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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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It sounds so simple, but if we as teachers put more effort into who we are teaching, more of the what would take care of itself.

- Katie, Elementary Teacher (Freeman & Freeman, 6)

When asking veteran teachers of English language learners (ELLs) to share the secret of their success, I usually hear the same answer. It is not the name of a particular language instruction model, learning strategy, or new district-wide curriculum. It is, instead, this: getting to know their students. As Katie observes in the quote above, it sounds so simple - and yet it is a necessary step that is often overlooked by teachers and schools at the beginning of the school year and as ELLs arrive throughout the year, leading to misplaced students and missed opportunities.

When these experienced teachers refer to "getting to know their students," it is true that they are referring in part to a student's English language proficiency, as well as strategizing the best way to assess the student's language and literacy skills with valid, reliable measures in order to place student in the appropriate classrooms. But they are also talking about much more than a number or language level - they are talking about prior academic experiences (or lack thereof), cultural and religious traditions, hobbies, personality, family circumstances, and background about the student's home community or native country that can inform their instructional decisions in the classroom.

This related excerpt from ASCD's February 2016 edition of Educational Leadership, which focuses on ELLs, offers more ideas for building productive relationships with diverse ELL families. While the full digital edition is only available to subscribers, a hard copy of this issue can be purchased from ASCD.

Gathering this information not only opens the doors to more fully meeting the student's needs and addressing challenges that may arise, but it also provides an opportunity to create a welcoming classroom environment, engage the student and family, increase the student's confidence, and create opportunities for classmates to learn from each other.

It allows teachers to build upon the student's strengths and successes, which is particularly important as students are acclimating to a new classroom and potentially a new country and culture. And it has the potential to improve classroom management and teacher interactions with the student as certain behaviors are explained and understood (such as not looking a teacher in the eye out of deference and respect).

This article provides some guidance on what information will be helpful to gather about your students, ideas on how to gather what you need and who will be able to help, and recommendations for useful resources. You will also find the video clips below useful as they contain valuable ideas from veteran teachers.

When you are done reading the article, scroll down to the comments section where we welcome you to share your own ideas on how you get to know your students!

Whom to ask?

Students

While it may seem challenging to gather the information you need from students who are still learning English, a little bit of effort can go a long way. Students' actions, body language, drawings, and behavior in the classroom can tell you volumes, even if they aren't speaking English yet. As their English improves, they will be able to share more through speaking and writing. Here are some ideas for ways to learn more from students (with special thanks to Becky Corr and Susan Lafond for their input!):

Start with "get to know" you games and icebreakers at the beginning of the year but don't stop there - keep looking for opportunities to allow students to share information about themselves throughout the year.

Ask a lot of questions to continue building that relationship. Ask about family members, pets, academics, sports, what they do outside of their school day, how they spend their weekends, after-school jobs and prom dresses!

Look for ways to build your student's trust. Share (appropriate) stories of your own about topics such as your family, pets, or favorite activities.

Listen to your students and let them know you're listening by the questions you ask. Tune in to what they are saying.

Take notice of changes and talk to your students about what you are observing.

You can also find ways to incorporate these topics into standards-based classroom assignments and discussions and continue learning about your students through their academic work. For example, you can give students the chance to write about their experiences through journals and autobiographical assignments, even if they start out with very basic information about themselves. (See Christine Rowland's video clip below about her autobiography assignment for her high school ELLs.)
In their 2011 book, Between Worlds: Access to Second Language Acquisition (3rd Edition), David E. Freeman and Yvonne S. Freeman share additional relevant ideas that teachers use when getting to know students:

Provide students with questionnaires that ask them how they feel about reading and writing in English, as well as about their individual strengths and challenges.

Have students interview each other about past schooling experiences and report to the group.

Ask students to submit writing samples and discuss them with students (p. 29)

Families

In addition to building a relationship with your students, meeting with parents, guardians, or family members (referred to as parents in the rest of the article) can provide you with a rich pool of information. If the parents don't speak English, be sure to have an interpreter available when you meet with them in order to make your time together as productive as possible; you may wish to meet without the child present in case the parents want to share any sensitive information.

Colleagues

Another important source can be found within your building - your colleagues. ESL teachers, bilingual teachers, guidance counselors, previous classroom teachers, paraprofessionals, parent liaisons, or other bilingual staff members might have helpful information about the student or about the larger community to which the student belongs. These individuals are often an underutilized resource within their building, so don't hesitate to ask for their input!

Community

Finally, you may also be able to find valuable information about a particular family or group of families from community members, staff from community organizations, or other parents whose children attend your school. These individuals are likely to have insights on language, religion, culture, or background information on a particular country or conflict. Building relationships with the community at large can also lead to other opportunities throughout the year for your students, and while you may be unsure of how to start the conversation, most people appreciate being given the chance to help their community.

Guidelines for Meeting with Families

In addition to making sure an interpreter is available, there are some important considerations that can help your communication with families go more smoothly.

Start by talking with ESL teachers, bilingual teachers, or family liaisons. Ask them for guidance on partnering with families to learn more about their students' experiences.

Once you have a little context, you may wish to set up a conversation with the family to learn more about the student's educational background. Explain that knowing a little bit more about the students' past experiences can help the school provide the right kind of instruction.

Take some time to get to know the family a little bit rather than jumping in with a lot of questions. Keep the questions focused on your student's schooling, unless the families wish to discuss other issues.

Some families will welcome the chance to share information about their child's experiences. If families are reluctant to answer many questions, however, don't push. Look for clues and continue working on building relationships that will create trust.

Keep in mind that some families may not be comfortable talking about certain aspects of their experience, such as their immigration journey, past traumatic events, or even their cultural identity and home language, as in the case many Indigenous families from Latin America.

While each family's situation is unique and it's important not to make assumptions, families from the same country or region may also share some experiences in common that can inform your work. Noting these trends can help the school partner more effectively with students as they get to know students' better.

Never ask questions related to immigration experiences. All K-12 students have the legal right to attend public schools regardless of immigration status.

What do I need to know about my ELLs?

Learning to Pronounce Students' Names

Taking the time to learn to say students' names correctly can make a world of difference. Read more about why it matters and strategies for learning to pronounce names that are new for you in our related resource section.

Focusing on the following questions will help guide your research as you begin.

1. Where is my student from?

This question may be easy to answer, but you may also find that it isn't as easy as it first seemed! Your students may have:

Recently immigrated from their country of origin

Recently arrived from a different country than their country of origin (as in the case of a refugee camp)

Been born in the U.S.

Moved frequently between multiple countries, such as the U.S. and Mexico

Moved around the U.S., as in the case of migrant farmworkers

Finding out this single detail will also provide your first clues as to the student's prior experiences with schooling, the family's socio-economic situation, and any previous traumas (see below for more information). To learn more about the dangerous conditions that children may experience on their journy from Latin America to the U.S., see this report from Buzzfeed.

Sources of Information: You may be able to learn about the student's background from students themselves, parents, siblings, the home language survey, or student records.

Once you know more, it may be helpful to learn more about:

Country of origin

Cultural and religious traditions

Political or historic situations that may be affecting patterns of immigration

"DOs" and DON'Ts" of social behavior and communication (Cary, 34).

It is easy to get overwhelmed, but focus your research on information that seems most relevant to your student and the family situation.

Recommended Resource: One useful tool is a set of books written by Jeffra JoAnn Flaitz about international students and immigrant/refugee students. Both books include profiles of the most common countries of origin for ELLs in the U.S. with information about culture, language, education, teaching styles, and classroom behavior. A sample chapter about El Salvador is available online.

Note: Since the books were written in 2003 and 2006, they may not have recent information about ongoing global conflicts or trends that are affecting your current students, although they will provide useful background information to more recent developments.

Classroom Ideas: You may wish to have students share information about their background with classmates through use of a globe, world map or class projects. You can also look for related materials such as children's books to share with the class and ways to integrate information about other countries throughout the curriculum so that students can continue to share information about their background as their language skills progress during the year. This is also an important step in helping students develop pride in their heritage.

Keep in Mind: Be mindful of what Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls "the danger of a single story" in her 2009 TED talk; in other words, when learning about another country, remember that what you learn may not reflect your student's experiences in that country. In addition, remember that students who speak the same language or who hail from the same country may not have all that much in common, and in fact may experience some tension if they come from different ethnic backgrounds or groups with histories of conflict.

For example, it is important to recognize the diversity within the Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. Spanish speakers may hail from Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Spain, or another part of the world! Students are likely to identify more with their nationality ("Salvadoran" or "Colombian") as opposed to the broader term "Latinos."

In addition, Spanish may be the student's second (or third) language if the student grew up speaking an indigenous language, such as Quechua, a language spoken in the Andes. Remember that cultural traditions and language vary not only across countries but within countries, just as in the U.S.

Vignette #1: Teacher Amber Prentice Jimenez learned this lesson when she discovered that two of her Somali students came from different ethnic groups that had been directly linked to the violence that led them each to come here as refugees, and she was very careful about managing their work together as the students became more comfortable with each other. Learning more about each student's background and the history of the conflict that had affected each of them helped her address these challenges.

Vignette #2: ELL education professor Stephen Cary shares the story of Lenny, a teacher who received a new boy, Ka, in his classroom. Ka told the class that he was from Laos and was "Mung" (as Lenny understood it). Lenny's first search on information about the "Mung" people was fruitless, until he looked for information on Laos and discovered information about the Hmong people. Then the floodgates of information opened and he spent hours online, reading about the Thai refugee camps where many Hmong families waited to receive permission to come to the U.S., as well as learning about the Hmong language and traditional Hmong beliefs.

Lenny's efforts were quite admirable, but he became so absorbed with what he learned about the traditional Hmong beliefs about sickness (as documented in the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down) that he when he heard from an uncle that Ka was sick and would miss school, he envisioned an "evil spirit, animal sacrifice, and shaman scenario."

As it turned out, Ka had strep throat, and the uncle reported that they "went to the hospital and got antibiotics." It was a wake-up call for Lenny, who was reminded that adjusting to life in a new country takes place on a continuum and may not be an all or nothing proposition. (Cary, 22-32)

2. What brought my student and/or my student's family here?

People move to a different country for all kinds of reasons. Those might include a new job, a chance to reunite with relatives, cultural exchange, political asylum, or escape from a war zone. For students who were born in the U.S., their parents or grandparents may also have come to this country for the same reasons. When getting to know a student, it's important to ascertain the situation that brought the family to this country to the extent possible.

You may learn that the family is in a very comfortable position and is enjoying the benefits of a new position or scholarship. You may also learn that the family has recently experienced significant trauma, that a parent or sibling is still living in a different country, or that the parents are working multiple jobs here in the U.S. and are not able to provide much supervision to their children.

You may also find, however, that students are afraid to talk about what brought their family here or where they came from. If questions about the student's past provoke anxiety, don't pressure students to respond. You may find the answer from another source or from the student in time.

Sources of Information: Some students or families may be reluctant to share too much information about their personal lives at first, particularly if they are unable to discuss it in English. With time, they may feel more comfortable sharing information with the help of an interpreter when they understand that your primary aim is to support their child.

You may also be able to learn more from community members or organizations who have ties to the family's country of origin. Did a refugee placement bring the family here? Is a new food processing plant opening up in town that is hiring workers? Is the family attending a religious institution where they are receiving support? Look for answers in your community, and keep your eyes and ears open in the classroom as well may to look for clues through the student's conversation, artwork, writing, or play.

3. What should I know about my student's family?

Some questions that may be helpful to answer about the student's family include the following:

With whom does the student live?

Is there a family member at home who speaks English and can serve as a primary point of contact?

Does the student have family members who are living far away?

Does the student have responsibilities such as caring for younger siblings or relatives?

Does the student have a job?

Are there any other stressors that may be affecting the student, such as financial difficulties, immigration status, pressure from parents, difficulty fitting in, or an unstable home life?

Sources of information: If the student is in a fluid situation (such as in a family of migrant farmworkers or in a family where the parents are separating), it might be difficult to determine where the student lives and with whom. Even if the basics can be learned, however, it may not tell the complete story. Nevertheless, it is important to know who the adults are in the student's life with whom you can begin to build a relationship, such as a grandparent or an aunt or uncle.

Some ways to get to know your student's family include:

organizing home visits at the beginning of the year

holding parent meetings in the communities where ELLs live so that it makes it easier for families to attend

looking for ways that parents can help out or volunteer in the classroom.

Keep in Mind: Even young students may have big responsibilities in their family; being aware of those responsibilities and establishing a line of contact with the families may provide an opportunity to find solutions together if those responsibilities conflict with the student's schooling or extra-curricular activities (think Ana's after-school job at her father's restaurant in Stand and Deliver!).

4. What language(s) does my student speak?

Learning about your student's home language or languages can be useful because you can:

Determine if the language is closely related to English (such as Spanish) and if so, build on those similarities with cognates

Find clues to the student's syntax, pronunciation, or communication style in English (called "language transfer")

Look for materials such as books or other educational resources in that language to have available in the classroom

Discover that an otherwise quiet student with "limited" English is in fact fluent in 2, 3, or 4 other languages! Such was the case of one of Michelle Lawrence's students from Buffalo, NY featured in the beginning of our Watch and Learn Story Set-up clip. She was very shy, but we soon learned that she spoke 4 languages, and we finally convinced her to list them on camera!

Sources of Information: You might find information about the student's home language on the home language survey, although it is important to take that information with a grain of salt in case the family is reluctant to have a child placed in ESL or bilingual classes. Speaking with the student and family in person is likely to give you a better picture of their language background; however, they may need more information about the kind of language instruction and its goals available at the school first before they disclose much detail about their language background.

Keep in Mind: Students who have been living in the U.S. may have moved between different kinds of language programs and classrooms even within the same school, and there may be significant gaps in both their home language and their English skills. As you learn more about their language proficiency levels, look for signs of both social and academic language in both languages in order to inform your instruction. Remember, too, that even if students can read in English, they might not be literate in their home language if all or most of their prior schooling was in the U.S.

Classroom activities: Once you know what languages your student speak, give them opportunities to teach their classmates and teachers words or phrases from their language.

Vignette: Stephen Cary describes the approach in Dolores Espinosa's K-1 class, in which students take turns being the "language teacher" for one week at a time. Students teach informal phrases to the class, which the students naturally incorporate into their interactions with each other over time. Native English speakers also have the opportunity to teach a heritage language of an earlier generation. Phrases are posted around the room, and a parent or relative will come in to do an activity with the class in the language of the week, such as a game or song. (132-133)

Not only does Dolores' approach provide a rich, multilingual experience for all students, it validates the student's background and identity, creating an opportunity to be an "expert" - a welcome break from being the one learning (and learning in) a different language all day long!

Recommended Resources: Jeffra Flaitz's books on understanding international, refugee, and immigrant students, mentioned above, include a guide to the linguistic systems of the featured languages as well as information about nonverbal behavior.

Additional information about language transfer for particular languages can be found in these tip sheets from Cengage Learning and MacMillan.

5. What kind of schooling has my student had?

This question may be fairly straightforward if a student arrives with a transcript or summary from previous schools, or if the student can demonstrate proficiency in other academic subjects such as math (even without advanced English skills). However, the picture may also be incomplete; records may not be available or the lack of information may reflect inconsistent, interrupted or limited schooling experiences, as in the case of refugee or migrant students.

Sources of Information: The student might be able to tell you about prior schooling experiences, but the input of a parent would probably yield more information. In addition, having another adult from the child's home country, such as an interpreter, school aide, or community member present may offer more context on a likely schooling scenario.

For students who have been in the U.S. at least a year, you may also be able to glean useful information from prior student records, portfolios, or teacher notes, particularly if the student attended your school the previous year.

What to look for: Useful information to determine includes:

Years of schooling

Types of school attended

Literacy background

Academic record

Prior English instruction

Any learning disabilities or special needs

Areas of giftedness

Favorite subjects

If possible, it may also be useful to find out about the student's school experiences; did the student like independent work or group activities? Did the student struggle with any subjects in particular? What was the student's behavior like?

Learn more: To learn more about other countries' educational systems, take a look at Jeffra JoAnn Flaitz's books mentioned above, which include detailed information on educational approaches, classroom behavior, teacher and student interactions, and how schools operate in the profiled countries.

6. What are my student's interests?

Last but not least, don't forget to find out about the fun things! What are some favorite hobbies, sports, and activities? In some cases, those activities may be a hook to student engagement, speaking more English or to making new friends - although there are no guarantees!

Vignette: In chapter 4 of his book (also available online through the Heinemann website), Stephen Cary shares the story of Cathy, a second-grade teacher who tried using her students' personal interests to engage them in the classroom. In the case of Erica, who loved music, some encouragement to look through the class CD box and write music reviews brought her out of her shell and provided a foundation for what soon became rapid language development; however, in the case of Gustavo, an avid soccer player, all of Cathy's soccer-themed activities fell short. Then over winter break, Gustavo made a friend who was also a soccer player, and his English took off (Cary, 53-55).

Even if your efforts don't yield big dividends in the classroom, though, knowing what those favorite activities are and talking about them with your students will show your student that you care about him or her as a person and that you see the student as more than an English language learner.

Sources of information: Look for signs of student interests in book selections, writing assignments, conversations, and artwork. Even if your student can't communicate very much about those interests at first, the signs may still be there. Parents are also an important source of information and will likely be happy to talk about the activities that their child enjoys when given a chance, such as in the case of Clara's parent letters mentioned above.

Concluding Thoughts

There is never enough time to do as much as you would like, and at first you may feel discouraged at all the information that you won't be able to learn. Nevertheless, taking some small steps may yield big results in your classroom and you will learn information that will serve you well when teaching other students in the future as well. Just remember Katie's message - if you focus on the who, the what will start to care of itself!

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Getting to Know Your ELLs: Six Steps for Success

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It sounds so simple, but if we as teachers put more effort into who we are teaching, more of the what would take care of itself. - Katie, Elementary Teacher (Freeman & Freeman, 6) When asking veteran teachers of English language learners (ELLs) to share the secret of their success, I usually hear the same answer.

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Throughout the year, literacy events and celebrations can be a great way to get kids excited about books. When schools celebrate reading, they send the message that reading matters and that it's fun!

However, it is important to plan an event that welcomes and includes English language learners (ELLs) and immigrant students who are learning to read in English and may have varying levels of literacy in their native language.

Fortunately, there are many steps planners can take in making reading events engaging and accessible for all students. This guide can help you get started, but the best ideas will be the ones that come from your own school community!

Literacy Celebrations: An Overview

What do we mean by "literacy celebrations"?

It's helpful to think about the kinds of literacy programs and events that happen in your classroom, school, library, or community throughout the year. These might include (but are not limited to) the following:

Book fairs and book distributions

Family literacy events

Kid-centered book clubs

Field trips

Reading events tied to other holidays and celebrations

Accomplishment parties

Annual literacy celebrations held nationally include:

(See more events on Reading Rockets' Literacy Calendar.)

What are some reasons students don't enjoy reading celebrations?

There are a number of reasons that ELLs may not enjoy reading events they attend, or worse, may find them stressful. These include:

Uncertainty about what the event is, why they are attending it, and what to do while they are there

Lack of confidence as a reader due to their ongoing literacy development

A lack of accommodations, such as information in students' first languages

A lack of books and activities that represent students and their experiences

Limited amount of reading genres and formats that ELLs can easily enjoy

A sense students have that "they are not readers" (which literacy expert Rachael Walker says is more common than you think!)

A negative experience at a literacy event in the past

An assumption on the part of students that these events are for "other kids"

A high-pressure reading activity such as a public read-aloud or book challenge competition with public results that increases stress levels

Uncertainty about "rules" for attendance and participation, such as whether students can take books home, whether schools and libraries are government buildings, or whether you must be a U.S. citizen to get a library card (you don't!)

