Test (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 10-11.

24. Helen Quinn, Okhee Lee, and Guadalupe Valdés, "Language Demands and Opportunities in Relation to Next Generation Science Standards for English Language Learners: What Teachers Need to Know" (Stanford, CA: Understanding Language, Stanford University, 2014), http://ell.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/academic-papers/03-Quin....

25. See, for example, Brown, Ryoo, and Rodriguez, "Pathway towards Fluency"; Carlo et al., "Closing the Gap"; Llosa et al., "Impact of a Large-Scale Science Intervention"; Kihyun Ryoo, "Learning Science, Talking Science: The Impact of a Technology-Enhanced Curriculum on Students' Science Learning in Linguistically Diverse Mainstream Classrooms" (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2009); Silverman and Hines, "Effects of Multimedia-Enhanced Instruction"; Tong et al., "Integrating Literacy and Science"; and Vaughn et al., "Enhancing Social Studies Vocabulary and Comprehension."

26. Baker et al., Teaching Academic Content and Literacy; and Gersten et al., Effective Literacy and English Language Instruction.

27. Michael D. Coyne, D. Betsy McCoach, and Sharon Kapp, "Vocabulary Intervention for Kindergarten Students: Comparing Extended Instruction to Embedded Instruction and Incidental Exposure," Learning Disabilities Quarterly 30 (2007): 74-88.

28. Diane August et al., "The Moderating Influence of Instructional Intensity and Word Type on the Acquisition of Academic Vocabulary in Young English Language Learners," Reading and Writing 31 (2018): 965-989.

29. See Rod Ellis, Instructed Second Language Acquisition: A Literature Review (Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education, 2005). The purpose of this literature review is to examine theory and research that has addressed what constitutes effective pedagogy for the acquisition of a second language in a classroom context. In other words, the review seeks to answer the question: How can instruction best ensure successful language learning?

30. Mary Beth Calhoun et al., "Effects of a Peer-Mediated Program on Reading Skill Acquisition for Two-Way Bilingual First-Grade Classrooms," Learning Disability Quarterly 30 (2007): 169-184.

31. August et al., "Impact of an Instructional Intervention"; August et al., "Helping ELLs"; Nonie K. Lesaux et al., "The Effectiveness and Ease of Implementation of an Academic Vocabulary Intervention for Linguistically Diverse Students in Urban Middle Schools," Reading Research Quarterly 45 (2010): 196-228; Lesaux et al., "Effects of Academic Vocabulary Instruction"; and Vaughn et al., "Enhancing Social Studies Vocabulary and Comprehension."

32. Brooke K. Cisco and Yolanda Padrón, "Investigating Vocabulary and Reading Strategies with Middle Grades English Language Learners: A Research Synthesis," RMLE Online 36, no. 4 (2012): 1-23; and Kim and Viesca, "Three Reading-Intervention Teachers' Identity Positioning."

33. Guadalupe Valdés, Learning and Not Learning English: Latino Students in American Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001).

34. Dressler and Kamil, "First- and Second-Language Literacy."

35. Ilana M. Umansky and Sean F. Reardon, "Reclassification Patterns among Latino English Learner Students in Bilingual, Dual Immersion, and English Immersion Classrooms," American Educational Research Journal 51 (2014): 879-912; and Rachel A. Valentino and Sean F. Reardon, "Effectiveness of Four Instructional Programs Designed to Serve English Learners: Variation by Ethnicity and Initial English Proficiency," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 37 (2015): 612-637.

36. Carlo et al., "Closing the Gap"; Lauren Aimonette Liang, Cheryl A. Peterson, and Michael F. Graves, "Investigating Two Approaches to Fostering Children's Comprehension of Literature," Reading Psychology 26 (2005): 387-400; Llosa et al., "Impact of a Large-Scale Science Intervention"; and William M. Saunders and Claude Goldenberg, "Effects of Instructional Conversations and Literature Logs on Limited- and Fluent-English-Proficient Students' Story Comprehension and Thematic Understanding," Elementary School Journal 99 (1999): 277-301.

37. Liang, Peterson, and Graves, "Investigating Two Approaches."

38. Saunders and Goldenberg, "Effects of Instructional Conversations."

39. Llosa et al., "Impact of a Large-Scale Science Intervention"; Diane August, Lauren Artzi, and Christopher Barr, "Helping ELLs Meet Standards in English Language Arts and Science: An Intervention Focused on Academic Vocabulary," Reading and Writing Quarterly 32 (2016): 373-396; and Silverman and Hines, "Effects of Multimedia-Enhanced Instruction."