Note: For additional barriers that impact students with special needs, which may include ELLs who are dually-identified, see our related article for students with learning and attention issues.

Planning a Successful Literacy Event

Step back and look at the big picture.

Whether you are planning something for your classroom or for the whole school, look at your curriculum throughout the year, as well as the school's existing calendar of literacy events and celebrations across grade levels.

Ask the following questions, ideally in discussion with colleagues such as the school librarian, an administrator, and other teachers and specialists:

What events do we hold each year and why?

Who participates?

How successful and engaging are these events for students?

What kinds of feedback have we gotten about these events in the past from students?

If we haven't gotten any, is there a way to ask students about their favorite / least favorite events from the past?

What kinds of events have students most enjoyed?

Are there any events that should be replaced or re-imagined?

Are there other possibilities that might better engage the students and families we currently serve?

Have we considered events that celebrate diversity such as Día or the African-American Read-In?

Are there students or community groups we'd like to see participate in the future?

Are there other holidays and celebrations that these groups observe that can serve as a bridge?

Have we taken the strengths and needs of our diverse learners into account when planning these events in the past? How can we do that more effectively in the future?

Are there barriers that prevent or discourage participation, such as transportation, child care, or work schedules? Are there some creative ways to remove those barriers that have not yet been tried?

Listen to kids' voices when planning literacy celebrations.

It's important to give students a chance to express their interests and preferences, whether at the classroom, grade, or school level. Get student input through:

student surveys

class discussions

activities tied to the curriculum such as an author study

Individual conversations may also be an effective way to get input from ELLs who prefer one-on-one interactions. Students appreciate the opportunity to express their choices, especially when it comes to reading! Explain to students that while you may not be able to implement all of their ideas, their suggestions do matter, will be taken seriously, and will help shape the event you plan.

Keep in mind that:

Smaller events that students can help plan may be more successful than big events. For example, students may prefer a skype visit or Twitter chat with a favorite author over a big school-wide book fair. Starting small may also lead to successes on which to build in the future. Find out what a successful event will look like to them. Their answers may surprise you!

Kids often like to talk about the books they enjoy and make recommendations, even if they seem resistant to reading what has been assigned. Kids can share their ideas in a book club, book swap, or "book of the week" pick for classmates.

ELLs may need some extra information and explanation about the event and its goals as you plan. Explain what kind of event you hope to plan and why students participate. Ask other students to share some highlights or activities that they have enjoyed from similar events. Providing this information will not only pave the way for students to provide more input, it will allow students to get more out of the event you choose (just as providing background knowledge helps students get more out of the lesson). At the same time, you will collect valuable information that can help inform your instruction and relationship.

Plan an event that has multiple activities, stations, or project options.

Offer students choices about how they will participate, and embrace a "choose your own adventure" spirit. Consider having different kinds of activities and stations that students can choose, such as areas where kids can:

be physically active

listen to or act out a story

browse through books and different kinds of reading materials

play games

do a project tied to a non-fiction theme

create a craft

participate in a maker project that involves some reading

talk and ask questions about stories and ideas that are being shared

Asking kids to sit still and listen for a long time without a chance to move around or ask any questions is not a recipe for success! Having students' input on the kinds of activities they enjoy will increase the likelihood that all kids will be able to find something they like to do.

Give students a chance to share their talents and experiences.

Offering students a chance to share a talent or skill or make a difference to others can be a powerful, positive experience because it can:

take the pressure off the "reading" part of the literacy event

build confidence and highlight the contributions and strengths of students, as opposed to their challenges or skills they have not yet developed (like learning English)

give students a chance to share their experience and represent the class or their school publicly

help others see ELLs and immigrant students in a new light and emphasize talents that others can appreciate and share

Consider ways that the event you plan will allow students to:

contribute their own talents and skills

highlight an important cultural tradition or experience

make a contribution to the school or local community as reading buddies or through holding a book drive

highlight their activities through a classroom newsletter, school website, or the local media

Include ELL families in the planning process.

Including and engaging ELL families around special events and celebrations can have a powerful impact. Collaborating with colleagues such as a bilingual parent liaison or ESOL specialist can ensure that you maximize your outreach.

First, think about how would you like to share information about the event with families. You may wish to talk about it informally or share it in a larger group setting. Sending translated information home is a good start but there should be personal communication as well. Your colleagues may have information on how families prefer to receive communication.

When sharing information about the event, share the same kinds of information you shared with students: what is the event and what will students be doing? Parents may wish to know if it's mandatory (particularly if it's after school hours). They also may be concerned about coming to the school or other public buildings out in the community.

Get input from parents on the kinds of literacy events that they think their children would enjoy. Parents may have ideas on their children's favorite books, authors, and activities - as well as ideas on the "not-so-favorite" list!

If you are planning to make this a family literacy event, survey parents about their interests and the factors that are likely to impact their participation in these events. Is there a topic that is of interest to multiple families? Are there other services at the school or library that may be of interest? It may be hard to plan a one-size-fits-all literacy event for families, but getting input on their interests and priorities is an important first step in hosting a successful event.

Look at ways to bring activities and services to families. For example, the public librarian can come to a school event to sign families up for a library card.

Engage community partners, volunteers, guests, and resources.

As you plan your activities and events, look for the people, organizations, and resources in your community that can be included in the event.

Volunteers: Look for opportunities to engage community volunteers and mentors (such as families, high school/college students or retirees) to read stories aloud, help with activities, or sit with a student as a reading buddy. Finding individuals that reflect your student population can help make the event even more positive, especially if they are available for an ongoing commitment. Individuals who speak students' languages may be interested in doing read-alouds in multiple languages.

Community partners: Look for community partners who can help plan events, organize outreach, and provide some kind of donation or contribution such as:

community organizations

local media outlets (particularly in other languages)

local businesses, restaurants, and sports franchises

institutions of higher education

your local library or bookstore

your local teacher's union affiliate

Community resources: Are there resources you can incorporate into your activity to help make it feel even more relevant to students? These might include:

A local author or a book about a local place, person, or event

Local storytellers or local celebrities

A field trip destination where the hands-on experience can inspire kids to learn more through reading (such as a family field trip to a museum organized by a Washington DC-based literacy organization, Turning the Page)

Book donations: You may be able to find a way to make books available for kids to take home through a literacy partner or donation. Learn more in our article, In Search of Free Books.

Review book selections that will be included in activities.

If books or stories will be read aloud at the event, include a diverse range of titles that represent the students' own diversity in terms of background, culture, language, disability, and other life experiences.

Look for mirror books, books to share in which your students will be able to see themselves.

If there is a theme for the event, look for books by a diverse group of authors on that theme and books that highlight a variety of aspects of the theme that will speak to different students. If you are having trouble coming up with related titles reflecting some diversity, you may need to broaden your search or consider a different theme that lends itself to more options.

Review book selections for sale, browsing, distribution and swaps.

If access to books and reading materials will be part of the event for students to either to buy, borrow, or keep, make sure to have a wide range of titles, genres, and formats available, including:

audiobooks

e-books

non-fiction, including biography

poetry

how-to books

maps and guidebooks

graphic novels and comic books

art and photo books

wordless books

newspapers

magazines

These formats can be especially appealing for reluctant or struggling readers. Ideally the selection of books will include not only ethnic and cultural diversity as well, but representations of socio-economic diversity, different life experiences such as adoption, and diverse representations of gender identity.

Help students with book selections.

Help students as they browse. Some students may welcome recommendations of new kinds of books; others may prefer to stick with old favorites or what's familiar. Don't limit a child's choice. Let them make their own decision about what to read. While there are opportunities to encourage more rigorous reading in the classroom, the goal this time around may simply be to build confidence and comfort; keep the stakes low and the level of fun high! And remember, a child choosing a book that seems well below his or her reading level has a reason - it could be an old favorite to revisit or it could be the chance to have something new to read and share with a younger sibling.

Look for reading "role models."

If visitors, volunteers, or special guests will be speaking with kids or reading aloud, consider the following:

Make an effort to include a diverse range of readers as well so that students can see various adults (and ideally some adults with whom they identify) participating in reading activities.

Ask your guests to share stories of challenges they have overcome regarding reading or learning a new language.

Ask your guests to talk about reading as part of their life: favorite books, what they like to read, reading habits, places they like to read, and what they find hard about reading. Kids may be surprised to know that adults struggle with reading too!

As appropriate, make your guest aware of kids' interests and abilities to help facilitate a positive experience for all students. (See more tips in this blog post from Rachael Walker.)

Don't force it.

If students seem especially stressed or anxious about attending an event, don't force it. Look for another activity that they can do during this time. If they are anxious about a class assignment related to reading, take time to talk with them about what is making them most nervous and how the plan can be adjusted to help them be successful.

Reflect, review, and revise.

After the event has ended, gather input from various stakeholders: most importantly, the students! Also talk with colleagues, families, visitors and guests, authors, volunteers, and partners. Find out what worked well and what didn't work well, and what was different than you had expected. Take notes in these discussions and talk about ideas for next time while it is fresh in your mind. Celebrate your successes, no matter how small, so that the next event will be even better!

Recommended Resources

Booklists

Classroom resources

Planning literacy celebrations

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12 Strategies for Creating Inclusive Literacy Celebrations for ELLs

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Throughout the year, literacy events and celebrations can be a great way to get kids excited about books. When schools celebrate reading, they send the message that reading matters and that it's fun!

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The Culture of Palestine: Palestine has a complicated and controversial history. It is believed that this region has been under 13 separate occupations, including the Assyrians,Greek and Roman Empires, and the Ottoman Empire. Following World War II, the area was controlled under British mandate. At that time, Great Britain began to establish Palestine as a Jewish homeland as part of the Zionist movement. This began much of the modern conflict that shapes Palestinian nationalism and patriotism today.

Palestine is made up of the Gaza Strip along the coast and sections of the West Bank, on the east side of Jerusalem. Some countries consider it its own independent state, while others do not. Even without recognized borders and sovereignty, the Palestinian people are passionate about their nation and its abundant culture.

The Culture of Palestine is closely related to those of its nearby countries such as Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Major aspects of Palestinian Society and Culture include customs, religion, language, literature, art, costume and music of the land and its inhabitants.

Palestinian Food and Cuisine

Palestinian staple foods include bread, meat, cheese, rice, sauces, soups and desserts. As expected, proximity to the Mediterrean influences the flavours of Palestine. Herbs and spices play a very important role in Palestine food - Za'atar is very popular and we recommend that you try it! Accompanying every mouth-watering dish are choices of beverages including coffee, tea, orange juice, Limonada and many more.

Palestinian culture revolves around food, from day to day life to weddings and celebrations, food comes into every aspect. Mealtimes are not simply about nutrition. They are often social occasions. Food culture in Palestine is about spending time with family and friends, showing generous hospitality to guests and making an event special. Most celebrations and ceremonies include food- from weddings to fast-breaking at iftar gatherings and Eid celebrations.

As in many other countries, there is strong national pride for the dishes and traditions revolving around food. Palestine is well known for dishes such as maqlubeh , kunafeh and many more. There are lots of sweet and savoury offerings. Although most Palestinians include meat in their diet, it is perfectly possible to follow a plant based diet here.

Languages Spoken in Palestine

Arabic is primarily spoken as a first language in Palestine, but many citizens also speak some English and an even smaller amount, Hebrew. Within the Arabic language however, there are numerous dialects. Palestine and its Arab neighbors (e.g. Jordan and Syria) speak a dialect from the subgroup of Levantine Arabic.

Modern Standard Arabic that is used throughout the Arab world and will also be understood in Palestine. During your time in Palestine you will probably find it easy to pick up a selection of Arabic words and phrases, this means that you will soon be able to greet people in Arabic! If you wish to study the Arabic language, we have several course options available at the Excellence Center.

The Palestinian dialect (اللهجة الفلسطينية)

The Palestinian dialect (اللهجة الفلسطينية) is the everyday spoken language and will be understood by the Palestinian people. Some of the words in Modern Standard Arabic are not really used in day-to-day conversation and some people may not understand the more formal language.

However, the Palestinian dialect is one of the closest dialects to Modern Standard Arabic. If you have studied this subject or learnt some basic phrases in MSA you will find that it is relatively simple to pick up the Palestinian dialect and also, your time studying will not have been wasted. In fact, learning the Palestinian dialect is a great way to build upon your knowledge and expand your language skills.

Religion

Palestine is located in the Holy Land for believers of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The religious populations in Palestine are, of course, Muslims, Christians and to a lesser extent, Jews. A modern estimate suggests that over 90% of the population identifies as Muslim, and the Sunni sect or division is the Muslim majority in the region. The Christian population is around 6% and the remainder are likely Jewish or secular.

Christians and Muslims in Palestine

Palestinian culture is based on not only helping family members and neighbors but also passersby whoever that person may be. A Palestinian person will automatically offer any possible help that they can. Despite their differing views, Christians and Muslims live alongside one another, which lends harmony to the entire area of Palestine.

This harmony imbues Palestine with a special beauty. An example of this harmony is the site of the Church of the Nativity and the Mosque of Omar bin al-Khattab, both sharing the same location in Manger Square in the heart of Bethlehem city.

Palestinian Culture and Customs

Much of the core of Palestine customs and conventions has been influenced by the prevalence of Islam and interaction with neighbouring countries. Close government ties between and immigration among Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and other countries of the Arab world have resulted in similar norms across this region. Palestinian culture in general is a rich array of contrasts from western culture and is unique and impressive.

Palestinian people are well known for being incredibly hospitable, and you might be invited to have tea or coffee with someone you have just met. Palestinians trust people very quickly and they enjoy meeting with internationals from all over the world and spending time with them.

The Palestinian philosophy is to take care of their guests whoever they are. will try to make their guests feel comfortable, treating them as if they have known them for a long time or as if they are part of the family. A Palestinian friend will invite you to go out with them often, check up on your regularly and be your friend for a lifetime.

Theatre, dance and arts groups

Despite the ongoing political deadlock, Palestinian society, through numerous NGOs, theatre, dance and arts groups, and with the help of an eager international audience and concerned activists, has been instrumental in this preservation, and for the traveler, ensured it has remained a part of any journey to the region.

The cultural life of Palestinians

The cultural life of Palestinians though did take a setback amidst the crushing burden that was the Second Intifada. However, with those dark days behind them, the famed resoluteness that is a part of being Palestinian ensured this was only a setback, and in recent times, the region has experienced a cultural revival. At the heart of this revival has been Ramallah, the de-facto capital of Palestine.

Being a slightly more liberal city than Hebron or Nablus, Ramallah has recovered from those days where many parts of the city were attacked by Israeli forces and were Yasser Arafat was put under siege and has since revived itself through a dedication to restoring Palestinian culture.

Now, while still a city with challenges, Ramallah bustles with the energy of a people determined to make a sustainable, vibrant life for themselves. With a constant selection of shows and performances mixing with resurging art and cultural scene, Ramallah has something to offer the culturally interested traveler.

Palestinians love an exchange of culture

Palestinians are eager to show the rest of the world their culture. They have not always had the opportunity to do so and are therefore keen to share knowledge and allow international visitors to experience their homeland. They will gladly engage visitors in many different family and cultural activities and celebrate Palestine. This will make your trip to Palestine full of amazing memories and enjoyable moments.

Locals not only wish to show you Palestinian culture but also they are equally very keen to learn of other peoples' cultures, get to know about their daily habits and how they spend their time. It gives them a glimpse into another culture and way of life.

Israeli Control over Palestine

It is known that the Palestinian borders are fully controlled by Israel which decides who enters and who does not. Added to this, Palestine does not have its own airport as the Yasser Arafat International Airport in Gaza was destroyed by the Israeli forces in 2000.

These two facts result in Palestine having fewer visitors compared to other countries that have control over their own borders, where visitors can visit more easily. Nonetheless, this makes Palestinians more eager to host internationals who come from different countries around the globe and they do so with open arms.

Palestinians are friendly!

During your time here, you will be surrounded by people who want to help to make your trip to Palestine enjoyable. You might hear them saying "Hello" or " Welcome to Palestine " or "How are you?".They will be keen to help you to find what you are looking for. All these greetings act as a sign of hospitality and eagerness. We are always glad to have you here.

Palestinians want to make sure that you feel totally comfortable and welcome on their sacred land and among their people, no matter where you come from.

Tara visited the West Bank in February 2020:

" I travelled to Palestine in February 2020, I was based in Abu Dis but travelled around most of the West Bank. The overriding feeling was that of being welcome wherever I went. The local residents of Abu Dis soon recognized me and were happy to chat, help me practice my Arabic and generally assist me in any way possible. They offered advice and expressed concern for my welfare, always being pleased to know when I returned safely from my excursions. Nothing was ever too much trouble.

The people I met in various towns and cities were all extremely hospitable. I was invited into a family home in Jerusalem, celebrated my birthday with a woman in Abu Dis who had her birthday on the same day, and upon learning that I work with and have an interest in horses, the organiser of our trip to Jericho arranged to include a visit to the local stables. I would recommend Palestinian hospitality to anyone! If at any time you find the intense hospitality overwhelming, just remember that Palestinians only want to ensure that you are well looked after, comfortable and make sure that you have everything you need."

Meeting new people in Palestine

Visiting Palestine is an exceptional opportunity for you to meet Palestinian people, experience their daily life, learn Palestinian Arabic and observe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict first-hand. Most importantly, it is an opportunity to significantly and positively influence the lives of Palestinians.

As you have read above, living in Palestine is totally different from living in Europe, the USA, Asia, South America or Australia. Life in Palestine is characterized by intensive social interactions, a spontaneous lifestyle (people and the way of doing things are not organized according to prearranged plans), hospitality and an eagerness to know about others and the wider world.

Palestine is culturally rich

Despite this though, suffice to say, that despite the occupation and the one-sided news that filters out of Palestine, the region of Palestine is as culturally rich as its people are welcoming and the land is beautiful. If a cultural experience is what you are after, you could do no worse than coming to this part of the world.

Final remarks

Your time in Palestine will be rich and rewarding. No matter how long you have to spend immersed in this culture, it will be time well spent. It is incredibly easy to engage in Palestinian culture and feel like more than just a tourist. If you take time to make friends and walk the unbeaten path, you will have more pictures, stories and adventures than you could have imagined.

Though cultural differences will likely exist, you will find yourself welcomed and appreciated at a home away from home. Most international visitors, interns, students, and volunteers adapt relatively easily to life in Palestine and enjoy a change of scenery and pace.

Finally, we encourage you to arrive with an open mind, be eager to learn and be motivated to participate in Palestinian culture. You will have a richer experience this way and leave knowing more about the Palestinian food, language, religion and zeal for life. We encourage you to document your experiences and share your love of Palestine with others. This helps to raise awareness and may encourage others to visit the West Bank and experience life in Palestine.

We are sure you will have a wonderful and unforgettable stay here in Palestine.

Any questions?

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact at Rafat@excellencenter.org

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The Culture of Palestine - The Excellence Center In Palestine 🇵🇸

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The Culture of Palestine: Palestine has a complicated and controversial history. It is believed that this region has been under 13 separate occupations, including the Assyrians,Greek and Roman Empires, and the Ottoman Empire. Following World War II, the area was controlled under British mandate.

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English Language Development

English Learner status is a federally protected class, entitling students to discrimination protection and educational supports. English Language Development (ELD) instruction is designed specifically to advance English learners (ELs) knowledge and use of English in increasingly sophisticated ways. In the context of the larger effort to help English learners succeed in school, ELD instruction is designed to help them learn and acquire English to a level of proficiency that maximizes their capacity to engage successfully in academic studies taught in English. Although there might be multiple goals for ELD instruction-engaging in social interactions inside and outside of school and in other pursuits requiring English proficiency (e.g., obtaining news, serving as a juror, voting, shopping, banking, and locating and using information)-we would argue that preparation for academic studies taught in English remains the top priority because of its relevance to school and career success. Helping ELs succeed in academic contexts is no doubt the most challenging goal and most likely the greatest need to emerge in recent English learner research.