40. Carlo et al., "Closing the Gap"; and Darci A. Burns, "Examining the Effect of an Overt Transition Intervention on the Reading Development of At-Risk English-Language Learners in First Grade" (PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 2011).

41. Llosa et al., "Impact of a Large-Scale Intervention."

42. August et al., "Impact of an Instructional Intervention"; and August et al., "Helping ELLs."

43. Ester Geva and Katherine Herbert, "Assessment and Interventions for English Language Learners with Learning Disabilities," in Learning about Learning Disabilities, ed. Bernice Wong and Deborah Butler, 4th ed. (Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2012), 271-298.

44. Baker et al., Teaching Academic Content and Literacy; and Gersten et al., Effective Literacy and English Language Instruction.

45. Gersten et al., Effective Literacy and English Language Instruction, 6-7.

46. Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, "Assessment and Classroom Learning," Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice 5 (1998): 7-74.

47. Kim and Viesca, "Three Reading-Intervention Teachers' Identity Positioning."

48. Burns, "Examining the Effect of an Overt Transition Intervention"; Carolyn A. Denton et al., "Intervention Provided to Linguistically Diverse Middle School Students with Severe Reading Difficulties," Learning Disabilities Research and Practice 23 (2008): 79-89; Barbara Gunn et al., "Supplemental Instruction in Decoding Skills for Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Students in Early Elementary School: A Follow-Up," Journal of Special Education 39 (2002): 69-79; J. Ron Nelson, Patricia F. Vadasy, and Elizabeth A. Sanders, "Efficacy of a Tier 2 Supplemental Root Word Vocabulary and Decoding Intervention with Kindergarten Spanish-Speaking English Learners," Journal of Literacy Research 43 (2011): 184-211; Carolyn R. Ransford-Kaldon et al., Implementation of Effective Intervention: An Empirical Study to Evaluate the Efficacy of Fountas & Pinnell's Leveled Literacy Intervention System (LLI); 2009-2010 (Memphis, TN: Center for Research in Educational Policy, 2010); Emily J. Solari and Michael M. Gerber, "Early Comprehension Instruction for Spanish-Speaking English Language Learners: Teaching Text-Level Reading Skills while Maintaining Effects on Word-Level Skills," Learning Disabilities Research and Practice 23 (2008): 155-168; Sharon Vaughn et al., "Effectiveness of an English Intervention for First-Grade English Language Learners at Risk for Reading Problems," Elementary School Journal 107 (2006): 153-180; and Sharon Vaughn et al., "Effectiveness of a Spanish Intervention and an English Intervention for English-Language Learners at Risk for Reading Problems," American Educational Research Journal 43 (2006): 449-487.

49. Gersten et al., Effective Literacy and English Language Instruction, 10-11.

50. Baker et al., Teaching Academic Content and Literacy.

51. Andrea Boyle et al., Dual Language Education Programs: Current State Policies and Practices (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2015).

52. For a general review, see Allan Wigfield, Jessica R. Gladstone, and Lara Turci, "Beyond Cognition: Reading Motivation and Reading Comprehension," Child Development Perspectives 10 (2016): 190-195; and Tahir Jahan Khan, Azlina Murad Sani, and Sarimah Shaik-Abdullah, "Motivation to Read in a Second Language: A Review of Literature," International Journal of Research in English Education 2, no. 4 (2017): 41-50.

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It's October in the Rio Grande Valley; the summer heat has receded and the school year is in full swing. Rolando Diaz teaches sixth-grade science at Del Valle Middle School. His class is a mix of English language learners (ELLs) with varying levels of English proficiency.

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I competed the Master the Screencast course by Matt Miller for Screencastify. Here is my video that I had to upload to complete the course.  You can also become a master by clicking on the link after #24 in this article from Ditch That Textbook.

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Eight English Learner Myths for Administrators

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Eight English Learner Myths for Administrators

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Myth 1: Using a push-in model will guarantee an increase in collaboration and opportunities for success for ELs.

Myth 2: Sheltered Instruction is Forever!

Myth 3: EL funding is limited to federal and state LEP dollars.

Myth 4: Translating materials is adequate for communicating to EL families.

Myth 5: ESL Teaching is Just Good Teaching.

Myth 6: EL language development is the responsibility of the EL teacher.

Myth 7: ELs no longer need language support once they meet language program exit criteria.

Myth 8: ELs automatically means “struggling students” and therefore, ELs cannot be successful in gifted and talented programs or advanced coursework due to their “limited” English language skills.