Basis for English Learner Programs

Federal Law

The most important Federal laws establishing the rights of all students are set forth in:

The Constitution of the United States, Fourteenth Amendment (1868)

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that ". . . No State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Civil Rights Act, Title VI (1964)

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 declares that ". . . No person in the United States shall, on the grounds of race, color or national origin . . . be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Equal Educational Opportunities Act (1974)

The Equal Educational Opportunities Act makes educational institutions responsible for taking the necessary steps to overcome linguistic and/or cultural barriers that keep students from equal participation in instructional programs. Specifically ". . . No State shall deny equal educational opportunity to an individual on account of his or her race, color, sex or national origin, by . . . the failure of an educational agency to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by its students in its instructional programs . . ."

Supreme Court

In addition to the Federal laws, the following select court rulings further define the rights of English Learners:

Lau v. Nichols (1974)

In Lau v. Nichols (1974), the United States Supreme Court held that San Francisco's failure to provide supplemental English language instruction to 1,800 students of Chinese ancestry violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (42 USC, Section 2000d).

Lau establishes a district's obligation to provide English Learners with meaningful access to the educational program. When a parent declines participation in a particular formal language instruction program, the district must continue to ensure that the student has an equal opportunity to have his or her English language and academic needs met.

Castañeda v. Pickard (Texas, 1981)

While Lau was important in the development of the legal basis to defend the rights of English Learners, Castañeda has a special relevance, since it provides important criteria for determining a school's degree of compliance with the Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1974.

In the Castañeda suit, parents of Mexican American children charged the Raymondville Independent School District (Texas) with instructional practices that violated their children's rights. Reversing an initial District Court finding, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the Mexican American plaintiffs. It then went on to formulate a test to determine school district compliance with the Equal Educational Opportunities Act (1974). Compliance requires the satisfaction of three criteria:

Theory: The school must pursue a program based on an educational theory recognized as sound or, at least, as a legitimate experimental strategy Practice: The school must actually implement the program with instructional practices, resources, and personnel necessary to transfer theory into reality Results: The school must not persist in a program that fails to produce results.

Enforcement Policy

Office for Civil Rights (OCR) for the United States Department of Education

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is charged with monitoring school districts' compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It does not prescribe a specific educational program that will provide adequate learning opportunity for English Learners. Rather, each school district must choose a proven approach, or an approach that promises to be successful, and is most appropriate to its own needs, conditions, and resources. The OCR, however, requires that all programs carry out certain basic functions by which schools will properly identify students who need language services; develop programs that are effective in promoting learning; provide adequate teachers, educational materials, and physical space; and adequately evaluate students' progress.

OCR investigates complaints that allege a district's failure to comply with these requirements or with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Consultation with Private Schools
ESSA, Title VIII, Sections 8501 - Consultations with Private Schools

Identification, Placement, & Scheduling

Enrollment

When enrolling an immigrant who may have just recently arrived in the United States, district personnel face a number of key understandings. One such understanding is that English learners (ELs) are an incredibly diverse group. These students may be refugees, migrants, have limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE), be unaccompanied minors, gifted learners or students with disabilities. The students' educational backgrounds can be just as diverse. Some arrive having received quality education in their home country, while others have not. Some have taken formal English classes or have attended international schools where English was the language of instruction. The design of the enrollment process gather as much information as possible to identify the strengths and challenges the students bring with them to the school.

The second key understanding involves rulings by federal courts on a number of issues involving the rights of English learners in schools. One such ruling states that ELs must be provided equitable access to the educational program meaning any class in which they are enrolled. The court decided that it was insufficient to place students in classes alongside native English speakers without supports, accommodations, or modifications as the students are deprived of a meaningful education (Lau v. Nichols, 1974).

This guidance is intended to support districts with enrollment, individual career and academic plans (ICAP) and instructional and assessment strategies. This guidance further endeavors to provide English learners from across the spectrum a motivating pathway to graduation.

Identification

Additional information on screening students with the WIDA Screener or Newcomer Kit can be found on the EL Assessment - Identification webpage.

Opting Out Of Services

Note: A student who has been formally identified as and English Learner must be administered the ACCESS for ELLs annually until that student attains the State's definition of English language proficient. This is true even if the parent refuses the ELD services offered by the school.

Placement, Scheduling, and Graduation

SLIFE and Newcomer Support

Instruction

Curriculum And Instruction

With the development of the Missouri Learning Standards, and the accompanying MAP tests, schools have available both the state's educational goals and a means to measure student performance against them. ELs have a legal and educational right to schooling that assists them in meeting these standards. The following discussion of curriculum focuses on a few additional guidelines, which can help schools, ensure that their programs respond to the unique educational needs of linguistically diverse students.

The ELD curriculum used must be tied to scientifically based research on teaching ELs and must have demonstrated effectiveness, which involves the application of rigorous, systematic, and objective procedures to obtain reliable and valid knowledge relevant to educational activities and programs. Local school systems will use the Missouri English Language Development (ELD) Standards as a basis for developing their own curricula, incorporating a scope and sequence that can be adapted to their individual program requirements and their EL population. With the Missouri ELD Standards as a guide and through collaboration of EL and content area teachers, ELs are provided quality instruction that enables them to meet school expectations, perform well on mandated assessments, and become college and career ready.

All teachers involved in the student's education must pay attention to supporting students as they acquire both content knowledge and English proficiency (EL Toolkit, 2015). As always, district personnel must consider the characteristics and needs of the students as well as have specific training necessary to provide evidence-based support for ELs. Some newcomers arrive with an extensive, quality education in their home country. In some cases, these students have taken years of English classes. Students who have received a formal education in their home country may need minimal accommodations or modifications to access subject area content and will catch up quickly, especially those with a high level of literacy in the native language.

On the other end of the spectrum, the student may not have attended school for months or years. They likely have little understanding of English and may or may not be literate in their home language. Some speak a dialect of the home language that is unfamiliar to school personnel. Due to the variety of characteristics, ELs will need varying levels of modifications, accommodations and supports from all of their teachers to be successful. Resources and considerations to support students in all classrooms are available through the ELD webpage.

In addition to sufficient training, all teachers should be familiar with the student's English Language Proficiency Level as determined by the WIDA Online Screener or the yearly ACCESS assessment and are responsible for providing scaffolds and supports targeting the student's specific ELP level. These assessments allow teachers to make data-informed decisions to meet the students where they are and to take them to the next level.
Missouri School Improvement Program (MSIP)
Aligning the Curriculum MSIP 6 Standards and Indicators

AS1 - Instructional staff implement a comprehensive, rigorous, guaranteed, and viable curriculum for all instructional courses and programs aligned to the Missouri Learning Standards where applicable.

1. The school system's curriculum aligns externally to all Missouri Learning Standards and the English language development standards and internally between grade levels and courses.

2. Building leaders and instructional staff ensure the written, taught, and assessed curriculum are aligned.

3. The school system develops written procedures to ensure the written curriculum is implemented and is evaluated. Prekindergarten instructional staff are included when the program is offered by the system.

4. The school system implements a systematic plan for developing and/or revising the curriculum for all content areas.

5. The school system provides opportunities for each student to excel (e.g. gifted and/or enrichment, at-risk, special education, etc.).

6. Educators provide learning opportunities that are aligned to the district curriculum and have clearly identified and communicated learning targets.

It is critical that the content of these settings be aligned with the district's overall curriculum for the subject and grade level. Ideally, this is accomplished at the same time that the EL curriculum is developed. If the district's curriculum is aligned with state standards, then adapting the curriculum should maintain that alignment. Administrators can support this effort by allowing teachers and curriculum developers a time to meet and coordinate EL teaching with the regular classroom program.

Outcomes of effective curriculum alignment would include:

Content and language goals/objectives for each unit, topic or theme

Specific Missouri Learning Standards covered

Measures that are both formative and summative are used for evaluating unit, topic or theme

ELD Programs and Instruction

WIDA Resources

Additional Resources

ASL and ELs

Coaching

Collaboration

Distance Learning

Publications from the United State Department of Education and OELA

Tools for Teaching/Lesson Planning

Reclassification

Reclassification

DESE defines a proficient student as one who scores a 4.7 or above on the yearly ACCESS for ELLs assessment. Students must receive services until reaching proficiency unless portfolio data, as described below, provides compelling evidence to justify reclassification. Districts should exercise caution when considering changing the EL status of a student who has already been through the EL determination process, regardless of outcome. In the case of English language proficiency, It is recognized that such a high-stakes decision should not rest on one test score alone and consequently, the reclassification policy reads as follows:

Note: Students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) should meet the above criteria or have Individual Education Plans (IEPs) that specify parallel, alternate standards-based criteria.

Districts have flexibility on how additional evidence is gathered, the extent to which it is gathered, who collects and stores the data, and the final decision as to whether the evidence is sufficient to reclassify the student. ESSA has included provisions that scores on standardized content assessments (MAP Grade-Level, EOC) must not be considered when making reclassification decisions.

Districts should consider starting the data collection process early in the school year for students with an overall ACCESS score of 3.5 or higher, especially for students earning that score on the screener. Those responsible for the student's education should collect evidence from existing formative assessments, projects, formal reports or writing assignments. In the final quarter, evidence can easily selected from the portfolio to serve as a summary of the student's abilities and used to support what the student earns on the ACCESS for ELs when the performance reports are given to districts.

Student-created digital portfolios are an excellent strategy districts may use to minimize the burden placed on their teachers. Additionally, the effects of students knowing where they are in their learning and where they need to be have a significant effect on student achievement. Teaching students what the next steps in their English acquisition looks and sounds like and asking students to collect artifacts that show their improvement is an excellent strategy to meet the revised procedures.

Masking

The concept of masking refers to scenarios when a student's limited English proficiency "masks," or prevents school personnel from identifying other areas in need of attention or development. The following are common scenarios that can be "masked" by a student's limited English proficiency.

Student A has been in the LIEP for 5 years and has earned two consecutive scores in the 5 range on the ACCESS for ELs. However, the student continues to underperform in class. This student is potentially in need of a specific intervention other than ELD.

Student B consistently performs at the top of his class, shows remarkable leadership skills, creative thinking, and visual or performing arts skills. In other words, he shows the signs of a gifted and talented student, but is in an LIEP and is consequently not identified or assessed for a gifted program.

Student C is a long-term EL who consistently scores high on the ACCESS for ELs, but has excessive absences, poor class grades and consequently, an inadequate portfolio. This student continues in the LIEP because of poor content performance and most likely will not produce the evidence necessary to successfully complete the eventual monitoring period.

In each of these scenarios, the local district has the option to use professional judgment to provide the most appropriate support or interventions. District personnel may determine that a student may be exited from the LIEP when assessment information paired with objective data supports the decision that English proficiency is no longer a barrier to performing in a class where English is the language of instruction.

Misclassification

Misidentified as an English Learner

Should an issue arise, a district should first determine what evidence has been collected about the student's language background, both in the current district and any other district. Possible sources for this information include the student's academic record, the district SIS, and previous assessments.

After collecting all available information, the district should then decide if the proper EL determination has been made based on the data collected. Care should be taken to examine when the Language Use Survey (LUS) was completed and what screener information was used, as these data from a previous district may take precedence over screening in the current district.

If it appears that the full EL determination process has not been followed, or has been followed incorrectly, the district should complete any procedurally incomplete parts, and collect any missing data. The results of the complete process should be used for classifying the student's EL status appropriately.

Results of this investigation must be communicated to the parents/guardians, along with the final EL determination.

Misidentified as English Proficient

If a student is not identified as an EL but there is evidence that they may be, this lack of identification most likely stems from one of the following issues:

the LUS was not administered;

the LUS indicated that the student was not eligible for screening

If the student's parents/guardians did not fill out a LUS, this should be administered, and the typical process for EL determination should be followed.

If the LUS indicated not to administer a screener, ask the student's parents or guardians if answers on the LUS are correct, and ensure that they understood the purpose of the LUS, the questions, and that it was administered in a language they understood.

If the parents/guardians indicate that the LUS was answered correctly, the student should not be screened, and thus does not have English Learner status.

If the parent indicates that the LUS was answered incorrectly, re-administer the LUS, and follow the standard EL determination process.

Discrepancies Between LUS and Prior Data

If a new-to-district student is not identified as a potential EL on the LUS but a review of their education history shows that the student has taken an ACCESS test, districts should investigate this discrepancy.

Until a resolution to this discrepancy is found, the student should be considered an EL using the most recent ELP score from the ACCESS assessment. If the student's educational record is available, districts should determine how and when the error occurred. If the error occurred during the LUS process due to the parents' misunderstanding of the purpose or the implications of the LUS, the district should clear up any misconceptions, potentially reassuring parents about the purpose of the LUS and informing parents of their rights to refuse the type of EL services provided.

In some instances, students will arrive in a school without an educational record. Districts should communicate in a timely manner with parents/guardians, with and interpreter if needed, to understand the student's previous school history and previous language services.
Sample Resolution of English Learner Misclassification Form Sample Parent Letter
Long-term ELs

Another piece of evidence that should not be considered as a basis for transition is time in the ESOL program. Arbitrary program time limits as the basis for transitioning students from language support programs are not supported by language acquisition research or program evaluation. ELs should be transitioned from ESOL services based on ELP and progress in academic skills.

Too many factors contribute to student progress to make a single time period appropriate for all ELs. Several decades' worth of research on language minority student academic achievement clearly indicates that anywhere from five to ten years are needed for a given student to reach parity with same-age peers.

Even after being transitioned, ELs must receive two-year periodic follow-up to ensure that they no longer need ELD services. More information can be found in the Identifying and Reclassifying English Learners guidance document.

Additional Resources

Monitoring

Missouri LEAs are required to monitor all students for two school years after exit from LEP classification. Districts must keep documentation (state assessment scores, final ELP scores, parental notification) on file throughout the two-year monitoring period. Students in the monitoring period do not take the yearly ACCESS for ELs.

During this time, LEAs are to provide assistance or support in the general education classroom for all students who struggle academically. LEAs continue to have the responsibility of ensuring that all students are successful in meeting state standards. Occasionally, this means that a monitored student may need to be re-admitted to the ESOL program, if the student's academic problems are determined to be as a result of continued difficulty with their ELP.

For purposes of accountability, in the first year of monitoring the student is classified as LEP/MY1. The second year the student will be reclassified as LEP/MY2. At the end of the second school year on monitor status, districts will no longer be required to keep documentation on file showing successful performance in the general education setting. However, these former ELs will continue to be included in accountability measures for an additional two years. The codes used after MY1&2 will be LEP/AY3 and LEP/AY4. After the fourth and final year, students will be coded as NLP.

Reclassification document

Coding

The final step to reclassification is coding in MOSIS. ESSA allows for states to include former ELs in the accountability system for 4 years; however, only two years are required for monitoring. The additional MOSIS codes AY3 and AY4 are added to identify former ELs who have successfully completed the two-year monitoring period. Following the AY4 year, students would be entered as NLP. Please see the chart below for the codes needed for reclassification.

AY4

Academic Year 4 - Former EL students in the fourth year since exiting the program are no longer monitored, but recognized as a former EL in the accountability system.

Family

Family And Culture

The subject of family and cultural influences on schooling is far too broad to address adequately in a few resources. However, it is absolutely essential that all of the foregoing program considerations, from planning to evaluation, be framed by an awareness of and sensitivity to the diverse cultural expectations students and their families bring to school. These expectations can be easily overlooked as educators become engrossed in the program development and implementation concerns. One way to avoid forgetting who the program recipients are is to involve the parents and community in program planning and implementation. The remaining discussion indicates some of the ways school personnel can address the varied socio-cultural backgrounds of ELs and their families.

Resources

ELs w/Disabilities

Serving ELs With Disabilities

Considering program guidelines for ELs with Disabilities, as with other populations, one might expect to find a range of abilities among students whose English proficiency is limited. The difficulty often arises in determining whether a learning problem is related only to ELP level or whether the student has an actual disability. Students learning English, because of their cultural and linguistic background, have special instructional needs. When a student is having difficulty mastering specific skills, it is important for the teacher to differentiate the instructional strategies and/or instructional pace for the student. Just because the student requires accommodations to his/her program, it does not necessarily mean that he/she has a disability or that he/she should be referred to for a comprehensive evaluation for possible special education services.

If the student continues to have difficulty after consistent language differentiation and instructional interventions have been implemented, the student can be referred for a comprehensive evaluation if the team suspects a disability. The ESL teacher has training in English language acquisition and should be a member of the team considering the referral. The ESL teacher is also familiar with the usual rate and stages of acquisition, as well as the typical errors to be expected. Once a referral is made, a comprehensive evaluation is conducted. The evaluation team will determine if the student is eligible to receive special education services as a student with a disability under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

If the student is eligible for special education services, an Individual Education Program (IEP) is developed by the IEP team which includes required members as specified in the Missouri State Plan Special Education, IDEA, Part B. The IEP should address the student's need(s) for services based on the students' disability to be able to progress in the general education curriculum. If the IEP team deems appropriate, language assistance and support can be addressed in the present level of academic achievement and functional performance. If appropriate, ELs may be served through both programs.

If the severity of the student's disability indicates more special education services are needed to meet the student's needs rather than ESL services, the ESL specialist should work with school and district personnel to set up a consultative model for that student's language development.

The ESL specialist should meet regularly with the special education teacher and maintain a record of consultations. Missouri uses ACCESS for ELLs® as its annual English Language Proficiency assessment. Students who are in monitored status for EL do not take the assessment. Form D is used by the IEP team to address the student's participation with or without accommodations. For additional information, refer to: https://dese.mo.gov/college-career-readiness/assessment/el-assessment.

Resources

Missouri DESE

CCSSO

WIDA

Advancing ALTELLA
The Advancing ALTELLA: Alternate Assessment Redesign project applies lessons learned from research on successful instructional practices, accommodations, and assessment of English learners with the most significant cognitive disabilities to inform development of alternate English language proficiency assessments.

Culturally And Linguistically Responsive RtI2 Planning Form

Other Publications

Prof Development

Professional Development

DESE has scheduled free professional development opportunities for Missouri K-12 educators in English language development. Use the TeamUp calendar on the DESE Curriculum page to register and get more information.

WIDA eLearning

Show Me ELD

MELL

The MELL program is designed to use existing resources to better serve English Learners (EL) and migrant students in Missouri public schools. The regional Migrant and English Language Learner (MELL) instructional specialists help districts with the following topics

Title I-C and Title III funds

Professional development opportunities

EL/Migrant identification

Building capacity in educational programs and strategies

Assistance to LEAs in enhancing English language proficiency and academic achievement of ELs

Additional EL topics

Region 2:
Adair, Audrain, Benton, Boone, Callaway, Camden, Chariton, Clark, Cole, Cooper, Howard, Knox, Lewis, Linn, Macon, Maries, Marion, Miller, Moniteau, Monroe, Morgan, Osage, Pettis, Putnam, Ralls, Randolph, Saline, Schuyler, Scotland, Shelby, Sullivan

Reah Morabith
MELL Instructional Specialist
360-773-6704
rmorabith@missouri.edu

DESE ELD Curriculum:
MELL, EL Instruction, building capacity in educational programs and strategies, assistance to LEAs in enhancing English language proficiency and academic achievement of ELs

Cammy Goucher
ELD Curriculum Director
573-751-3926
cammy.goucher@dese.mo.gov

DESE Student Support Services:
Foster Care, Title III EL, Title I.C Migrant Education Program, Title I.C Immigrant Children and Youth

VACANT
Student Support Services Director
573-751-8280

Resources

Additional Resources

Certification

Gifted ELs

Teacher Observation Tools

World Languages

World Languages

New and unprecedented global challenges make the need for international understanding and collaboration more valuable than ever before. By providing students with pathways to develop multi-literacy and global competence, they will be prepared to engage in intercultural communication with cultures from around the world. Global influences within our state can only be enriched and enhanced by providing increased opportunities for students throughout the state to develop multi-literacy through the study of languages in addition to English.