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In our many years of working with English learners (ELs) and collaborating with our colleagues in support of ELs, we have come across a variety of common myths that are shared by educators in districts of all sizes across the country. While some of these can be addressed at the classroom level to some extent, it takes a "big picture", holistic approach to address them comprehensively and effectively for the maximum benefit of ELs. That is where the administrator comes in. The administrator can play a unique role in terms of setting the tone of the school, creating a culture of collaboration, maintaining high standards of excellence for all students and staff, using resources and staffing strategically, and ensuring a welcoming environment for ELs and their families.

To help you get started in this journey, we have compiled 8 common myths regarding ELs that we think should be reconsidered, as well as supporting research for our responses to each myth, best practices, strategies, and recommended resources.

Before diving into these myths, let's make one thing clear: we don't expect you to know all these things. That's why we made this list. We hope you will find it useful, thought-provoking, and that it will afford you an opportunity to engage in deeper conversations about the needs of your ELs. We want you to explore multiple ways you can work together as an educational team to ensure ELs' success.

That's another important point: you are not expected to do this alone. Addressing language and culture is complex work due to the highly diverse and ever-changing nature of the students we are serving. It requires that you learn new things about new students and their backgrounds and pedagogy constantly. You need a dedicated professional team in order to pull all the pieces together and develop a successful support system that works to meet the needs of English Learners.

Myth 1: Using a push-in model will guarantee an increase in collaboration and opportunities for success for ELs.

Fact: "Push-in" refers to a program model in which an EL teacher (such as an ESOL, ESL, or ELD specialist) provides ESL services in the mainstream classroom instead of a separate classroom. It is contrasted with a pull-out model in which ELs leave their regular classroom and go to an ESL classroom. The push-in model aims to provide inclusive services to English Learners. While it may seem like a better model because it's "inclusive", providing services to ESL students in a push-in model does not automatically guarantee high quality language services. Just having an EL teacher in the room with the classroom teacher does not lead to meaningful collaboration and quality services for ELs. Having a push-in model tells the administrator where the EL teacher is teaching, not what the EL teacher is teaching. Low-quality services (e.g. helping students complete assignments) have been delivered to English Learners in push-in models in the name of inclusion.

All instructional models need to begin with an analysis of the student needs, close examination of EL achievement data, outcomes desired and a review of a variety of models, approaches, and strategies that will be used to attain the goals. For most push-in situations, it should really be a collaborative model. Truly collaborative models require different resources and supports to be successful. Some of the questions to consider include: When will the teaching team meet and plan regularly? How much time do they need to co-plan together? What is the role of each teacher and how will they collaborate?

Recommendation: Examine your English learners' needs, their educational backgrounds, and EL achievement data as well as language proficiency data when making a determination about your EL instructional models. Determine what professional development all teachers require to meet the needs of English Learners. A combination of instructional models might be needed to meet the developing language proficiency needs of English learners. For example, a pull out model may be utilized to provide targeted language support to newcomer students in addition to collaborative push-in service. In both models, the EL teacher's role is to provide explicit, quality language instruction.

Recommended resource:

Myth 2: Sheltered Instruction is Forever!

Fact: Sheltered Instruction courses are modified content courses (e.g., sheltered science) designed to provide ELs with access to content learning. One can trace Sheltered Instruction back to the landmark case of Lau v. Nichols of 1974. Under Lau v. Nichols (1974) ruling, schools have an obligation to modify instruction to provide ELs with access to equal educational opportunities, instead of "sink or swim" approach where students are provided grade level content without modifications. On the other hand, the Office for Civil Rights Memorandum: May 25, 1970; 35 Federal Register 11595 (1970) prohibits tracking by the school system of English learners into lower-level ability groups or vocational programs without consideration of students' personal goals. It requires schools to show how segregation of students is preparing them to participate in their other instructional programs. Such programs "must not operate as an educational dead-end or permanent track."

In several studies, it has been documented that sheltered instruction was used with ELs not because students were not able to succeed academically, but due to the mainstream teacher quality to scaffold instruction up versus simplify it or water it down (Gandara & Maxwell-Jolly, 2000; Rumberger & Gandara, 2004). Student voices and experiences were recorded in several studies. For example, in Dabach (2014) study, stating that students found the label "sheltered" embarrassing because they knew that they were learning less in those classes. Prolonged participation in sheltered classes led to students' lowered self-esteem, what they can and cannot learn, thus, diminishing their belief in their own abilities and whether they can handle mainstream classes.

Recommendation: Before you hurry back to your classroom and close down all your sheltered classes, stop and think about the following: Sheltered Instruction may be beneficial to beginning level ELs as a temporary programmatic option to provide meaningful content-based instruction (as opposed to "survival English" decontextualized learning). However, school administrators should provide meaningful professional development to all teachers to build teacher disciplinary language knowledge. Teachers need to be aware of the complexities of language within their discipline and how to provide well-sequenced scaffolded instruction that help students gain access to meaningful grade-level learning.