All Missouri students should have the opportunity to develop proficiency in languages other than English, including their heritage language, and to develop global competence by demonstrating intercultural proficiency. This means that rather than being discouraged from enrollment in world languages courses, each and every student, including English Learners (EL), students living in poverty, migrant students, students with visible and non-visible disabilities, underserved students, Deaf and hard of hearing students, students with interrupted formal education (SIFE), Gifted and Talented students, and students with low academic skills deserve the opportunity to develop their skills in both English and at least one language other than English in order to prepare them to be college- and career-ready.
Learning a World Language

promotes an understanding of different cultures and allows students to connect with others and value diversity

increases the understanding of one's own language and culture

strengthens literacy in all subject areas

enhances and enriches life opportunities

positively affects intellectual growth

A well-articulated and properly sequenced program of study results in higher levels of proficiency which are demonstrated in reading, writing, listening, speaking, and presentational skills through performance of authentic tasks.

Understanding multiple languages and cultures can offer students professional opportunities and success in a variety of career fields and future endeavors such as graduate studies, education, Foreign Service work, business, social work, public service, law, journalism, and health professions. To promote such participation in a global society, the Missouri Seal of Biliteracy has encouraged and recognized students for high levels of proficiency in English and at least one additional language since 2017.

Missouri is now a member of the National Council of State Supervisors for Language (NCSSFL).

The vision of NCSSFL is a nation in which all individuals will be prepared for the demands of an interdependent world by attaining competence in more than one language and culture.

The mission of NCSSFL is to provide leadership in facilitating and promoting policies and practices that support language education.

The purpose of NCSSFL is to affect state and national policy and practice in language education by:

identifying and advocating positions on key issues in support of the vision of the organization;

collaborating with other organizations to advance and support quality teaching, learning and leadership;

communicating best practices across international boundaries; and

fostering and promoting the establishment, maintenance, and effectiveness of state-level positions in languages.

For more information visit: https://ncssfl.org

Resources

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English Learner status is a federally protected class, entitling students to discrimination protection and educational supports. English Language Development (ELD) instruction is designed specifically to advance English learners (ELs) knowledge and use of English in increasingly sophisticated ways.

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Theories of language development: Nativist, learning, interactionist | MCAT | Khan Academy

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The Home Language: An English Language Learner’s Most Valuable Resource

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In this article written for Colorín Colorado, Dr. Fred Genesee discusses the research supporting the importance of a child’s home language. In addition, Dr. Genesee explores the question of why an approach that is well-supported by research has been largely ignored in the era of “research-based” policy.OverviewWebcast: ELLs and ReadingLearn more about using the home language to support ELLs’ reading instruction in our Teaching ELLs to Read webcast featuring Dr. Genesee!The education of English language learners (ELLs) is one of the most important issues facing U.S. educators. ELLs are a large and growing proportion of the school-age population — according to National Center for Educational Statistics, in 2007, about 10.8 million (or 20%) school-aged children in the U.S. spoke a language other than English at home (Planty, Hussar, Snyder, Kena, Kewal Ramani, Kemp, Bianco, & Dinkes, 2009). This situation is not likely to change because ELLs are currently the fastest growing population in U.S. schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 2004), with the number of ELLs expected to increase another 50% by 2025 (Passel & Cohn, 2008).The importance of the issues goes beyond the sheer number of ELLs, however. It has been shown in numerous national studies and surveys that, on average, ELLs under achieve in comparison to their English-speaking peers in academic domains and that the achievement gap tends to increase the higher the grade level (e.g., Fry, 2007; Rumberger, 2007; McNeil et al., 2008). As we consider ways to help ELLs increase their academic achievement, then, it is clear that educators need all the resources at their disposal to meet these challenges.Policy and Home LanguageUntil recently, significant efforts were made to enhance the educational outcomes of ELLs by offering alternative forms of education that incorporate use of ELLs’ home language (Genesee, 1999, for a review). These programs were justified on the grounds that educating ELLs in English only posed a triple threat to their educational success since it would require that they simultaneously:learn academic English to high levels,master challenging academic skills and content taught through English,adopt new social skills that would permit them to integrate with their English-speaking classmates and teachers.However, in recent years, recent political and legislative initiatives that disfavor bilingual education have made these educational options difficult to access, despite evidence of their success (Goldenberg, 2009). Along with these politically-motivated changes, it would appear that educators and policy-makers no longer recognize the native language skills of ELLs as an important educational resource and, indeed, it would even appear that they discredit it having any role in the education of ELLs.What does the research say?At the same time that the role of the home language is diminishing in public education policy, there have been growing political and legislative expectations that educational policies and classroom practices be backed up by scientific, empirical evidence. With respect to ELLs, there is undeniable and growing evidence that the home language of ELLs is of considerable benefit to their overall academic success. There are multiple sources of such evidence. First, recent meta-analyses have shown that educational programs that systematically incorporate use of ELLs’ home language result in levels of academic success, including achievement in literacy and other academic subjects, that are as high as and often better than that of ELLs in English-only programs (Genesee & Lindholm-Leary, in press). In a review of these meta-analyses, Goldenberg (2008) notes “Readers should understand how unusual it is to have five meta-analyses on the same issue conducted by five independent researchers or groups of researchers with diverse perspectives. The fact that they all reached essentially the same conclusion is worth noting. No other area in educational research with which I am familiar can claim five independent meta-analyses based on experimental studies — much less five that converge on the same basic finding.” (p. 15).Second, in a study of ELLs in two-way immersion programs, Lindholm and Aclan (1991) found a significant positive relationship between individual student’s level of bilingual proficiency and their achievement in math and reading in English. Furthermore, the students who were classified as “high bilinguals” were able to attain grade level results by fourth grade in English reading and by third grade in English math.Third, a growing body of evidence from researchers around the world has shown that bilingual children exhibit significant cognitive advantages in comparison to monolingual children (e.g., Bialystok 2006; Chin & Wigglesworth, 2007; Kovaacs & Mehler, 2009). These advantages have been demonstrated in executive control processes related to selective attention and inhibition and monitoring of attention when, for example, children are engaged in problem solving.Fourth, and finally, extensive research, again from around the world, has found that children who are learning to read in a second language are able to transfer many skills and knowledge from their first language to facilitate their acquisition of reading skills in the second language. The best evidence of this comes from studies showing that students with strong reading skills in the home language also have strong reading skills in their second language. Much of this work has been done on ELLs in the U.S. (August & Shanahan, 2006; Riches & Genesee, 2006).What we see in the U.S., then, is a push for research-based policy but the creation of policies that contradict the research. Debate concerning the value of using ELLs’ home language in specially-designed programs, such as two-way immersion, will undoubtedly continue, and so it should since it makes little educational sense to diminish U.S. students’ opportunities to become bilingual in an increasingly globalized community.Back to topHome Language in the ClassroomIn the meantime, teachers and students can’t wait for these policy debates to be settled before deciding how or whether to draw upon ELLs’ home language. The question arises how can schools and teachers, even those who are monolingual, act on evidence that clearly shows the personal, cognitive, linguistic and educational value of using the linguistic resources that ELLs bring to school. There is no simple or single answer to this question, but a number of options are worth exploring that, at the moment, are often overlooked and discounted. Cloud, Genesee, and Hamayan (2009, Chapter 3) offer a number of suggestions:To encourage students to see connections between their languages and, thus, to better understand how languages are structured and organized, talk to ELLs about their home language — ask them:How is the home language the same and how it is different from English?Are there words in the home language that sound the same and mean the same thing in both languages?Are there words in the home language and English that sound the same but mean different things?As part of phonological and metalinguistic awareness exercises to facilitate reading acquisition, ask students:to say words that start with the same sound(s) in English or the L1.how words are changed and formed in the home language — singular and plural forms, present tense and past tense forms of verbs — to enhance their word knowledgewho are new to your class, to read books in their home language to show you what they know about reading.By using the collective skills and knowledge of all students (both ELL and English-L1 students) in the classroom, even a monolingual teacher can tap into these valuable language resources that ELLs have and do so with the confidence that these methods will promote their language development — in English as well as the home language.Back to topEducation for AllA hallmark of public education in the U.S. is respect for and appreciation of the individual skills and backgrounds of students as a foundation for furthering their education. Taking advantage of ELLs’ home language resources is asking no more than the same respect and appreciation for this group of learners. At the same time, parents, teachers, educational leaders in local school districts, and politicians should discuss how best to provide all students in the U.S. with high quality educational programs that promote competence in additional languages. At stake is not only the competitiveness of individual students once they enter the work force but, indeed, the ability of the U.S. itself to compete in an increasingly multilingual and multicultural world.Back to topVideo: Using the Home Language as a ResourceDearborn Public Schools ELD Director Rose Aldubaily discusses the value of using students’ home language as a resource. About the AuthorFred Genesee is Professor in the Psychology Department at McGill University, Montreal. He has conducted extensive research on alternative forms of bilingual and immersion education for language minority and language majority students. His current research interests also include language acquisition in pre-school bilingual children, internationally-adopted children, second language reading acquisition, and the language and academic development of students at-risk in bilingual programs. He is the recipient of the Canadian Psychological Associate Award for Distinguished Contributions to Community or Public Service and the 2-Way CABE Award of Promoting Bilingualism. Publications include:Genesee, F., Paradis, J., & Crago (Eds.) (2010). Dual Language Development and Disorders: A Handbook on Bilingualism and Second Language Learning, 2nd Edition. Baltimore, Maryland: Brookes Publishing.Cloud, N., Genesee, F., and Hamayan, E. (2009). Literacy Instruction for English Language Learners: A Teacher’s Guide to Research-Based Practices. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.Back to topAcknowledgementsOur policy section is made possible by a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation. The statements and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.

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Abstract

Building on earlier evidence showing a beneficial effect of bilingualism on children's cognitive development, we review recent studies using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods to examine the effects of bilingualism on cognition in adulthood and explore possible mechanisms for these effects. This research shows that bilingualism has a somewhat muted effect in adulthood but a larger role in older age, protecting against cognitive decline, a concept known as "cognitive reserve". We discuss recent evidence that bilingualism is associated with a delay in the onset of symptoms of dementia. Cognitive reserve is a crucial research area in the context of an aging population; the possibility that bilingualism contributes to cognitive reserve is therefore of growing importance as populations become increasingly diverse.

Why bilingualism?

It is generally believed that more than half of the world's population is bilingual [ 1]. In each of the U.S. [ 2] and Canada [ 3], approximately 20% of the population speaks a language at home other than English. These figures are higher in urban areas, rising to about 60% in Los Angeles [ 4] and 50% in Toronto [ 3]. In Europe, bilingualism is even more prevalent: In a recent survey, 56% of the population across all European Union countries reported being functionally bilingual, with some countries recording particularly high rates, such as Luxembourg at 99% [ 5]. Bilinguals, therefore, make up a significant portion of the population. Importantly, accumulating research shows that the development, efficiency, and decline of crucial cognitive abilities are different for bilinguals than for monolinguals. What are these cognitive differences and how does bilingualism lead to these changes?

The context for examining how bilingualism affects cognitive ability is functional neuroplasticity, the study of how experience modifies brain structure and brain function. Such modifications have been found following experiences as diverse as juggling [ 6], video-game playing [ 7], careers in architecture [ 8] taxi-driving [ 9], and musical training [ 10, 11]. Bilingualism is different from all of these: like juggling and playing video games it is intense, and like architecture and driving taxis in London it is sustained, but unlike these experiences, bilinguals are not typically pre-selected for talent or interest. Although bilinguals undoubtedly differ from monolinguals in certain ways, they generally did not choose bilingualism. Rather, the circumstances of their family, place of birth, or immigration history simply required that they learn more than one language.

What is different about bilingual minds?

It has long been assumed that childhood bilingualism affected developing minds but the belief was that the consequences for children were negative: learning two languages would be confusing [ 12]. A study by Peal and Lambert [ 13] cast doubt on this belief by reporting that children in Montreal who were either French-speaking monolinguals or English-French bilinguals performed differently on a battery of tests. The authors had expected to find lower scores in the bilingual group on language tasks but equivalent scores in nonverbal spatial tasks, but instead found that the bilingual children were superior on most tests, especially those requiring symbol manipulation and reorganization. This unexpected difference between monolingual and bilingual children was later explored in studies showing a significant advantage for bilingual children in their ability to solve linguistic problems based on understanding such concepts as the difference between form and meaning, that is, metalinguistic awareness [ 14- 20] and nonverbal problems that required participants to ignore misleading information [ 21, 22].

Research with adult bilinguals built on these studies with children and reported two major trends. First, a large body of evidence now demonstrates that the verbal skills of bilinguals in each language are generally weaker than are those for monolingual speakers of each language. Considering simply receptive vocabulary size, bilingual children [ 23] and adults [ 24] control a smaller vocabulary in the language of the community than do their monolingual counterparts. On picture-naming tasks, bilingual participants are slower [ 25- 28] and less accurate [ 29, 30] than monolinguals. Slower responses for bilinguals are also found for both comprehending [ 31] and producing words [ 32], even when bilinguals respond in their first and dominant language. Finally, verbal fluency tasks are a common neuropsychological measure of brain functioning in which participants are asked to generate as many words as they can in 60 seconds that conform to a phonological or semantic cue. Performance on these tasks reveals systematic deficits for bilingual participants, particularly in semantic fluency conditions [ 33- 37], even if responses can be provided in either language [ 38]. Thus, the simple act of retrieving a common word is more effortful for bilinguals.

In contrast to this pattern, bilinguals at all ages demonstrate better executive control than monolinguals matched in age and other background factors. Executive control is the set of cognitive skills based on limited cognitive resources for such functions as inhibition, switching attention, and working memory [ 39]. Executive control emerges late in development and declines early in aging, and supports such activities as high level thought, multi-tasking, and sustained attention. The neuronal networks responsible for executive control are centered in the frontal lobes, with connections to other brain regions as necessary for specific tasks. In children, executive control is central to academic achievement [ 40], and in turn, academic success is a significant predictor of long term health and well being [ 41]. In a recent meta-analysis, Adesope et al. [ 42] calculated medium to large effect sizes for the executive control advantages in bilingual children and Hilchey and Klein [ 43] summarized the bilingual advantage over a large number of studies with adults. This advantage has been shown to extend into older age and protect against cognitive decline [ 25, 44, 45], a point we return to below.

In this review, we examine the evidence for bilingual advantages in executive control and explore the possible mechanisms and neural correlates that may help to explain them. Our conclusion is that lifelong experience in managing attention to two languages reorganizes specific brain networks, creating a more effective basis for executive control and sustaining better cognitive performance throughout the lifespan.

Language Processing in Bilinguals

Joint activation of languages

A logical possibility for the organization of a bilingual mind is that it consists of two independently-represented language systems that are uniquely accessed in response to the context: A fluent French-English bilingual ordering coffee in a Parisian café has no reason to consider how to form the request in English, and a Cantonese-English bilingual studying psychology in Boston does not need to recast the material through Chinese. Yet, substantial evidence shows that this is not how the bilingual mind is organized. Instead, fluent bilinguals show some measure of activation of both languages and some interaction between them at all times, even in contexts that are entirely driven by only one of the languages.

The evidence for this conclusion comes from psycholinguistic studies using such tasks as cross-language priming (in which a word in one language facilitates retrieval of a semantically related word in the other language) and lexical decision (in which participants decide whether a string of letters is a legal word in one of the languages) that show the influence of the currently unused language for both comprehension and production of speech [ 46- 52]. Further evidence comes from patient studies showing intrusions from the irrelevant language or inappropriate language switches [ 53], and imaging studies indicating involvement of the non-target language while performing a linguistic task in the selected language [ 54- 56]. Using eye-tracking technology, for example, Marian, Spivey, and Hirsch [ 57] reported that English-Russian bilinguals performing a task in English in which they had to look at the named picture from four alternatives were distracted by a picture whose name shared phonology with Russian even though there was no connection to the meaning of the target picture and no contextual cues indicating that Russian was relevant. Similarly, Thierry and Wu [ 58] presented English monolinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals, and Chinese monolinguals with pairs of words in English (translated to Chinese for Chinese monolinguals) and asked participants to decide if the words were semantically related or not. The manipulation was that half of the pairs contained a repeated character in the written Chinese forms, even though that orthographic feature was unrelated to the English meaning. Waveforms derived from analyses of electroencephalography (EEG) are used to indicate the neuronal response to language on a millisecond by millisecond scale. This event-related potential (ERP) signals the effort associated with integrating the meaning of words in a negative waveform about 400 milliseconds after the stimulus, a waveform called the N400. The more similar the words are to each other, the smaller is the amplitude of the N400. In the study by Thierry and Wu, semantic relatedness was associated with significantly smaller N400 amplitude in all groups as expected, but the repeated character also led to smaller N400 for the two Chinese groups. Thus, although irrelevant to the task, participants were accessing the Chinese forms when making judgments about the semantic relation between English words. Subsequent research has refined these results by showing their basis in the phonology rather than the orthography of spoken language [ 59] and extended the phenomenon to the phonological hand forms of American Sign Language [ 60].

This joint activation is the most likely mechanisms for understanding the consequences of bilingualism for both linguistic and nonlinguistic processing. For linguistic processing, joint activation creates an attention problem that does not exist for monolinguals: In addition to selection constraints on such dimensions as register, collocation, and synonymy, the bilingual speaker also has to select the correct language from competing options. Although joint activation creates a risk for language interference and language errors, these rarely occur, indicating that the selection of the target language occurs with great accuracy. However, this need to select at the level of language system makes ordinary linguistic processing more effortful for bilinguals than monolinguals and explains some of the costs in psycholinguistic studies described above. For nonlinguistic processing, the need to resolve competition and direct attention is primarily the responsibility of general cognitive systems, in particular executive functions. The possible influence of linguistic processes on nonlinguistic executive control has enormous consequences for lifespan cognition and is discussed in the next section.

Consequences of joint activation

Cognitive networks in bilinguals

Bilingual performance on conflict tasks

Early evidence that bilingual children solved nonverbal conflict tasks differently from monolingual children was reported in a study by Bialystok and Majumder [ 21]. Eight-year-old children were given a variety of nonverbal problems to solve, some of which contained perceptual distraction (block design from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) [ 71] and some which did not (Noelting's Juice Task [ 72, 73]). Bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on the conflict tasks, but children in the two groups were comparable on tasks that did not include distracting perceptual information. This pattern has been confirmed in studies of both children and adults using a flanker task (children: [ 74, 75]), theory of mind task (children: [ 76, 77]; adults: [ 78]), Simon task (children: [ 79]; adults: [ 44]). Other studies with adults have shown better performance by bilinguals in naming the font color in a Stroop task [ 25], smaller costs in task switching [ 80], better ability to maintain task set in an attention task [ 81], and more susceptibility to negative priming, presumably because of greater inhibition [ 82].

Some studies have extended these bilingual advantages into older age. Bialystok, Craik, Klein and Viswanathan [ 44] reported an experiment in which middle-aged and older adults who were either monolingual or bilingual were given a version of the Simon task. Participants were shown either a green or a red square on each trial, and the task was to press an associated response key as rapidly as possible. The keys were located at each side of the presentation screen. In one condition, the squares appeared centrally on the screen, so there was no spatial conflict between the location of stimuli and responses; in this condition there were no reaction-time (RT) differences between language groups. In a second condition, the colored squares appeared laterally on the screen, either directly above the appropriate response key (congruent condition) or on the other side of the screen, above the incorrect response key (incongruent condition). The RT difference between congruent and incongruent response trials (the Simon effect) is a measure of attentional control. Bilinguals produced smaller Simon effects than monolinguals at all ages.

Three other results from this study are noteworthy. First, the decrease in attentional control in older adults was reduced in the bilingual groups, suggesting that bilingualism may be protective against the effects of cognitive aging. Second, whereas a bilingual advantage was expected for incongruent stimuli, it was also found for congruent stimuli. This result has been replicated in subsequent studies [ 43] and is difficult to account for in terms of response conflict or inhibition. Third, prolonged practice reduced both the Simon effect and the size of the bilingual advantage. Apparently all participants can learn to disregard the distracting effects of interfering stimuli given sufficient practice on a task, but it seems that bilinguals can learn this type of inhibition more rapidly. One interesting question in this regard is the extent to which this attenuation of attentional control is specific to the practiced situation, or whether it generalizes to tasks tapping attentional control in a different manner. Our conjecture is that the attenuation effect is context specific.

A complication that has emerged as more results are reported is that the bilingual advantage is not always found in samples of young adults. For example, a study examining performance on the Simon task in 5-year-olds, young, middle-aged and older adults found a bilingual advantage in RT in the 5-year-olds and in the older adults, but not in the young adult group [ 83]. Similarly, a study of the Stroop effect in younger and older adults found a bilingual advantage in both age groups but when the same participants performed the Simon arrow task the bilingual advantage was found only in the older adults [ 25]. Similarly, Salvatierra and Rosselli [ 45] used a simple version of the Simon task and reported a bilingual advantage for older but not younger adults. There is thus some evidence that the bilingual advantage is greatest in children and in older adults, but less constantly present in young adults - perhaps because the young adult group is at the developmentally peak age for cognitive control.

It appears that bilingual advantages for young adults tend to emerge on tasks or conditions that are difficult. For example, Bialystok [ 84] found that bilingual young adults outperformed their monolingual counterparts on the directional arrow Simon task, but only on the condition that included more monitoring and switching than a simpler condition. Similarly, several studies by Costa and colleagues have reported a bilingual advantage in young adults [ 75, 85, 86] but only under some conditions. For example, Costa et al. [ 85] demonstrated that the bilingual advantage on a flanker task held only under high monitoring conditions. In versions where most of the trials were of one type (congruent or incongruent) no bilingual advantage was observed; the advantage was found, however, in a condition involving 25% incongruent and 75% congruent trials, although even there the advantage decreased over blocks of the experiment (cf., [ 44]). Costa et al. [ 85] concluded that the bilingual advantage reflects a more efficient monitoring system for conflict resolution, in that bilinguals may be better at determining when the misleading information can be safely ignored. Finally, Hernández et al. [ 86] used a nonlinguistic version of the Stroop effect and found a trend towards both reduced interference and enhanced facilitation in young adult bilinguals compared with monolinguals (cf., older participants in [ 25]). One interesting aspect of the studies by Costa, Hernández and colleagues is that the monolinguals were Spanish speakers and the bilinguals' two languages were Catalan and Spanish. Most of the participants were undergraduate students and were not immigrants, so the two groups were well equated apart from the language difference. In summary, the evidence for a bilingual advantage in younger adults is more sporadic than in other age groups, although at all ages there are some reports of studies showing no difference between monolinguals and bilinguals performing a conflict task.

Neural correlates of cognitive reorganization

Recently, studies have begun to investigate the neural correlates of bilingual processing examined in the behavioral research. The majority of this research has used fMRI to study bilinguals performing a linguistic task in their two languages. Typically, participants name pictures or generate words in response to a cue signaling the required language and performance is compared for single language and mixed language conditions. Two early studies revealed promising results. The first led to the surprising finding that language switching was accompanied by activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), an area known to be part of the general executive control system [ 28]. Less surprising was a study showing the involvement of Broca's area as well as a left frontal area in a language switching task [ 87]. Subsequent research has corroborated the involvement of these systems and shown that language switching elicits a spatially-distributed activation pattern involving bilateral frontal regions, bilateral precentral areas, bilateral caudate, bilateral (or midline) pre-supplementary areas (pre-SMA), and bilateral temporal regions. This pattern has been found for German-French bilinguals [ 88], Spanish-Catalan bilinguals [ 89], Chinese-English bilinguals [ 65, 90, 91] and Spanish-English bilinguals [ 92]. A few studies [ 65, 88] have also reported activation in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), but activation in this area is not consistently observed. Abutalebi and colleagues [ 93] extended this finding to show activation of ACC for both language switching and nonverbal switching. Importantly, these studies confirm that frontal systems involved in executive control are recruited by bilinguals to manage attention to language.

Figure 1.

Bilingual influence on brain function and structure. Transparent brains showing the left and right hemispheres. Green voxels depict grey matter regions showing high activation during bilingual language switching in a meta-analysis ( 94). Red-yellow voxels indicate regions of higher white matter integrity in bilingual older adults relative to monolinguals ( 111). Together, the functional and structural data indicate that neural correlates of bilingualism are observed in the frontal lobes, generally responsible for higher cognition such as executive functions.

Taken together, fMRI research on bilingual language switching has implicated distributed cortical activation that converges in the frontal regions. Intriguingly, the brain regions related to bilingual switching are also critical for general attention and cognitive control [ 97, 98]. This overlap in brain regions activated for bilingual switching and cognitive control implies that the same mechanisms may be involved in both activities, and that these shared processes might help to explain the superior performance of bilinguals on nonverbal conflict tasks. In other words, using these cognitive control networks for bilingual language processing may reconfigure them for other purposes, providing part of the explanation for the behavioral differences between monolinguals and bilinguals found in nonverbal conflict tasks. Specifically, the evidence suggests that cognitive control networks may be more broadly based in bilinguals as a result of their dual function. However, fMRI studies on language switching in bilinguals can only show that these networks are included in bilingual language selection. Determining whether or not such reconfiguration occurs can only be evaluated by comparing monolinguals and bilinguals performing nonverbal conflict tasks. The hypothesis is that monolinguals and bilinguals will perform nonverbal control problems using somewhat different networks, specifically, that the network used by bilinguals will be more broadly based.

Only a few studies have contrasted the neural correlates of non-linguistic cognitive control in bilinguals and monolinguals. Garbin and colleagues [ 99] gave a color-shape switching task to Spanish monolingual and Spanish-Catalan bilingual young adults in fMRI. A bivalent stimulus (e.g., a red circle) and a cue (e.g., "color" or "shape") were shown, and participants responded to the indicated dimension. Both RT of switch costs and accuracy favored the bilingual participants but activation patterns were also different for the two groups: monolinguals showed increased activation in the right IFG, whereas bilinguals showed increased activation in left inferior frontal gyrus. More interestingly, higher levels of activation in left IFG and left striatum were associated with smaller switch costs for the bilingual participants, but increased activation in the right IFG was associated with larger switch costs. In light of the lack of switching effect in the behavioral data, it is possible that the bilinguals relied more on the left IFG and striatum in face of the demand to switch between responses associated with a bivalent stimulus. The left IFG was identified in both the qualitative [ 94] and quantitative [ 95] meta-analyses of bilingual language switching. This region is central to speech production [ 100] and has been shown to have higher activation for bilinguals than monolinguals during speech production [ 101, 102]. Thus, left IFG appears to be one of the overlapping brain regions in bilinguals handling both language switching and non-linguistic cognitive control.

A study by Luk and colleagues [ 103] used an adaptation of a flanker task to compare activation in monolingual and bilingual participants. The stimuli consisted of a string of five chevrons, and the task was to indicate the direction of the red one (that could appear in one of three positions) while ignoring the four black ones. In a previous behavioral study with these stimuli, bilinguals performed this task more rapidly than monolinguals [ 104]. The fMRI data were analyzed using a multivariate statistical technique for neuroimaging data (Partial Least Squares; for review, see [ 105]) to identify integrated neural networks. The results showed that monolinguals and bilinguals recruited different neural networks for both congruent and incongruent trials. Another condition that tested 'no-go' responses indicated no difference between groups. Importantly, greater activity in the bilingual network, including areas identified in the meta-analysis [ 95], was related to smaller RT costs for incongruent trials. There are two implications of these results. First, bilingualism alters functional neural network at the response-selection level (congruent and incongruent trials), but not at the motor execution level (response inhibition no-go trials), a pattern consistent with previous results for both adults [ 106] and children [ 79, 107]. Second, bilinguals showed a brain-behavior correlation when suppressing interference from conflicting flankers, replicating a previous study using magnetoencephalography (MEG) [ 108].

Although bilingualism is a language experience, managing attention to two languages imposes demands on the cognitive system that require brain regions not typically used for language processing. From studies of bilingual language switching and non-linguistic cognitive control, and from the meta-analysis cited earlier, it seems likely that the neural locus of cognitive control in bilinguals lies in bilateral frontal regions. In order to facilitate information transfer between the hemispheres, it is also possible that prolonged bilingual experience alters anatomical structures in addition to cortical functional networks. Cortical activity assessed by fMRI is limited to blood-oxygenated-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the grey matter. However, when investigating domain-general neural changes (cognitive control) in response to domain-specific experience (bilingualism), it is important to use methods that allow not only the identification of functional networks but also their underlying anatomical structures [ 109, 110].

Nature of the bilingual advantage

Why might bilingualism be associated with an advantage in attentional control? The need to manage two jointly activated languages apparently leads to an enhancement of frontal-posterior attentional control mechanisms with the consequence that other types of cognitive control are also enhanced. Inhibitory control was suggested as the relevant mechanism in early studies [ 44, 61] and continues to be endorsed by some researchers [ 51, 115]. One problem with this account, however, is the recurrent finding of a bilingual advantage in congruent trials (for which there is no conflict) as well as incongruent trials [ 44, 75]. Minimally, therefore, inhibition alone is insufficient to explain bilingual processing differences. The inhibition view is also challenged by evidence from preverbal infants who demonstrate early effects of bilingualism but for whom language inhibition is not a plausible explanation ( Box 1).

Box 1: Bilingualism in infancy.

Research with infants being raised in bilingual homes has produced dramatic evidence for very early effects of bilingualism and challenges some standard explanations for the mechanism underlying these effects. It has long been known that children being raised with two languages do not confuse the languages when learning to speak, even though they may borrow from one when speaking the other [ 131]. It is also well known that monolingual infants lose the ability to make phonetic discriminations not present in their language by about 10-months old whereas bilingual infants continue to distinguish between phonetic categories relevant to all languages. Thus, it is not surprising that bilingual infants can differentiate between their two languages essentially from birth [ 132]. What is surprising, however, is the extension of this discrimination to non-acoustic properties of language. Weikum and colleagues [ 133] showed silent video clips to 8-month old infants who were being raised in homes that were either monolingual English or English-French bilingual. Using a habituation paradigm, the speaker switched languages after habituation and the researchers measured whether or not infants regained interest. The results showed renewed attention among the bilingual but not the monolingual infants. To determine whether the bilingual infants had learned about the facial structures that accompany each language or something more general, the same materials were presented to monolingual Spanish (or Catalan) infants and bilingual Spanish-Catalan infants [ 134]. Again, only the bilingual infants noticed the change in language, even though the children in this study had no experience with either language. The authors concluded that bilingualism enhances general perceptual attentiveness through the experience of attending to two sets of visual cues.

This enhanced perceptual attentiveness may help explain the results of a study in which 7-month old monolingual and bilingual infants learned a head-turn response to a cue to obtain a visual reward and then had to replace that with a competing response for the same reward [ 135]. Again, only the bilingual infants could learn the new response. Even before children have productive language ability, the experience of building two distinct representational systems endows them with greater perceptual and attentional resources than their monolingual peers. In light of such evidence for bilingual advantages in the first year of life, explanations for the mechanism responsible for the advantages found later may need to be reconsidered to include a role for such perceptual processes.

An alternative to inhibition is to consider the demands imposed by a mixed set of congruent and incongruent trials: there is always some probability that the next display may be an incongruent trial. Thus, even on congruent trials the display must be evaluated before the participant commits to a response. Congruent responses will typically be faster than incongruent responses, but individuals with superior attentional control processes (e.g., bilinguals) will be able to carry out such evaluative decisions more rapidly and effectively. Therefore, a different account of the bilingual advantage is in terms of conflict monitoring [ 43, 85, 86]. Evidence supporting this view comes from situations in which monitoring demands are low - if the majority of trials are of one type only [ 84, 85], the potentially misleading information (spatial position in the Simon task, flanker items in the flanker paradigm) can be treated as a valid cue, even if the participant must respond in the direction opposite to that indicated by the cue. In such low-monitoring conditions the bilingual advantage is typically not found. More generally, Hernández, Costa, and Humphreys [ 116] argue for a bilingual advantage in the deployment of attention, enabling them to resist "capture" by irrelevant information; such differences in attentional control may be the consequence of superior conflict monitoring. Conflict monitoring and inhibition are not mutually exclusive: Although monitoring is consistent with evidence that pure blocks of congruent trials are performed equivalently by monolinguals and bilinguals [ 106, 117], an inhibition account is still required to explain evidence that pure blocks of incongruent trials are sometimes performed faster by bilinguals, notably by older adults for whom the task is more effortful [ 106].

Another problem with a pure inhibition account is that bilingual advantages are only found with some types of inhibition. The relevant distinction is captured by the contrast between the concepts of response inhibition and interference suppression [ 79, 118]. In response inhibition, a univalent stimulus is associated with a prepotent response that must be overruled, such as say "day" to a picture of night or press "left" when the arrow points right. Bilinguals typically show no advantage in these situations [ 79, 107]. In interference suppression, a bivalent stimulus contains two cues, each associated with a different response, such as the word "red" written in blue ink, so attention must be selectively focused on the relevant cue. Bilinguals typically outperform monolinguals on these tasks [ 25]. The hallmark of univalent response inhibition tasks is that the correct response can be pre-programmed before the cuing stimulus appears (e.g., if sun appears I'll say 'night;' if the arrow points right I'll respond left). On bivalent tasks, in contrast, the nature of the interfering information is not revealed until the display appears; for example, in the Simon task the participant prepares to respond on the left if the stimulus is green, but cannot prepare to deal with possible competing information until the display is shown. Bilinguals are more efficient at dealing with this online interference, in much the same way as the picture of a horse presented to a French/English bilingual would evoke both ' horse' and ' cheval ', one of which must be suppressed. In a sense, the bilingual must constantly maintain the set of 'respond in one language, suppress the other language' whenever the possibility of two languages exists (cf., global inhibition). Further, this set maintenance must coexist with processing the stimuli and responses of the language currently utilized in a fluent and appropriate manner (cf., local inhibition). Thus, language use for bilinguals involves interference suppression, and the online monitoring required in both nonverbal task switching and language selection is similar.

The suggestion that bilinguals are particularly adept at maintaining the appropriate one of two (or more) relevant task goals or attentional sets in working memory has much in common with the notion of selection of wanted stimuli as opposed to inhibition of unwanted ones. The net effect is the same, but by this view the suppression of potentially interfering information is essentially a consequence of active selection of the relevant information, rather than a primary mechanism of direct inhibition. This view is consistent with that proposed by Colzato and colleagues [ 81] who concluded that the bilingual advantage is not due to the constant exercise of inhibition, but that learning to keep two languages separate leads to an improvement in selecting goal-relevant information from goal-irrelevant information.

Box 2: How bilingual?

Bilingualism is not a categorical experience but experimental research designs require it is treated as such - participants are monolingual or bilingual and differences in performance are assessed for members of the two groups. However, individuals can never be perfectly monolingual or bilingual: even the most monolingual people have had some experience with another language, for example as a school subject or a travel necessity, and all bilinguals have preferred languages or preferred contexts for each. These gradations raise three questions about the research results.

The first question is the possibility of a cumulative benefit for multiple languages. If managing two languages enhances cognitive control processes, then does further enhancement accrue from the management of three or more languages, as explicitly proposed by Diamond [ 136]? Research by Chertkow et al. [ 123] on Alzheimer's disease and Kavé et al. [ 127] on normal aging showed better outcomes for multilinguals than for bilinguals, but there may be significant differences between multilinguals and bilinguals that do not exist between bilinguals and monolinguals. As we have suggested, bilinguals are typically not pre-selected for talent or interest but multilinguals may often be individuals with high ability and motivation to learn other languages, factors which may impact as well on cognitive performance.

The second question is the degree of bilingualism required for these benefits to emerge. If bilingualism is protective against some forms of dementia, then middle-aged people will want to know whether it is too late to learn another language, or whether their high-school French will count towards cognitive reserve. A related question concerns the age of acquisition of a second language; is earlier better? The best answer at present is that early age of acquisition, overall fluency, frequency of use, levels of literacy and grammatical accuracy all contribute to the bilingual advantage, with no single factor being decisive [ 137, 138]. Increasing bilingualism leads to increasing modification of cognitive outcomes.

Finally, if the benefits of bilingualism are at least partly explained by the joint activation of two languages, does the similarity of the two languages matter? Does Spanish-English bilingualism require more (or less?) attentional control to maintain separation than say Chinese-English bilingualism? In a study with children who spoke English plus one of French, Spanish, or Chinese, there was no effect of the type of bilingualism, and all bilingual children outperformed monolingual children on tests of executive control [ 139].

Bilingualism and Dementia

The finding that bilingualism enhances cognitive control raises the possibility that lifelong bilingualism protects against age-related cognitive decline, and may even postpone the onset of symptoms of dementia. In this case, bilingualism may be one of the environmental factors that contribute to cognitive reserve or brain reserve [ 120]. Cognitive reserve is the idea that engagement in stimulating physical or mental activity can act to maintain cognitive functioning in healthy aging and postpone the onset of symptoms in those suffering from dementia. These factors include education, occupational status, higher socio-economic class, and the continuing involvement in physical, intellectual and social activities [ 121- 123]. If bilingualism contributes to cognitive reserve, then bilinguals should maintain higher levels of cognitive functioning and cope better with symptoms of dementia than monolinguals who are otherwise equivalent.

To test this idea, Bialystok, Craik, and Freedman [ 124] examined the hospital records of monolingual and bilingual patients who had been diagnosed with various types of dementia. In spite of being equivalent on a variety of cognitive and other factors, the bilinguals experienced onset symptoms and were diagnosed approximately 3 - 4 years later than the monolinguals. Specifically, monolingual patients were diagnosed on average at age 75.4 years, and bilinguals at age 78.6. A replication from a new set of patients all diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) [ 125] confirmed the results.

Three questions about these results are their reliability, validity, and causality. For reliability, several studies have replicated these findings. Chertkow et al. [ 126] reported partial support for the original results and showed that multilinguals were diagnosed with AD later than comparable monolinguals, although a more limited effect was found when monolinguals were compared with bilinguals. A similar positive relationship between multilingualism and high-level cognitive functioning was reported by Kavé et al. [ 127] in a study of elderly Israelis. Gollan et al. [ 128] reported a study with Spanish-English bilinguals who had been diagnosed with probable AD and found that a higher degree of bilingualism was associated with later age of onset and diagnosis, although only in the less-educated patients.

Second, validity requires demonstrating the specific relation between the predictor and outcome variables. Previously, socioeconomic status, cultural differences and immigration status have been suggested as contributors to or even causes of the bilingual advantage. However, in both Toronto studies, educational level and occupational status favored the monolingual group and immigration status was ruled out as a contributing factor.

Third, regarding cause and effect, is it possible the people that people with 'good brains' are both resistant to dementia and also more likely to learn a second language? This is unlikely: most people do not become bilingual because they are bright or have a flair for learning languages, but rather out of necessity. Supporting this interpretation, a recent study showed that in a sample of monolingual and bilingual AD patients matched on age, cognitive level, and other factors, CT scans showed more AD pathology in the brains of the bilinguals, consistent with the idea that they are better able to cope with the disease and can function longer without showing symptoms [ 129].