For example, one such approach is called Teaching and Learning Cycle (Rothery, 1994) in which students are provided with many opportunities to build knowledge on the topic, develop oral language, study a discipline-specific mentor text through a joint deconstruction process, followed by joint construction before students write independently. In this approach, genres of school texts (written and spoken) are explicitly taught. After developing ideas and building knowledge on the topic, in teacher-guided discussions, students work with mentor texts of science explanations or historical accounts to learn from author's choices of text organization and language features before they write independently. One key component that this approach provides is joint construction of text where students' language is crafted to meet the expectations of writing for a particular purpose, audience, and mode.

This approach takes the mystery out of teachers' expectations of what is expected in writing. It also expands a variety of writing that disciplines value (e.g. consequential explanations in history, journal entries in science, descriptive reports in geography, classifying reports in biology and many others). The Teaching and Learning Cycle has been developed in Australia and has been used successfully in the US and is described in multiple research studies (e.g. Brisk, Gebhard, deOliveira, Schleppegrell and others).

Administrators could examine not only where ELs are placed, but also students' experiences in those placements by talking to students and observing their levels of engagement or disengagement. Teachers can affirm students' identity and counteract their lowered self-esteem by explicitly acknowledging their multilingual and multicultural assets and continuously rebuilding students' self worth.
Recommended Resource:
Myth 3: EL funding is limited to federal and state LEP dollars.

Fact: EL students usually generate additional funding in the form of federal Title I and state compensatory dollars. These funds are often reserved for district and school initiatives such as literacy intervention designed to help struggling students, some of whom are ELs. While ELs may benefit from these initiatives, they may benefit from increased funding towards language development and these funding streams can also be used to develop language and academic knowledge for ELs. Some district budgets have a strict line between Title I and Title III (federal funds set aside for EL support) and this can be problematic when you consider that a great number of ELs are generating federal Title I dollars, they will increase their reading comprehension when they have attained a higher proficiency level in English and Title III funds are often about 10% (or less) of the Title I amount. The narrow view that EL funds are the only funds available to support ELs severely restricts the amount of funds available to support language development while ignoring the greater amount of funds ELs generate in other financial categories.

Again, this is not to say that ELs won't benefit from literacy initiatives or other improvement efforts funded by Title I or other sources, but to point out that language needs can be addressed through a variety of funding sources.

Recommendation: Review your instructional needs and resources closely and determine if additional funds are available to support the EL instructional program. What are the highest priorities for your ELs and what kind of funding and support is needed to reach your goals? Developing literacy and math skills funded by Title I and Title III dollars is important, but it should not be done at the expense of developing disciplinary literacies offered in inquiry-rich learning such as STEM or interdisciplinary inquiry units.
Recommended resource:
Myth 4: Translating materials is adequate for communicating to EL families.

Fact: We should begin by saying that written communication via letters or emails alone is not adequate for any families. Families and schools should be partners and relationships are built best through authentic communication. Written communication is a one-way communication without any way for families to engage meaningfully. In addition, for EL families, especially, understanding school communication extends beyond understanding language.

As an immigrant parent with a doctorate degree in educational leadership and high academic language skills in English, Ruslana notes that she personally continues to struggle understanding all of the school communication that comes home from school. The main reason for her is not language, but all the cultural knowledge that is embedded in those messages which inhibit her comprehension of those written messages. Written communication translated in families' languages is a start, but it should not stop there. Reaching out to families and communicating with them to help them understand the school culture will help build stronger relationships with families and empower them with the knowledge necessary to advocate for their students in informed ways. It will also help you as an administrator to understand your culture better, in this case, your school culture.

Imagine taking your family to Kenya and attending the school there for a year and trying to navigate the school culture that's foreign to you. Written letters in Swahili will probably end up in the recycling bin. In addition, EL families come from a wide variety of backgrounds and you can't be sure that translation will be understood for a variety of reasons. There may be dialects or tribal languages that may be overlooked. In addition, parent literacy levels in their home language(s) or English need to be considered as well.

Recommendation: Build relationships and two-way communication pathways with EL families. Find a variety of ways to communicate with EL families - some in print, some through phone calls and some in person. The more frequently and meaningfully you can communicate with families, the better support the student will have at home to be successful at school. Meet families in their communities: at markets, places of worship, or community events.

Recommended Resource: WIDA Family Engagement Focus Bulletin 2015

Myth 5: ESL Teaching is Just Good Teaching.

Fact: There are many elements of "just good teaching" that provide quality support for ELs - the gradual release of responsibility, pair and group work, clear objectives, etc. However, without scaffolding toward deep disciplinary learning and only focusing on differentiating for language levels at the expense of disciplinary learning, ELs are likely to remain academically behind. Most of an EL student's day is spent listening to others and if they are going to reach parity with their native English speaking peers they need multiple opportunities to discuss, read and write about age appropriate content themselves. Teachers need to 1) possess disciplinary language knowledge 2) explicitly teach language in the service of deep disciplinary learning 3) provide ELs with opportunities to use language in meaningful ways (filling in worksheets is not a meaningful use of language).

In their article Preparing Mainstream Teachers for English-Language Learners: Is Being a Good Teacher Good Enough?, de Jong and Harper (2005) lay out clear misconceptions about the myth that "good teaching is good for all kids" and provide research to understand what is involved in educating culturally and linguistically diverse learners who qualify for additional language support.

Recommendation: Provide support for teachers to learn about quality disciplinary language instruction in the context of learning. Help them deconstruct standards to determine the language associated with academic tasks and then plan for modeling and measuring the academic language during the lesson. Hire licensed, qualified EL staff to teach and collaborate on professional development for all staff.
Recommended Resource:
Myth 6: EL language development is the responsibility of the EL teacher.

Fact: ELs are the responsibility of all educators. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973)29 U.S.C. Section 706 states that English Learners are entitled to "free and APPROPRIATE [emphasis added] public education. The need may be met by providing all teachers working with ELs with meaningful professional development that targets their specific EL needs and strategies that help teachers be successful with EL students. While each teacher may have a specific role to play in supporting the ELs academic and linguistic development, it is important that all are aware of their own responsibility to the student and their family. Even if an EL teacher is able to meet with the EL student for one hour daily, AND the EL teacher is a major award-winning educator, there are multiple hours in the day when the EL student would not receive language instruction. This myth is perpetuated in the teacher education field when the regular education teachers are not provided the foundational knowledge of the language demands of their disciplines and effective scaffolding for language learners in their coursework.

Recommendation: Work with all educators to better understand the language proficiency levels of ELs, develop language instructional strategies, and develop ways to measure language progress and provide feedback to students. Adopt a motto,"Teachers are also learners" and create a culture of learning at school where all teachers can continue to learn because cultural and linguistic diversity is becoming the norm rather than an exception.
Recommended Resource:
Myth 7: ELs no longer need language support once they meet language program exit criteria.

Fact: Language development is a long-term process. Language demands increase through the years of schooling, beyond the "exit" stage. As a result, ELs may require attention to their language needs even after exiting the EL program for several reasons. If the exit criteria are not rigorous and aligned to success in content areas, ELs will need further support to be successful in the academic areas. Also, if ELs exit at the end of their elementary school, they might show signs of needing support in middle school due to the increase of the language demands in middle and high school. For more on this topic, read Much More Than Reclassification by Ruslana and Luciana de Oliveira, Ph.D.

Recommendation: Work with all educators to better understand language demands in academic areas. Develop language-rich pedagogies, measure language progress, and provide feedback to students. Ensure that there is a way to track ELs in the system to help educators keep track of students even after they have exited the program.

Myth 8: ELs automatically means "struggling students" and therefore, ELs cannot be successful in gifted and talented programs or advanced coursework due to their "limited" English language skills.

Fact: Just because English Learners are learning English, it does not mean they are struggling students. Many are high achieving or exhibit achievement in areas not traditionally identified. Understanding giftedness among culturally diverse learners will require a new lens.

Office for Civil Rights Memorandum: May 25, 1970; 35 Federal Register 11595 (1970) requires school districts to take affirmative steps to provide equal access to educational programs for students with emerging proficiency in English. It prohibits denying access to any instructional programs - whether college preparatory, gifted and talented, vocational, computer, compensatory or special education - on the basis of English language skills. Dear Colleague Letter issued by the Office of Civil Rights and the US Department of Justice on January 7, 2015 states,

"School districts may not categorically exclude EL students from gifted and talented education (GATE) or other specialized programs such as Advanced Placement (AP), honors, or International Baccalaureate (IB) courses. Unless a particular GATE program or advanced course is demonstrated to require proficiency in English for meaningful participation, schools must ensure that evaluation and testing procedures for GATE or other specialized programs do not screen out EL students because of their limited English proficiency." ( http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-el-201501.pdf)

Recommendations: Giftedness or participation in advanced coursework is not restricted by the English language level. A study by Kanno & Kangas (2014) found that ELs have been placed in the remedial algebra tracks regardless of their high achievement in math. They concluded that "unless high school educators abandon their assumption that English proficiency must be fully in place before ELLs are ready to take high-level courses and begin offering linguistic support within the context of a rigorous academic curriculum, ELLs' underachievement will persist, not because they are incapable of learning but because they are not given the opportunity to learn". Moschkovich (n.d.) recommends that teachers encourage participation in discussions that focus on important concepts and cognitive development, rather than on pronunciation, vocabulary, or low-level linguistic skills. By learning to recognize how ELs express their ideas as they are learning English, teachers can maintain a focus on cognitive reasoning as well as on language development.