Conclusion

In the first study reporting the surprising outcome of an advantage in cognitive and linguistic performance by bilingual children, Peal and Lambert [ 13] concluded: "Intellectually [the bilingual child's] experience with two language systems seems to have left him with a mental flexibility, a superiority in concept formation, a more diversified set of mental abilities" (p. 20). Peal and Lambert did not explain what they meant by "mental flexibility" but the description works well to describe the data accumulated in the 50 years since their original study. Bilinguals do sometimes have an advantage in inhibition, but they also have an advantage in selection; bilinguals do sometimes have an advantage in switching, but they also have an advantage in sustaining attention; and bilinguals do sometimes have an advantage in working memory, but they also have an advantage in representation and retrieval. Together, this pattern sounds like "mental flexibility", the ability to adapt to ongoing changes and process information efficiently and adaptively.

It should not be surprising that intense and sustained experience leaves its mark on our minds and brains - the functional connections that come from practice are surely changed by massive experience, and the structural regions that are recruited for specific activities undoubtedly change as well through use. These responses to experience are precisely what we mean by neuroplasticity. Yet, in the case of bilingualism, the assumption has long been that any such effects would be deeply negative: As one influential educational researcher commented in 1926, "This might be considered evidence that the use of a foreign language in the home is one of the chief factors in producing mental retardation as measured by intelligence tests" ([ 130], p. 393). Almost a century later, and in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary, there remains resistance to the idea that bilingualism can enhance aspects of cognitive function. Educational and clinical practitioners routinely advise parents to "simplicify" their children's linguistic environment when there are signs of academic struggle, and language professionals prescribe optimal timetables (and methods) for introducing languages to children to minimize the inevitable confusion. But such views are based on fear and anecdote - the weight of scientific evidence supports the promise of "mental flexibility". There is still much we do not know about the effect of bilingualism on the mind, the neural correlates of those effects, and the causal components of the experience that lead to them. But it is too late to turn back: it is now clear that the bilingual mind has been uniquely shaped by experience.

Box 3: Outstanding questions.

1. Nature of the Bilingual Advantage: What are the limits and boundary conditions for the bilingual advantage and why are bilingual advantages not always found? What is the role of the standard components of executive control - inhibition, shifting, and working memory - in bilingual differences in processing? Do these relations change over the lifespan?

2. Cognitive Reserve: Is the bilingual protection against cognitive decline similar to other types of cognitive reserve in terms of mechanism and neural correlates?

3. Brain Correlates: What changes occur in the frontal lobes? Are there effects on other brain regions? What is the mechanism for these experience-dependent changes in frontal networks?

4. Psychopathology: What are the neural correlates of the protective effects for patients with dementia? Does bilingualism have differential effects on various types of dementia?

Acknowledgement

Preparation of this manuscript was supported by grant R01HD052523 from the US National Institutes of Health and grant A2559 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to EB, grant A8261 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to FIMC, and grant MOP57842 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to EB and FIMC. We thank Steven Lovasz for his assistance in preparing the manuscript.

Footnotes

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Contributor Information

Ellen Bialystok, York University.

Fergus I.M. Craik, Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest

Gigi Luk, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

References

34. Gollan TH, et al. Semantic and letter fluency in Spanish-English bilinguals. Neuropsychology. 2002;16:562-576. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

120. Stern Y. What is cognitive reserve? Theory and research application of the reserve concept. J. Int. Neuropsychol. Soc. 2002;8:448-460. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

121. Stern Y, et al. Influence of education and occupation on the incidence of Alzheimer's disease. JAMA. 1994;271:1004-1010. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

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Bilingualism: Consequences for Mind and Brain

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Building on earlier evidence showing a beneficial effect of bilingualism on children's cognitive development, we review recent studies using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods to examine the effects of bilingualism on cognition in adulthood ...

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To be effective, a program of vocabulary instruction should provide students with opportunities for word learning by:

encouraging wide reading;

exposing students to high-quality oral language;

promoting word consciousness;

providing explicit instruction of specific words; and

providing modeling and instruction in independent word-learning strategies.

Each of these components contributes to helping students overcome the major obstacles to vocabulary growth.

What to do about the size of the task

Wide Reading

We know that the volume of students' reading is strongly related to their vocabulary knowledge. ¹ Students learn new words by encountering them in text, either through their own reading or by being read to. Increasing the opportunities for such encounters improves students' vocabulary knowledge, which, in turn, improves their ability to read more and more complex text. In short, the single most important thing you can do to improve students' vocabularies is to get them to read more.

Remember, to keep up, students need to learn at a rate of 2,000-3,000 words per year; to catch up, they need to exceed this rate. Can wide reading really be enough to help students learn so many words? Evidence indicates that it can. First, there is the evidence of those avid readers who acquire large vocabularies largely apart from any type of explicit instruction in vocabulary. Second, there is a growing body of research showing that, although the odds of learning any particular word from context are small, the cumulative effects of learning from reading can be large. Consider the following argument for the effects of wide reading: ²

If, over a school year, a fifth-grade student reads for an hour each day, five days a week (in and out of school), at a conservative rate of 150 words per minute, the student will encounter 2,250,000 words in the course of reading.

If 2% to 5% of the words the student encounters are unknown words, he or she will encounter from 45,000 to 112,500 such words.

We know that students learn between 5% 10% of previously unknown words from a single reading. This accounts for at least 2,250 new words the student learns from context each year.

The figure 2,250 new words learned a year is based on the lowest points of the estimated ranges. Even this conservative figure suggests that reading is a powerful influence on students' vocabulary growth.

What kinds of reading are necessary to produce such vocabulary growth? Whereas some argue that almost any reading ultimately will have powerful benefits for students, ³ others say that if students consistently select texts below their current reading levels, even wide reading will not result in measurable vocabulary growth. ⁴ Nor is reading text that is full of unfamiliar words likely to produce large gains in word knowledge. ⁵

To help students get the most out of reading, you should encourage them to read at a variety of levels - some text simply for enjoyment, which should benefit their fluency if nothing else - and some text that challenges them. You should also help students develop reading strategies that will allow them to read more challenging texts with lower levels of frustration. When students have been taught comprehension strategies, they tend to do more reading. ⁶

Increasing their motivation to read is another critical factor in helping students make the most of wide reading. One powerful motivating factor associated with more reading is a classroom environment that encourages and promotes social interactions related to reading. ⁷ Making available a variety of books and setting aside ample time for reading also motivate increased reading.

As is true for any method of promoting vocabulary growth, wide reading has some limitations. One is that it obviously cannot be effective with very young students who are not yet able to read very much on their own. Another limitation is that, although wide reading may be effective in producing general vocabulary growth, it is not an effective method for teaching the words that students need to master a particular selection or a concept related to a specific content area. Finally, it is important to acknowledge that, as important as it is, wide reading does not produce immediate, magic results; its effects are cumulative, and emerge over time.

You can encourage wide reading in a number of ways. You might, for example, recommend or provide lists of books for students to read outside of class, and make time in class for students to discuss what they have read. You can set aside a time each day for independent reading. And, of course, you can model the value you place on reading as they read, by telling students about the books you are reading.

What to do about the differences between spoken and written English

High Quality Oral Language

As we discussed earlier, both English language learners and English-speaking students may achieve fluency in the language of face-to-face conversation and still have little exposure to or knowledge of the kind of language they encounter in school textbooks. Clearly these students need more exposure to written English, and wide reading is the most effective way of increasing exposure to this kind of language. But what can be done with students who are in the process of learning to read, and who cannot do a great deal of reading on their own? Here is one solution: Increase the quality of the oral language to which students are exposed - let them hear spoken English that incorporates more of the vocabulary and syntax typical of written, and particularly literate English.

A very effective way to expose children to literate vocabulary is to read to them from storybooks, especially when the reading is accompanied with discussion. ⁸ Authors of good children's literature have always found ways to talk "over children's heads" - using big words and other aspects of literate language - without decreasing children's interest or enjoyment. Both younger and older students appear to benefit from read-aloud activities, and older students can learn the meanings of new words as efficiently from hearing stories read to them as they can from reading the stories themselves. ⁹ Making available (either in the classroom or school library) a selection of quality audio books and players that students can use on their own can also be a good way to expose them to a variety of good books and broad language experiences.

Storytelling is yet another way to increase the quality of students' oral language experiences. Even when no text is involved, storytelling still exposes students to richer language than does normal conversation. Pretend play likewise involves rich language use. The quality of preschool children's conversations, and teachers' use of a more sophisticated vocabulary also have been found to affect students' language and literacy development. ¹⁰

Word Consciousness

Asked what they could do to use more sophisticated vocabulary without intimidating or confusing their students, a group of teachers responded enthusiastically, "Make it fun!" We definitely agree. Playing with language is an essential component of language development. Word consciousness is the knowledge of and interest in words. Word-conscious students enjoy learning new words and engaging in word play. They know and use many words, and are aware of the subtleties of word meaning and of the power words can have. ¹¹

To become word conscious, students first need to develop a feel for how written language is different from everyday conversation. To this end, it is valuable to draw their attention to the distinctive characteristics of written language, even when reading aloud, and to help them learn to read like a writer, and to write with an audience in mind.

Having students copy in their journals phrases or sentences from their reading that are examples of especially effective language use - vivid descriptions, striking metaphors, interesting similes, plays on words-can help make language more alive for them. Students can share their examples with the class, or they can post them in the classroom to serve as inspiration or models for others.

Reading and discussing two versions of the same story - ideally, one with rich language and one with language that is less interesting - can promote word consciousness in younger students.

Word consciousness can be promoted in a way that helps students become aware of differences between Standard English and non-standard varieties, without stigmatizing the latter. Shirley Brice Heath describes classrooms in which students learned to be "language detectives," studying how people speak differently in different groups and in different situations. She believes that this awareness made an important contribution to the students' academic success. ¹² It may be especially important to make such differences explicit for students less familiar with standard English.

A number of oral and written word games can serve to promote word consciousness, including puns, limericks, Hink-Pinks, crossword puzzles, jokes, riddles, and anagrams. ¹³ Encouraging students to play with words can create an interest in knowing more about them, and thus, can become a strategy for independent word learning.

What to do about the limitations of sources of information about words

Independent Word-Learning Strategies

Techniques that teachers can model and teach to students so as to help them figure out the meanings of unknown words on their own. Because students learn most new words incidentally, through wide reading, helping students to acquire a set of word-learning strategies is important to their vocabulary development. Key word-learning strategies include:

1. the efficient use of the dictionary;

2. the use of word parts (prefixes, suffixes, roots, compounds) to unlock a word's meaning; and

3. the use of context clues.

Dictionary Use

Instruction in dictionary use that focuses on having students look up words and use information from their definitions to write sentences does not provide students with the guidance they need to make dictionary use an efficient independent word-learning strategy.

This is not to say, however, that dictionaries are not important aids to word learning. In fact, the more students are exposed to dictionary definitions, the better their word learning. ¹⁴ The crucial point here is that students receive instruction in how to use what they find in a dictionary entry so that they are able to translate the cryptic and conventionalized content of definitions into usable word knowledge. ¹⁵ This instruction includes modeling how to look up the meaning of an unknown word, thinking-aloud about the various definitions in an entry, and deciding which is the most appropriate definition for a particular context. ¹⁶

Word Parts

Teaching students how to use information about word parts can be very valuable in promoting vocabulary growth. Many students, however, are not aware of this strategy. Even students who have learned to break words into parts in their decoding instruction may not understand that they can use this knowledge to figure out word meanings. Teacher modeling helps to make the strategy's value clear to students. ¹⁷

Using word-part information can be especially helpful in learning certain content-area concepts. (See Teaching Word Meaning as Concepts)

Context Clues

Context clues are clues to the meaning of a word contained in the text that surrounds it. These clues include definitions, examples, and restatements. Teaching students strategies for identifying and using context clues has been suggested as a major instructional technique for vocabulary development. ¹⁸ A student learns a new word from context by making connections between the word and the text in which it appears. When a new word is first encountered, the student stores in memory some information about how it fits into what is being read. In subsequent encounters with the word, this information is reinforced, and more information about the word's role in particular contexts is added until the word is understood and used appropriately. As in teaching other kinds of strategies, teaching students to use context clues to develop vocabulary is an extended process that involves: modeling the strategy; providing explicit explanations of how, why, and when to use it; providing guided practice; gradually holding students accountable for independently using the strategy; and then providing intermittent reminders to apply it to reading across content areas.

As we noted earlier, learning words from context is a long-term process, one that involves multiple encounters with words. The challenge is to create vocabulary instruction that compresses this process to enable students to learn more words in a shorter period of time. ¹⁹

What to do about the complexity of word knowledge

Explicit Instruction of Specific Words

Although students gain most of their word knowledge through wide reading, explicit instruction of specific words and their meanings also can contribute greatly to their vocabulary development. Explicit instruction is especially important for students whose exposure to the vocabulary of literate English is limited. To be most effective, explicit vocabulary instruction should be dynamic and involve a variety of techniques. Specifically, instruction should:

1. Use both definitional and contextual information about word meanings,

2. Involve students actively in word learning, and

3. Use discussion to teach the meanings of new words and to provide meaningful information about the words.

Use Definitional and Contextual Information

In the past, vocabulary instruction most often consisted of learning lists of words and definitions (with a test on Friday). We now know that such instruction is of limited value, particularly in improving students' reading comprehension. ²⁰ Students need to know how a word functions in various contexts. Therefore, instructional methods that provide students with both definitional and contextual information do improve comprehension, and do so significantly.

Some instructional activities that provide students with definitional information include:

Teach synonyms.
Often a synonym is all students need to understand a new word in context.

Teach antonyms.
Not all words have antonyms, but thinking about antonyms requires students to identify the crucial aspects of a word. For example, the word chaos implies an abyss, a void, or clutter, but its antonym, order, narrows the focus to the "clutter" part of the word's meaning.

Rewrite definitions.
As we noted earlier, dictionary definitions can often confuse or mislead students. Asking students to restate a dictionary definition in their own words can be more effective than requiring them to remember the exact wording of the definition.

Provide example sentences.
A good way to ascertain whether students understand a word's definitions is to have them provide example sentences in which they use the word. They may draw these examples from personal experiences ("Mom's kitchen is chaos.") or from textbooks ("After the great flood of 1937, there was chaos all over the Tennessee Valley.").

Provide non-examples.
Another way to find out if students truly understand the meaning of a new word is to have them supply words that are not examples of the word's meaning. For example, point out to them that cry is not an example of the word guffaw, then ask them to think of other non-examples of the word (bawl, sniffle, whine, whimper). Coming up with non-examples requires students to think about the critical attributes of a word, much like providing antonyms.

Discuss the difference between the new word and related words.
A discussion of the word debris, defined as "trash," "garbage," or "waste," might include a discussion of the differences between debris and trash, garbage, and waste. For example, debris might be the result of some sort of accident or disaster, whereas trash might include anything. Garbage generally refers to organic material, such as food leftovers, and waste implies something left over, rather than something resulting from a disaster. Such a thorough discussion encourages students to focus on the meanings of words.

Some activities that provide students with contextual information include:

Have students create sentences that contain the new word.
Encourage students to create sentences that show a clear understanding of the meaning of the word - not just "I like chaos." More acceptable sentences are those that include the definition, such as, "Chaos is when everything is in disorder." Even more acceptable are sentences that extend the definition, such as, "The scene was complete chaos - desks were turned over, paint was splashed on the floor, and the trash can was upside down." Of course, to write sentences containing a new word, students need examples of how it is used correctly. Definitions, even those that give brief examples, rarely provide enough information to guarantee that students have a real sense of how words are used. One way to scaffold students' use of new words is to have them complete sentence stems containing the word, e.g., "John thought it would pacify the teacher if "²¹

Use more than one new word in a sentence.
Asking students to use more than one new word in each sentence they create can force them to look for relations among words.

Discuss the meaning of the same word in different sentences.
Many words have multiple meanings, which depend on the context in which the words appear. To prevent students from limiting word meanings to one particular context, have them use a new word in several different and varied sentences. For the word chaos, their sentences might include topics such as chaos in classroom behavior, chaos as clutter and mess, chaos in personal relations, and so forth.

Create a scenario.
Invite students to make up a story in which a new word features prominently. If students are too young for this activity, have them draw a picture story for a new word.

Create silly questions.
You might have students pair new words and use each pair to make a silly question.²² For the words actuary, hermit, philanthropist, and villain, their questions might include "Can an actuary be a hermit?" "Can an actuary be a philanthropist?" "Can a philanthropist be a hermit?" "Can a philanthropist be a villain?"

Involve Students Actively in Word Learning

Students remember more when they relate new information to known information, transforming it in their own words, generating examples and non-examples, producing antonyms and synonyms, and so forth.

Instruction that works

In one study of exemplary vocabulary instruction, activities were conducted in a five-day cycle. On the first day, the new words were defined, and students discussed the use of each word in context. This discussion took different forms, including discussion of examples and non-examples, pantomimes, and having students say "Yay" if the word was used correctly in a sentence and "Boo" if it was not. On the second day, after a review of the definitions, students might work on log sheets, completing sentences for each word. On the third day, they completed another log sheet, then worked on a timed activity in which pairs of students attempted in the shortest amount of time to match words with their definitions. This activity was repeated on the fourth day. After completion of the second timed activity, students were asked silly questions. On the fifth day, they took a post-test.

These activities varied somewhat with different units. For example, students also completed a "Word Wizard" chart activity each day. A Word Wizard chart is a chart that contains new vocabulary words. These words can be taken from a storybook, from a text, or just be words that are encountered in some way. Every time a child in the class found one of these words in context, the teacher attached an adhesive note with the child's name and the context next to the word. The first child who received 5, 10, or some other number of notes became the Word Wizard. Students were given credit toward becoming a "Word Wizard" by finding examples of each word used outside of class.

This program, or variations of it, significantly improved students' comprehension of texts containing words that were taught. As part of the program, it was revealed that twelve encounters with a word reliably improved comprehension, but four encounters did not. The instructional approach, which involved active processing of each words' meaning, had significantly greater effects than did a definition-only approach on measures of comprehension but not on measures involving the recall of definitions. These findings suggest that vocabulary instruction can improve comprehension, but only if the instruction is rich and extensive, and includes a great many encounters with to-be-learned words.

Use discussion to teach word meanings. Discussion adds an important dimension to vocabulary instruction. Students with little or no knowledge of some new words they encounter in a vocabulary lesson are often able to construct a good idea of a word's meaning from the bits of partial knowledge contributed by their classmates. (When the class as a whole does not know much about a particular word, however, you may have to help. Perhaps supplying some information about the word, such as a quick definition.)

Discussion can clarify misunderstandings of words by making the misunderstandings public. For words that a student knows partially, or knows in one particular context, the give-and-take of discussion can clarify meanings. When misunderstandings are public, the teacher can shape them into the conventional meaning.

Discussion involves students in other ways. As they wait to be called on, students practice covertly, or silently prepare a response. Therefore, even though you call on only one student, many other students anticipate that they will have to come up with an answer. As a result, discussion leads to increased vocabulary learning. ²³ Without the practiced response, discussion is not likely to be valuable as a learning experience.

Bringing instruction together

Sample Lesson

This sample lesson illustrates how a teacher can bring together the three components of explicit vocabulary instruction to teach words that are key to understanding the story The Talking Eggs by Robert San Soucil. The words chosen for instruction are backwoods, contrary, dawdled, groping, rubies, and silver. ²⁴

For the key word backwoods, read the following sentence from the story: "Then the old woman took her by the hand and led her deep into the backwoods." Ask students to predict what backwoods means. Backwoods is a compound, and, when the information from the word parts is combined with some information from the context, its meaning should be fairly clear. Next, ask students to describe the backwoods briefly.