Review how giftedness is defined in your school. Examine how effective the core instruction is to allow ELLs to be successful and showcase their giftedness. Reflect on how well the teachers are trained to recognize giftedness among multilingual students. Provide a space for parents of ELs to learn about recognizing giftedness outside of school so that they are more equipped to advocate for gifted services for their children. Many parents might not even know that those options are available for their children. They may not know what questions to ask due to the challenge of navigating a new school system and knowledge of the policies and options.
Recommended Resource for Identifying Gifted ELs: Recommended Resource for Expanding Access to Advanced Placement Courses:
About the Authors

Ruslana Westerlund

Ruslana Westerlund, Ed.D. is an associate researcher at WIDA, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her current research involves training teachers how to support English learners disciplinary literacy in science, social studies, and English Language Arts using Systemic Functional Linguistics. She has over 20 years of experience in the ESL field at K-12 and higher education levels. Before coming to WIDA, Ruslana worked as an ESL teacher in K-12 schools and in teacher preparation programs at undergraduate and graduate levels. She also served as an ELD and refugee student specialist at the Minnesota Department of Education. In that role, she managed grants from the Office of Refugee Resettlement and collaborated with various state departments to provide wrap-around services to refugee children. She completed her doctorate degree with the focus on educational leadership. In her spare time, she blogs at Reclaiming The Language For Social Justice blog. She also offers consulting to schools who are seeking solutions on how to best supporting ELs' developing disciplinary literacy in science, social studies, and English Language Arts.

Kristina Robertson

Kristina Robertson is an English Learner (EL) Program Administrator in Roseville, MN who works with K-12 teachers and administrators to develop quality language programming and instruction needed to advance equity for ELs in academic achievement. Kristina has 20 years of education experience as a teacher and leader in English language instruction, with licenses in ESL, Administration, and Reading. Kristina holds a Masters of Arts in TESOL from the School for International Studies in Brattleboro, VT and has dabbled in PhD coursework for Leadership, Learning Technologies and Curriculum and Instruction. She started her career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sri Lanka and then returned to Minnesota, where she has taught many language and cultural backgrounds in the K-12 setting, as well as ESL teacher preparation courses at the college level. Kristina served on the American Federation of Teacher's ELL Educator Cadre for a decade and has authored a number of our Bright Ideas articles. She is also featured in a Colorín Colorado Meet the Expert video interview. Kristina resides in Minnesota.

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Eight English Learner Myths for Administrators

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In our many years of working with English learners (ELs) and collaborating with our colleagues in support of ELs, we have come across a variety of common myths that are shared by educators in districts of all sizes across the country.

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The Essential 5: A Starting Point for Cooperative Learning

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Kagan’s FREE Articles - Research & Rationale - Research proves effectiveness of Kagan Structures.

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Kagan specializes in staff development and educational resources for teachers. Visit our online store, magazine and message board � the leading authority on cooperative learning, classroom discipline and multiple intelligences.

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

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

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Great article that addresses the findings of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth to make recommendations for effective literacy instruction of ELL students.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Using Pair and Group Work to Develop ELLs' Oral Language Skills

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Using Pair and Group Work to Develop ELLs' Oral Language Skills

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Great resources, Lists of Types of Questions and Examples, Video Examples in Practice, and Talk Moves Sentence Stems.

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In our last post, we shared information about the new Teaching Channel ELL series based on Academic Conversations (2011) by Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford featuring related classroom videos developed in partnership with the Oakland Unified School District. This week we'd like to delve deeper into these resources and provide strategies for building the oral language skills of ELLs across content areas that are framed around four practices.

Most teachers understand that pair and group work provide excellent opportunities for ELLs' oral language development because each student has more time to talk than in a large group discussion, and students often feel more comfortable sharing their ideas in a small group environment. However, in order to build on the skills described in the CCSS, it may be necessary to re-envision pair and group work and provide additional supports for ELLs. ELLs may find group work challenging if they do not understand their expected role in the task they are working on, or if they do not feel confident in using the language required for the task.

In this blog post we will first examine two speaking and listening standards that can be used to help frame group work. Next, we will highlight four student practices based on recommendations from Zwiers & Crawford (2011) and the practices demonstrated in the Teaching Channel classroom video clips. These four student practices will foster oral language development and support ELLs in meeting the standards. For each of the practices, we will provide an explanation and share some Teaching Channel video clips that show the practices in action.

Four Practices for Fostering ELLs' Oral Language Development

These four practices are:

1. Coming to the discussion prepared

2. Using appropriate body language for discussions

3. Participating by taking turns

4. Making connections to what others have said

Guiding Common Core State Standards

First, let's take a look at two standards that are part of the Speaking and Listening Anchor Standards for K-12 that are most relevant for our purpose.

Comprehension and Collaboration

Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.SL.1 CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.SL.4
Present information, findings, and supporting evidence such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

According to the standards listed above, all students (including ELLs) will need practice in holding discussions with varied partners, learning to effectively express their ideas with supporting evidence, and learning to build on the ideas of other students. Teachers can help ELLs meet those standards with the following practices.

Come to the discussion prepared

As we discussed in our Socratic Circles blog post, it is important for students to have sufficient preparation in the content they will be discussing. To view a model of ways teachers can help students prepare and engage in academic discussions through small group work, take a look at the video of Ms. Groves' class discussion of Siddhartha's Journey. In the video, Ms. Groves described having students do several close reading of the Siddhartha's text and answer text-dependent questions that are open-ended, are not only limited to questions with one right response, and require students to answer using evidence from the text. Students then shared their responses to the text-dependent questions in small groups.

In making recommendations for the types of questions and prompts teachers can develop to help students plan for think-pair-share activities, Zwiers (2010) makes some suggestions in the table below. Teachers can provide these types of prompts in a graphic organizer or a journal prompt prior to classroom discussions. It is important to note that these types of questions and prompts can be used across content areas and academic conversations should not be limited only English language arts.

Types of Questions and Examples

Create Questions That...;

Examples

Focus students on key content concepts.

What was the Magna Carta and why was it important?

Explain how the author uses metaphor to enhance the story.

Draw a picture of the water cycle and explain how it works.

Allow for divergent and personalized responses, as long as they connect back to evidence in the text.

If you were a colonist at this time, would you have chosen to fight against the British? Why or why not?

How does our school community deal with waste?

Describe how acids and bases are used at your house.

Emphasize one or more thinking skills being developed in the lesson and unit. Thinking skills that come from standards include: questioning, interpreting, classifying, persuading, evaluating, analyzing, comparing, and synthesizing.

What were the results of the Industrial Revolution?

Come up with two questions about electronic motors.

What can you infer about the character's feelings from her actions?

Deepen understandings and focus students back to the essential standards of the text, lesson, and unit.

What does this have to do with our goal of learning the many ways in which different people helped in the war?

Adapted from: ALDNetwork.org (2013). Think pair share tips. Retrieved from http://www.jeffzwiers.org
In structuring group and pair discussions, it is helpful for ELLs to have their written ideas or notes for reference. However, it is also important to help students transition to being able to speak without the use of notes. As you saw in the video of Ms. Groves' class, she suggested that her students not always read from their notes. Similarly, this video clip of Ms. Brewer's class shows how sticky notes can be used to support student discussion. Sticky notes will help students hold on to their ideas without allowing them to rely too heavily on written notes in a discussion.

Use appropriate body language for discussions

It is important that students learn the body language associated with academic discussions. Zwiers and Crawford (2011) identify behaviors that are valued in school:

Appropriate eye contact (which can mean not constantly staring at the other person but also not always looking down, away, or past the other person)

Facing each other with the entire body

Leaning toward the partner

Showing understanding through head nodding

Appropriate gesturing (not rolling eyes, sighing, or folding arms)

ELLs may need some direct instruction in what is considered culturally appropriate body language for discussions in U.S. classrooms. All the while, teachers of ELLs should recognize and respect how ELLs might show respect and engage in discussions in their cultures. This video of Ms. Nguyen's 6th grade less provides an example of a participation protocol that demonstrates one way to teach students how to appropriately use body language to engage in a discussion. She includes the following criteria in her class' participation protocol: look at your partner, lean towards your partner, lower your voice, listen attentively, and use evidence and examples. As students are having discussions, she uses a checklist to monitor how well they are meeting these criteria.