The key word contrary can be taught the same way, beginning with reading this sentence from the book: "You do as I say and don't be so contrary," and asking students to predict the meaning of the word from context. For this word, have students discuss a definition for the word, such as "disagreeable, raising objections," and encourage them to explain how the definition fits in the context of the sentence. As a follow up, you have them create some sentences that contain contrary. This can lead to a discussion of another, related meaning for contrary, that of "from another point of view," as in the expression "to the contrary."

For dawdled and groping, begin once again by reading sentences in the story that contain the words. Because these words are verbs, however, you might want to pantomime the meaning of each, rather than supply a conventional definition. Then ask students to create sentences that use the words. You might define dawdled with some non-examples, because it is a word that has some clear antonyms, such as hustled, ran, went quickly, and so on.

For rubies and silver, begin by having the class discuss what precious things are. You might illustrate the words by providing pictures that show rubies and things made of silver. Next, work with the class to make a list of precious things, including rubies and silver, as well as gold, diamonds, and so forth.

The words used in the sample lesson are highly dissimilar. They were selected for instruction only because they happen to come from the story they students were reading. The techniques used to teach the words, however, are somewhat similar. For four of the six words, the teacher starts with sentences from the text, then asks students to create additional sentences to extend the meaning of the word beyond the text. Finally, the teacher also includes a definition, either a conventional verbal one or a gestural one, for each of the words.

The instruction this lesson illustrates is relatively minimal, designed to support the reading of the text. More elaborate instruction would shift the focus from the story to the vocabulary words, and might be useful in a classroom with many English language learners, or in any classroom when a greater emphasis on vocabulary is appropriate. More elaborate instruction also might include using additional sentence contexts for each word, a "yea or nay" activity ("Would you dawdle in the backwoods?"), or having students write a scenario, or story that contains these words.

Some cautions

Explicit vocabulary instruction does seem to improve comprehension significantly, at least when the words taught come from the text students are reading. Nevertheless, some cautions are in order. First, teaching vocabulary as students read can, under certain circumstances, distract them from the main ideas of the text. Second, teaching words that are not important to understanding the text leads students to focus on individual word meanings rather than on the overall meaning of what they read. The more effort students expend focusing on word meanings, the less effort they will have available to recall information that is important to comprehension. ²⁵ Thus, to be effective, pre-reading vocabulary instruction should focus on words that relate to the major ideas in a text, rather than on words that are interesting or unusual.

Excerpt from: Texas Education Agency. (2002). Promoting Vocabulary Development: Components of Effective Vocabulary Instruction, 2002 Online Revisited Edition (pp. 10-20). Retrieved October 11, 2007, from http://www.tea.state.tx.us/reading/practives/redbk5.pdf.

iunningham, A. E., & Stanovich, K. E. (1991). Tracking the unique effects of print exposure in children: Associations with vocabulary, general knowledge, and spelling. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83, 264-274.; Fielding, L. G., Wilson, P. T., & Anderson, R. C. (1986). A new focus on free reading: The role of trade books in reading instruction. In T. Raphael & R. E. Reynolds (Eds.), The contexts of school-based literacy. New York: Random House.

2 Herman, P. A., Anderson, R. C., Pearson, P. D., & Nagy, W. E. (1987). Incidental acquisition of word meanings from expositions with varied text features. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 263-284.; Nagy, W. E., Anderson, R. C., & Herman, P. A. (1987). Learning word meanings from context during normal reading. American Educational Research Journal, 24, 237-270.; Nagy, W. E., Herman, P. A., & Anderson, R. C. (1985). Learning words from context. Reading Research Quarterly, 20, 233-253.

3 Krashen, S. (1993). The power of reading: Insights from the research. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

4 Carver, R. P. (1994). Percentage of unknown vocabulary words in text as a function of the relative difficulty of the text: Implications for instruction. Journal of Reading Behavior, 26, 413-437.; Carver, R. P., & Leibert, R.E. (1995). The effect of reading library books at different levels of difficulty upon gain in reading ability. Reading Research Quarterly, 30, 26-48.

5 Shefelbine, J. L. (1990). Student factors related to variability in learning word meanings from context. Journal of Reading Behavior, 22, 71-97.

6 Guthrie J.T., Schafer, W.D., Wang, Y., & Afflerbach, P. (1995). Relationships of instruction to amount of reading: An exploration of social, cognitive and instructional connections. Reading Research Quarterly, 30, 8-25.

7 Guthrie, Schafer, Wang & Afflerbach, 1995.

8 Dickinson, D.K., & Smith, M.W. (1944). Long-term effects of preschool teachers' book readings on low-income children's vocabulary and story comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 29, 104-122.

9 Stahl, S.A., Richek, M.G., & Vandevier, R. (1991). Learning word meanings through listening: A sixth grade replication. In J. Zutell & S. McCormick (Eds.) Learning factors/teacher factors: Issues in literacy research. Fortieth yearbook of the National Reading Conference (pp. 185-192). Chicago National Reading Conference.

10 Dickinson & Smith, 1994.

11 Graves, M.F., Juel, C., & Graves B.B. (1997). Teaching reading in the twenty-first century. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

12 Brice Heath, S. (1983). A lot of talk about nothing. Language Arts, 60, 39-48.; Brice Heath, S. (1983). Ways with words: Language, Life, and work in communities and classrooms. New York: Cambridge University.

13 Stahl, 1999.

14 McKeown, M. G., Beck, I. L., Omanson, R. C., & Pople, M. T. (1985). Some effects of the nature and frequency of vocabulary instruction on the knowledge and use of words. Reading Research Quarterly, 20, 522-535.

15 Scott & Nagy, 1997.

16 Graves et al., 1997.

17 Nagy, W. E., Winsor, P., Osborn, J. & O'Flahaven, J. (1994). Structural analysis: Some guidelines for instruction. In F. Lehr & J. Osborn (Eds.), Reading, language, and literacy: Instruction for the twenty-first century (pp. 45-58). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

18 Anderson & Nagy, 1991; Sternberg, R. J. (1987). Most vocabulary is learned from context. In M. G. McKeown & M. E. Curtis (Eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition (pp. 89-105). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

19 Stahl, 1999.

20 Stahl, S. A., & Fairbanks, M. M. (1986). The effects of vocabulary instruction: A model-based meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 56, 72-110.

21 Beck, I. L., Perfetti, C. A., & McKeown, M. G. (1982). Effects of long-term vocabulary instruction on lexical access and reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74(4), 506-521.

22 Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, (1982).

23 Stahl, S. A., & Clark, C. H. (1987). The effects of participatory expectations in classroom discussion on the learning of science vocabulary. American Educational Research Journal, 24, 541-556.

24 This sample lesson is adapted from Stahl, 1999.

25 Wixson, K.K. (1986). Vocabulary instruction and children's comprehension of basal stories. Reading Research Quarterly. 21, 317-329.

For any reprint requests, please contact the author or publisher listed.

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The Components of Effective Vocabulary Instruction

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To be effective, a program of vocabulary instruction should provide students with opportunities for word learning by: encouraging wide reading; exposing students to high-quality oral language; promoting word consciousness; providing explicit instruction of specific words; and providing modeling and instruction in independent word-learning strategies.

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Chapter 9: Language Development

Theories of Language Development

Psychological theories of language learning differ in terms of the importance they place on nature and nurture. Remember that we are a product of both nature and nurture. Researchers now believe that language acquisition is partially innate and partially learned through our interactions with our linguistic environment (Gleitman & Newport, 1995; Stork & Widdowson, 1974).

Video 9.3 Theories of Language Development discusses the major theories of how language develops in children.

Learning Theory

Perhaps the most straightforward explanation of language development is that it occurs through the principles of learning, including association and reinforcement (Skinner, 1953). Additionally, Bandura (1977) described the importance of observation and imitation of others in learning language. There must be at least some truth to the idea that language is learned through environmental interactions or nurture. Children learn the language that they hear spoken around them rather than some other language. Also supporting this idea is the gradual improvement of language skills with time. It seems that children modify their language through imitation and reinforcement, such as parental praise and being understood. For example, when a two-year-old child asks for juice, he might say, "me juice," to which his mother might respond by giving him a cup of apple juice.

However, language cannot be entirely learned. For one, children learn words too fast for them to be learned through reinforcement. Between the ages of 18 months and 5 years, children learn up to 10 new words every day (Anglin, 1993). More importantly, language is more generative than it is imitative. Language is not a predefined set of ideas and sentences that we choose when we need them, but rather a system of rules and procedures that allows us to create an infinite number of statements, thoughts, and ideas, including those that have never previously occurred. When a child says that they "swimmed" in the pool, for instance, they are showing generativity. No adult speaker of English would ever say "swimmed," yet it is easily generated from the normal system of producing language.

Other evidence that refutes the idea that all language is learned through experience comes from the observation that children may learn languages better than they ever hear them. Deaf children whose parents do not speak ASL very well nevertheless are able to learn it perfectly on their own, and may even make up their own language if they need to (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1998). A group of deaf children in a school in Nicaragua, whose teachers could not sign, invented a way to communicate through made-up signs (Senghas, Senghas, & Pyers, 2005). The development of this new Nicaraguan Sign Language has continued and changed as new generations of students have come to the school and started using the language. Although the original system was not a real language, it is becoming closer and closer every year, showing the development of a new language in modern times.

Nativism

The linguist Noam Chomsky is a believer in the nature approach to language, arguing that human brains contain a Language Acquisition Device that includes a universal grammar that underlies all human language (Chomsky, 1965, 1972). According to this approach, each of the many languages spoken around the world (there are between 6,000 and 8,000) is an individual example of the same underlying set of procedures that are hardwired into human brains. Chomsky's account proposes that children are born with a knowledge of general rules of syntax that determine how sentences are constructed. Language develops as long as the infant is exposed to it. No teaching, training, or reinforcement is required for language to develop as proposed by Skinner.

Although there is general agreement among psychologists that babies are genetically programmed to learn language, there is still debate about Chomsky's idea that there is a universal grammar that can account for all language learning. Evans and Levinson (2009) surveyed the world's languages and found that none of the presumed underlying features of the language acquisition device were entirely universal. In their search they found languages that did not have noun or verb phrases, that did not have tenses (e.g., past, present, future), and even some that did not have nouns or verbs at all, even though a basic assumption of a universal grammar is that all languages should share these features.

Sensitive Periods

Anyone who has tried to master a second language as an adult knows the difficulty of language learning. Yet children learn languages easily and naturally. Children who are not exposed to language early in their lives will likely never learn one. Case studies, including Victor the "Wild Child," who was abandoned as a baby in France and not discovered until he was 12, and Genie, a child whose parents kept her locked in a closet from 18 months until 13 years of age, are (fortunately) two of the only known examples of these deprived children. Both of these children made some progress in socialization after they were rescued, but neither of them ever developed complex language abilities (Rymer, 1993). This is also why it is important to determine quickly if a child is deaf, and to communicate in sign language immediately. Deaf children who are not exposed to sign language during their early years will likely never learn the complexity of language (Mayberry, Lock, & Kazmi, 2002). The concept of sensitive periods highlights the importance of both nature and nurture for language development.

Interactionist Approach

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Chapter 9: Language Development Psychological theories of language learning differ in terms of the importance they place on nature and nurture. Remember that we are a product of both nature and nurture. Researchers now believe that language acquisition is partially innate and partially learned through our interactions with our linguistic environment (Gleitman & Newport, 1995; Stork & Widdowson, 1974).

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Rooted Linguistics: Serving Teachers of Multilingual Learners

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What kind of word wall is on your walls? Does it support your learners or is it just there as part of the wall paper creating wall pollution?
Let me tell you first hand...I used to have a traditional word wall and I wholeheartedly thought I was doing what was best for my students. It was alphabetical and I put words on it that were Tier I, Tier II, and Tier III (thinking that I was supporting everyone). I tried playing games with my students using the word wall and I even let them add their own words to it so they could take ownership of the wall.
But as a lifelong learner I embrace new information and when I find something that is better for students, I recognize it. Recently I learned about Interactive Word Walls from Dr. Julie Jackson. She is a professor at Texas State University and travels to deliver professional development regarding these amazing word walls. Her expertise is in the field of science but I think the word walls can work in any content area. ​

The idea is that the word wall is not alphabetically organized, rather is it structured by theme or unit of study. In addition, these word walls can take many shapes. They are in the form of various graphic organizers (only really large on our walls). Students interact with them and add visuals, realia (real objects), sketches, or pictures to the categories. The word walls usually have a sentence stem or frame as well to support comprehension and synthesize meaning.
​
Why is this type of word wall better than a traditional word wall?
Research shows that our brains work better when information is organized and categorized, connected and attached to a visual or real object. All of this is embedded in Interactive Word Walls. If you still aren't buying it, take a look at the two pictures below. Imagine that you are a student learning both content AND language in this classroom. How much would you learn from this traditional word wall?

Probably not much. Now take a look at this Interactive Word Wall. Are you able to gather any language from it and synthesize information from the word wall?

Even though this is a language that you (probably) don't speak, chances are that you are able to connect meaning from this type of word wall. Because of it's organization and use of visuals, the Interactive Word Wall allows our knowledge from L1 (first language) to transfer to our target language. So useful! Plus if there are any words that you did not know in your L1, you will be able to learn them easily since there are visuals to help you.
Let's take a look at the fist column. Did you initially think this column was electric energy and then when you looked more closely at the last few pictures (sun and fire) you thought...no, it can't be electric, it must be heat energy? Think of the high level of processing that your brain had to go through to come to that conclusion.
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Make it Even More ELL Friendly
One way to make it EVEN more ELL friendly is to add some Total Physical Response (click to learn more). When introducing the key words on the word wall, teach students a physical movement to go along with the meaning of the words. For example, if we were learning about heat energy, I might have my kids fan their faces because heat is hot. Or for sound energy we might put our hands around our mouths like a megaphone or cup our ears like we are listening.

Steps for making your own Interactive Word Wall:
​
1. Select critical vocabulary based on grade level essential skills.
2. Sketch a map or graphic organizer that will best display the topic (Venn Diagram, Bubble, T Chart, Content Frame, etc.)
3. Create the graphic organizer frame on your classroom wall.
4. Allow students to add to the wall during class as learning grows.
5. Students can have their own copy of the graphic organizer to complete as well.
​
Like I mentioned, I learned how to make word walls more interactive and accessible from Dr. Julie Jackson. She taught me. Who will you teach? Pass this knowledge along. It will only make teaching and learning better for the greater good of our students.
​
Like George Bernard Shaw said, "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

​For more about interactive word walls, watch the short YouTube video below or visit the resources down here. Link to the Google Slides.

Resources:
http://www.thesciencetoolkit.com/about-me/
www.thesciencetoolkit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Interactive-Word-Walls-Science-Scope.pdf
http://www.thesciencetoolkit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Interactive-Word-Walls-Science-and-Children.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuaOjtk9QoM

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Is Your Word Wall Really Supporting the Learners in Your Classroom?

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What kind of word wall is on your walls? Does it support your learners or is it just there as part of the wall paper creating wall pollution? Let me tell you first hand...I used to have a...

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Unpacking (SLA) Articles - Episode 4: Written corrective feedback

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Strategies That Help Multilingual Students Learn Content and English at the Same Time

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Teachers can use these strategies to help keep students who are still learning English on track with their peers.

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When I read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, I remember being fascinated by the "babel fish." These were fish, who when dropped in a person's ear, would provide immediate translation of any language, thriving on sound waves and converting them into comprehensible language.

Wouldn't it be just great if learning a new language were that easy (despite the "yuck" factor)? While we do have some technology that provides translation into a variety of languages, it often fails to translate accurately due to the complexity of language. Effective communication requires so much more than just being able to translate vocabulary words - it requires knowledge of intonation, dialect, and intent, and a nuanced understanding of word use, expression, and a language's cultural context. For example, one online translation application I tried translated "Fall Events" as "fall down events" in Spanish because it didn't know that I was referring to events in autumn.

So, without a babel fish or perfect technology, we are left with the old-fashioned way of learning a new language, which requires time, effort, and patience. How much time, effort, and patience depends a lot on the individual who is learning, as well as the learning environment and situation, but language researchers have developed a general outline of language acquisition that helps explain the process that language learners go through to develop skills in a foreign language. In this article, I will provide an overview to the stages of language acquisition, and offer strategies designed to support ELL instruction at different stages of language acquisition.

Stages of Language Acquisition

Researchers define language acquisition into two categories: first-language acquisition and second-language acquisition. First-language acquisition is a universal process regardless of home language. Babies listen to the sounds around them, begin to imitate them, and eventually start producing words. Second-language acquisition assumes knowledge in a first language and encompasses the process an individual goes through as he or she learns the elements of a new language, such as vocabulary, phonological components, grammatical structures, and writing systems.

The Six Stages of Second-Language Acquisition

Pre-production

This is also called "the silent period," when the student takes in the new language but does not speak it. This period often lasts six weeks or longer, depending on the individual.

Early production

The individual begins to speak using short words and sentences, but the emphasis is still on listening and absorbing the new language. There will be many errors in the early production stage.

Speech Emergent

Speech becomes more frequent, words and sentences are longer, but the individual still relies heavily on context clues and familiar topics. Vocabulary continues to increase and errors begin to decrease, especially in common or repeated interactions.

Beginning Fluency

Speech is fairly fluent in social situations with minimal errors. New contexts and academic language are challenging and the individual will struggle to express themselves due to gaps in vocabulary and appropriate phrases.

Intermediate Fluency

Communicating in the second language is fluent, especially in social language situations. The individual is able to speak almost fluently in new situations or in academic areas, but there will be gaps in vocabulary knowledge and some unknown expressions. There are very few errors, and the individual is able to demonstrate higher order thinking skills in the second language such as offering an opinion or analyzing a problem.

Advanced Fluency

The individual communicates fluently in all contexts and can maneuver successfully in new contexts and when exposed to new academic information. At this stage, the individual may still have an accent and use idiomatic expressions incorrectly at times, but the individual is essentially fluent and comfortable communicating in the second language.

How long does it take for a language learner to go through these stages? Just as in any other learning situation, it depends on the individual. One of the major contributors to accelerated second language learning is the strength of first language skills. Language researchers such as Jim Cummins, Catherine Snow, Lily Wong Filmore and Stephen Krashen have studied this topic in a variety of ways for many years. The general consensus is that it takes between five to seven years for an individual to achieve advanced fluency. This generally applies to individuals who have strong first language and literacy skills. If an individual has not fully developed first language and literacy skills, it may take between seven to ten years to reach advanced fluency. It is very important to note that every ELL student comes with his or her own unique language and education background, and this will have an impact on their English learning process.

It is also important to keep in mind that the understood goal for American ELL students is Advanced Fluency, which includes fluency in academic contexts as well as social contexts. Teachers often get frustrated when ELL students appear to be fluent because they have strong social English skills, but then they do not participate well in academic projects and discussions. Teachers who are aware of ELL students' need to develop academic language fluency in English will be much better prepared to assist those students in becoming academically successful. (Learn more about academic language in Colorín Colorado's academic language resource section.)

Instructional Strategies

If you have ELL students in your classroom, it is more than likely there will be students at a variety of stages in the language acquisition process. What can teachers do to differentiate instruction according to language level? Here are some suggestions for appropriate instructional strategies according to stages of language acquisition.

Emphasize listening comprehension by using read-alouds and music.

Use visuals and have students point to pictures or act out vocabulary.

Speak slowly and use shorter words, but use correct English phrasing.

Model "survival" language by saying and showing the meaning. For example, say, "Open your book," and then open a book while the student observes.