Participate by taking turns

It is important for students to take turns speaking. In pairs, it is likely that turn taking will occur naturally. However, in a small or large group, a tool such as a talking rock or talking stick (a rock or a stick that students hold to "give them the floor" to talk) can encourage all members of the group to take part in the discussion. Students can pass the talking rock or talking stick around in a circle, and the student who has the rock or stick can take the opportunity to say something or pass. The rock or stick can also be placed in the center of the group and students can take it as they have something to say. In the video of Ms. Groves' class, we saw students pass around a talking rock as a way to support students taking turns and to encourage all members of the group to participate.

An additional way to encourage turn taking is to teach and model strategies for inviting someone into the conversation (e.g., Manuel, what do you predict the girl in the story will do next?)

Make connections to what others have said

Not only do students need to be able to share their own opinions by using evidence from texts or content material being studied, they also need to interact with the ideas of others. Modeling and providing ELs with key phrases can support them in their efforts to build on the ideas of others.

More specifically, Talk moves are the discourse behaviors that students need to practice in order to effectively engage in a discussion. Such behaviors include: restating what was said, agreeing and disagreeing, asking clarifying questions, adding to or piggybacking on what someone has said, and making connections between ideas.

In this video clip, the students in Ms. Simpson's class practice using talk moves in a whole group discussion during a math lesson. Students will need practice with talk moves before they are able to use them on their own in small groups or pairs.

In the video of Ms. Groves classroom, we saw that she had sentence stems that were easily accessible to support students' use of talk moves, and when monitoring the small groups she referred students back to these stems. Another idea for using talk moves would be for each student to have a handout or index card with sentence stems that can be used that students could have in front of them during discussions. The table below provides some possible sentence stems for specific types of talk moves.

Talk Moves Sentence Stems

Restating

So you are saying...;

Put another way, you are saying ...;

What I understood you to say is ...;...;

Asking a clarifying question

Is it your position that...;?

Could you give an example of...;?

I'm confused when you say...;

Could you elaborate?

Zwiers and Crawford (2011) also propose conversation mini-lessons that provide teachers opportunities to introduce a conversation skill to students and then have them practice it in a relatively short time period. Examples of possible mini lessons could include asking each other for supporting examples, building on a partner's idea, and paraphrasing conversations themes. Mini lessons should include opportunities to analyze strong conversation skills, teacher or student modeling, some type of scaffolded support (e.g., graphic organizers, sentence stems), and opportunities to practice and build independent skills.

Summary

We have shared a lot of information with you in this blog post! To help you keep it all straight, the following table provides a summary of the four student practices that support ELLs' participation in pair and small group work. We also define each practice and share the accompanying Teaching Channel videos that show you what the practice looks like in action. Most of the videos are the same as were mentioned above. However, there are also a couple of additional videos added that model the student practices.

Student Oral Language Practice, Definition of Practice, and Video Examples of Practice

More Resources on Building ELLs' Oral Language

For additional resources and videos on this topic, take a look at the following:

We hope these suggestions and supporting video clips give you some new ideas for group work in your classroom. Let us know what works well for your class!

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Using Pair and Group Work to Develop ELLs' Oral Language Skills

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In our last post, we shared information about the new Teaching Channel ELL video series based on Academic Conversations (2011) by Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford. This week we'd like to delve deeper into these resources and provide strategies for building the oral language skills of ELLs across content areas that are framed around four practices.

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Quizizz - The world's most engaging learning platform

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Find and create gamified quizzes, lessons, presentations, and flashcards for students, employees, and everyone else. Get started for free!

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Reflection of Chapters 1 & 2 of Scaffolding

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Reflection of Chapters 1 & 2 of Scaffolding

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Reflection on the article: What Does Research Tell Us About Teaching Reading to English Language Learners

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Reflection on the article: What Does Research Tell Us About Teaching Reading to English Language Learners

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Staehr Fenner, 2018

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Browse Educational Resources | Education.com

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Browse Educational Resources. Award winning educational materials designed to help kids succeed. Start for free now!

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SupportEd has developed some free tools to help educators and administrators better serve English learners.

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Teaching English Language Learners: What the Research Does and Does Not Say

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This thorough review offers a comprehensive summary of existing research on issues related to the education of ELLs. Dr. Claude Goldenberg focuses on two major reviews of research, one by the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, and the other by the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence (CREDE). Topics covered include: bilingual education, oral language development, reading instruction, curriculum, instructional methods, assessment, and accommodations.

Citation

Goldenberg, C. (2008). Teaching English language learners: what the research does - and does not - say. American Educator. Retrieved from http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2008/goldenberg.pdf

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Teaching English Language Learners: What the Research Does - and Does Not - Say

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This thorough review offers a comprehensive summary of existing research on issues related to the education of ELLs. Dr. Claude Goldenberg focuses on two major reviews of research, one by the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, and the other by the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence (CREDE).