Gesture, point and show as much as possible.

More advanced classmates who speak the same language can support new learning through interpretation.

Avoid excessive error correction. Reinforce learning by modeling correct language usage when students make mistakes.

Continue the strategies listed above, but add opportunities for students to produce simple language.

Ask students to point to pictures and say the new word.

Ask yes/no and either/or questions.

Have students work in pairs or small groups to discuss a problem. Have literate students write short sentences or words in graphic organizers.

Model a phrase and have the student repeat it and add modifications. Teacher says, "This book is very interesting." The student repeats it and says, "This book is very boring." Continue with as many modifications as possible.

Avoid excessive error correction. Reinforce learning by modeling correct usage.

Introduce more academic language and skills by using the same techniques listed above, but beginning to use more academic vocabulary.

Introduce new academic vocabulary and model how to use it in a sentence.

Provide visuals and make connections with student's background knowledge as much as possible.

Ask questions that require a short answer and are fairly literal.

Introduce charts and graphs by using easily understood information such as a class survey of food preferences.

Have students re-tell stories or experiences and have another student write them down. The ELL student can bring these narratives home to read and reinforce learning.

In writing activities, provide the student with a fill-in-the blank version of the assignment with the necessary vocabulary listed on the page.

Provide minimal error correction. Focus only on correction that directly interferes with meaning. Reinforce learning by modeling the correct usage.

Have students work in pairs and groups to discuss content.

During instruction, have students do a "Think, pair, share" to give the student an opportunity to process the new language and concept.

Ask questions that require a full response with explanation. If you do not understand the student's explanation, ask for clarification by paraphrasing and asking the student if you heard them correctly.

Ask questions that require inference and justification of the answer.

Ask students if they agree or disagree with a statement and why.

Model more advanced academic language structures such as, "I think," "In my opinion," and "When you compare." Have students repeat the phrases in context.

Re-phrase incorrect statements in correct English, or ask the student if they know another way to say it.

Introduce nuances of language such as when to use more formal English and how to interact in conversations.

Have students make short presentations, providing them with the phrases and language used in presentations ("Today I will be talking about") and giving them opportunities to practice the presentation with partners before getting in front of the class.

Continue to provide visual support and vocabulary development.

Correct errors that interfere with meaning, and pre-identify errors that will be corrected in student writing, such as verb-tense agreement. Only correct the errors agreed upon.

You may want to assist in improving pronunciation by asking a student to repeat key vocabulary and discussing how different languages have different sounds.

Identify key academic vocabulary and phrases and model them. Ask students to produce the language in class activities.

Use graphic organizers and thinking maps and check to make sure the student is filling them in with details. Challenge the student to add more.

Help the student make connections with new vocabulary by instructing him or her in the etymology of words or word families such as, "important, importance, importantly."

Create assessments that give students an opportunity to present in English after they have an opportunity to practice in pairs or small groups.

Introduce more academic skills, such as brainstorming, prioritizing, categorization, summarizing and compare and contrast.

Ask students to identify vocabulary by symbols that show whether the student "knows it really well, kind of knows it, or doesn't know it at all." Help students focus on strategies to get the meaning of new words.

Have a "guessing time" during silent reading where they circle words they don't know and write down their guess of the meaning. Check the results as a class.

Introduce idioms and give examples of how to use them appropriately. For example, "Let's wind up our work." What's another way you could use the phrase "wind up?"

Starting at this level, students need more correction/feedback, even on errors that do not directly affect meaning. They should be developing a more advanced command of syntax, pragmatics, pronunciation, and other elements that do not necessarily affect meaning but do contribute to oral fluency.

It may also be helpful to discuss language goals with the student so you can assist in providing modeling and correction in specified areas.

Students at this level are close to native language fluency and can interact well in a variety of situations. Continue to develop language skills as gaps arise by using the strategies listed above. Although the student may seem completely fluent, he or she still benefit from visual support, building on background knowledge, pre-teaching vocabulary and making connections between content areas.

Offer challenge activities to expand the student's vocabulary knowledge such as identifying antonyms, synonyms and the use of a thesaurus and dictionary.

Demonstrate effective note-taking and provide a template.

Offer error correction on academic work and on oral language. Because students at this stage have achieved near-native fluency, they benefit from support in fine-tuning their oral and written language skills.

Recommendations

Scaffold instruction so students receive comprehensible input and are able to successfully complete tasks at their level. Instructional scaffolding works just like the scaffolding used in building. It holds you at the level needed until you are ready to take it down. Scaffolding includes asking students questions in formats that give them support in answering, such as yes/no questions, one-word identifications, or short answers. It also means providing the context for learning by having visuals or other hands-on items available to support content learning. Also, when practicing a new academic skill such as skimming, scaffolding involves using well-known material so the students aren't struggling with the information while they are trying to learn a new skill. Scaffolding includes whatever it takes to make the instruction meaningful for the student in order to provide a successful learning experience.

Use cognates to help Spanish speakers learn English and derive meaning from content. The Colorín Colorado website has a helpful list of common cognates in Spanish for teachers to reference. Teachers can explicitly point out cognates for Spanish speaking students so they begin to realize that this is a useful way for them to increase their English vocabulary.

Explicit vocabulary instruction is very important in accelerating ELL students' English language development. Textbooks include lists of new vocabulary words based on grade-level content, but ELL students need further vocabulary instruction. There are many words in a text that may affect the ELL student's comprehension of the text that a teacher may assume he or she knows. It is important for teachers to develop ways to help students identify the words they don't know, as well as strategies for getting their meaning. Of course it is also beneficial if teachers reinforce the language structures or common associations of vocabulary. For example, "squeak" is a sound that often goes with "mouse" or "door" and it may be stated as, "squeak, squeaky, squeaks, or squeaked."

Error correction should be done very intentionally and appropriately according to student language ability, as noted earlier in the article. Students who are just beginning to speak English are already nervous about using their new language skills and constant correction will not improve their ability; it will just make them want to withdraw. I inform students in advance of the type of errors I will correct, such as "missing articles" and "third person agreement," and then those are the only errors I check. In my class, I do not correct the errors; I circle the mistakes and return the paper to the student. They are responsible for correcting the errors and returning the paper to receive more points. Most of the time the students can make the corrections themselves when they see the area I've circled, but if they have difficulty, I guide them as they make the correction. In this way, I feel there is a manageable amount of correction information to work with and the student will actually learn from doing the correction.

Learning another language. If you learn the language(s) your students speak, they will be thrilled to hear you try it with them. I learned how to say "good morning" in Somali and had to practice for an hour before I felt comfortable saying it. When I did I was rewarded with the big grins of students as they entered the room. They were excited to teach me other phrases as well, and we discussed how much English they had learned since they arrived in the country. They were very proud to think of how much progress they'd made.

Seek the experts in your building or district who can offer you guidance on effective instructional strategies for your ELL students. There are many teachers who have taught ELL students in your content area, have taught a certain population of students, or are trained ESL or bilingual teachers who have a lot of advice and support to offer. Don't hesitate to look for support when you are challenged to reach students who are learning English. This can be especially true when you have a "pre-production" or "beginning level" student and you are responsible for grade level content instruction.

Visit the hotlinks section for this article for more information on specific research regarding language acquisition and recommended instructional strategies. You can also search the Colorín Colorado educator information for useful information and resources to assist you in meeting ELL student needs.

ELL teachers encounter students with a variety of backgrounds and abilities, and until the babel fish comes into existence, they will need to have flexibility, creativity and skill in order to help ELL students make meaning from the new language and content they are learning. An understanding of the language acquisition process and levels will help teachers tailor instruction to meet the needs of a diverse group of learners. Students will benefit from everything teachers do to support the development of their language skills while teaching them grade level content. Together teachers and students develop their understanding of each other, the world around them, and the language that connects us all.
The Stages of Second Language Acquisition
This chapter from Classroom Instruction That Works with English Language Learners Facilitator's Guide, by Jane D. Hill and Cynthia L. Björk, offers information on the second language acquisition process and effective ELL instruction. It includes a a simplified chart of language acquisition levels and the kinds of language teachers can use to help students at each level.

Simple description of the stages of language acquisition and recommendations for instructional strategies according to level.
Overview of Second Language Acquisition and Strategies
Downloadable booklet from the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory, "Strategies and Resources for Mainstream Teachers of English Language Learners." Includes useful information on language levels, acquisition and 10 things teachers can do today to help ELL students.
Understanding the "Silent Period" with English Language Learners
This article describes some strategies used by two kindergarten teachers to communicate verbally and nonverbally.

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“One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.”— Chinese ProverbWhen I read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, I remember being fascinated by the “babel fish.” These were fish, who when dropped in a person’s ear, would provide immediate translation of any language, thriving on sound waves and converting them into comprehensible language.Wouldn’t it be just great if learning a new language were that easy (despite the “yuck” factor)? While we do have some technology that provides translation into a variety of languages, it often fails to translate accurately due to the complexity of language. Effective communication requires so much more than just being able to translate vocabulary words — it requires knowledge of intonation, dialect, and intent, and a nuanced understanding of word use, expression, and a language’s cultural context. For example, one online translation application I tried translated “Fall Events” as “fall down events” in Spanish because it didn’t know that I was referring to events in autumn.So, without a babel fish or perfect technology, we are left with the old-fashioned way of learning a new language, which requires time, effort, and patience. How much time, effort, and patience depends a lot on the individual who is learning, as well as the learning environment and situation, but language researchers have developed a general outline of language acquisition that helps explain the process that language learners go through to develop skills in a foreign language. In this article, I will provide an overview to the stages of language acquisition, and offer strategies designed to support ELL instruction at different stages of language acquisition.Stages of Language AcquisitionResearchers define language acquisition into two categories: first-language acquisition and second-language acquisition. First-language acquisition is a universal process regardless of home language. Babies listen to the sounds around them, begin to imitate them, and eventually start producing words. Second-language acquisition assumes knowledge in a first language and encompasses the process an individual goes through as he or she learns the elements of a new language, such as vocabulary, phonological components, grammatical structures, and writing systems.The Six Stages of Second-Language AcquisitionPre-productionThis is also called “the silent period,” when the student takes in the new language but does not speak it. This period often lasts six weeks or longer, depending on the individual.Early productionThe individual begins to speak using short words and sentences, but the emphasis is still on listening and absorbing the new language. There will be many errors in the early production stage.Speech EmergentSpeech becomes more frequent, words and sentences are longer, but the individual still relies heavily on context clues and familiar topics. Vocabulary continues to increase and errors begin to decrease, especially in common or repeated interactions.Beginning FluencySpeech is fairly fluent in social situations with minimal errors. New contexts and academic language are challenging and the individual will struggle to express themselves due to gaps in vocabulary and appropriate phrases.Intermediate FluencyCommunicating in the second language is fluent, especially in social language situations. The individual is able to speak almost fluently in new situations or in academic areas, but there will be gaps in vocabulary knowledge and some unknown expressions. There are very few errors, and the individual is able to demonstrate higher order thinking skills in the second language such as offering an opinion or analyzing a problem.Advanced FluencyThe individual communicates fluently in all contexts and can maneuver successfully in new contexts and when exposed to new academic information. At this stage, the individual may still have an accent and use idiomatic expressions incorrectly at times, but the individual is essentially fluent and comfortable communicating in the second language.How long does it take for a language learner to go through these stages? Just as in any other learning situation, it depends on the individual. One of the major contributors to accelerated second language learning is the strength of first language skills. Language researchers such as Jim Cummins, Catherine Snow, Lily Wong Filmore and Stephen Krashen have studied this topic in a variety of ways for many years. The general consensus is that it takes between five to seven years for an individual to achieve advanced fluency. This generally applies to individuals who have strong first language and literacy skills. If an individual has not fully developed first language and literacy skills, it may take between seven to ten years to reach advanced fluency. It is very important to note that every ELL student comes with his or her own unique language and education background, and this will have an impact on their English learning process.It is also important to keep in mind that the understood goal for American ELL students is Advanced Fluency, which includes fluency in academic contexts as well as social contexts. Teachers often get frustrated when ELL students appear to be fluent because they have strong social English skills, but then they do not participate well in academic projects and discussions. Teachers who are aware of ELL students’ need to develop academic language fluency in English will be much better prepared to assist those students in becoming academically successful. (Learn more about academic language in Colorín Colorado’s academic language resource section.) Instructional StrategiesIf you have ELL students in your classroom, it is more than likely there will be students at a variety of stages in the language acquisition process. What can teachers do to differentiate instruction according to language level? Here are some suggestions for appropriate instructional strategies according to stages of language acquisition.Language StageStrategiesPre-productionEmphasize listening comprehension by using read-alouds and music.Use visuals and have students point to pictures or act out vocabulary.Speak slowly and use shorter words, but use correct English phrasing.Model “survival” language by saying and showing the meaning. For example, say, “Open your book,” and then open a book while the student observes.Gesture, point and show as much as possible.More advanced classmates who speak the same language can support new learning through interpretation.Avoid excessive error correction. Reinforce learning by modeling correct language usage when students make mistakes.Early ProductionContinue the strategies listed above, but add opportunities for students to produce simple language.Ask students to point to pictures and say the new word.Ask yes/no and either/or questions.Have students work in pairs or small groups to discuss a problem. Have literate students write short sentences or words in graphic organizers.Model a phrase and have the student repeat it and add modifications. Teacher says, “This book is very interesting.” The student repeats it and says, “This book is very boring.” Continue with as many modifications as possible.Avoid excessive error correction. Reinforce learning by modeling correct usage.Speech EmergentIntroduce more academic language and skills by using the same techniques listed above, but beginning to use more academic vocabulary.Introduce new academic vocabulary and model how to use it in a sentence.Provide visuals and make connections with student’s background knowledge as much as possible.Ask questions that require a short answer and are fairly literal.Introduce charts and graphs by using easily understood information such as a class survey of food preferences.Have students re-tell stories or experiences and have another student write them down. The ELL student can bring these narratives home to read and reinforce learning.In writing activities, provide the student with a fill-in-the blank version of the assignment with the necessary vocabulary listed on the page.Provide minimal error correction. Focus only on correction that directly interferes with meaning. Reinforce learning by modeling the correct usage.Beginning FluencyHave students work in pairs and groups to discuss content.During instruction, have students do a “Think, pair, share” to give the student an opportunity to process the new language and concept.Ask questions that require a full response with explanation. If you do not understand the student’s explanation, ask for clarification by paraphrasing and asking the student if you heard them correctly.Ask questions that require inference and justification of the answer.Ask students if they agree or disagree with a statement and why.Model more advanced academic language structures such as, “I think,” “In my opinion,” and “When you compare.” Have students repeat the phrases in context.Re-phrase incorrect statements in correct English, or ask the student if they know another way to say it.Introduce nuances of language such as when to use more formal English and how to interact in conversations.Have students make short presentations, providing them with the phrases and language used in presentations (“Today I will be talking about”) and giving them opportunities to practice the presentation with partners before getting in front of the class.Continue to provide visual support and vocabulary development.Correct errors that interfere with meaning, and pre-identify errors that will be corrected in student writing, such as verb-tense agreement. Only correct the errors agreed upon.You may want to assist in improving pronunciation by asking a student to repeat key vocabulary and discussing how different languages have different sounds.Intermediate FluencyIdentify key academic vocabulary and phrases and model them. Ask students to produce the language in class activities.Use graphic organizers and thinking maps and check to make sure the student is filling them in with details. Challenge the student to add more.Help the student make connections with new vocabulary by instructing him or her in the etymology of words or word families such as, “important, importance, importantly.“Create assessments that give students an opportunity to present in English after they have an opportunity to practice in pairs or small groups.Introduce more academic skills, such as brainstorming, prioritizing, categorization, summarizing and compare and contrast.Ask students to identify vocabulary by symbols that show whether the student “knows it really well, kind of knows it, or doesn’t know it at all.” Help students focus on strategies to get the meaning of new words.Have a “guessing time” during silent reading where they circle words they don’t know and write down their guess of the meaning. Check the results as a class.Introduce idioms and give examples of how to use them appropriately. For example, “Let’s wind up our work.” What’s another way you could use the phrase “wind up?“Starting at this level, students need more correction/feedback, even on errors that do not directly affect meaning. They should be developing a more advanced command of syntax, pragmatics, pronunciation, and other elements that do not necessarily affect meaning but do contribute to oral fluency.It may also be helpful to discuss language goals with the student so you can assist in providing modeling and correction in specified areas.Advanced FluencyStudents at this level are close to native language fluency and can interact well in a variety of situations. Continue to develop language skills as gaps arise by using the strategies listed above. Although the student may seem completely fluent, he or she still benefit from visual support, building on background knowledge, pre-teaching vocabulary and making connections between content areas.Offer challenge activities to expand the student’s vocabulary knowledge such as identifying antonyms, synonyms and the use of a thesaurus and dictionary.Demonstrate effective note-taking and provide a template.Offer error correction on academic work and on oral language. Because students at this stage have achieved near-native fluency, they benefit from support in fine-tuning their oral and written language skills. RecommendationsScaffold instruction so students receive comprehensible input and are able to successfully complete tasks at their level. Instructional scaffolding works just like the scaffolding used in building. It holds you at the level needed until you are ready to take it down. Scaffolding includes asking students questions in formats that give them support in answering, such as yes/no questions, one-word identifications, or short answers. It also means providing the context for learning by having visuals or other hands-on items available to support content learning. Also, when practicing a new academic skill such as skimming, scaffolding involves using well-known material so the students aren’t struggling with the information while they are trying to learn a new skill. Scaffolding includes whatever it takes to make the instruction meaningful for the student in order to provide a successful learning experience.Use cognates to help Spanish speakers learn English and derive meaning from content. The Colorín Colorado website has a helpful list of common cognates in Spanish for teachers to reference. Teachers can explicitly point out cognates for Spanish speaking students so they begin to realize that this is a useful way for them to increase their English vocabulary.Explicit vocabulary instruction is very important in accelerating ELL students’ English language development. Textbooks include lists of new vocabulary words based on grade-level content, but ELL students need further vocabulary instruction. There are many words in a text that may affect the ELL student’s comprehension of the text that a teacher may assume he or she knows. It is important for teachers to develop ways to help students identify the words they don’t know, as well as strategies for getting their meaning. Of course it is also beneficial if teachers reinforce the language structures or common associations of vocabulary. For example, “squeak” is a sound that often goes with “mouse” or “door” and it may be stated as, “squeak, squeaky, squeaks, or squeaked.“Error correction should be done very intentionally and appropriately according to student language ability, as noted earlier in the article. Students who are just beginning to speak English are already nervous about using their new language skills and constant correction will not improve their ability; it will just make them want to withdraw. I inform students in advance of the type of errors I will correct, such as “missing articles” and “third person agreement,” and then those are the only errors I check. In my class, I do not correct the errors; I circle the mistakes and return the paper to the student. They are responsible for correcting the errors and returning the paper to receive more points. Most of the time the students can make the corrections themselves when they see the area I’ve circled, but if they have difficulty, I guide them as they make the correction. In this way, I feel there is a manageable amount of correction information to work with and the student will actually learn from doing the correction.Learning another language. If you learn the language(s) your students speak, they will be thrilled to hear you try it with them. I learned how to say “good morning” in Somali and had to practice for an hour before I felt comfortable saying it. When I did I was rewarded with the big grins of students as they entered the room. They were excited to teach me other phrases as well, and we discussed how much English they had learned since they arrived in the country. They were very proud to think of how much progress they’d made.Seek the experts in your building or district who can offer you guidance on effective instructional strategies for your ELL students. There are many teachers who have taught ELL students in your content area, have taught a certain population of students, or are trained ESL or bilingual teachers who have a lot of advice and support to offer. Don’t hesitate to look for support when you are challenged to reach students who are learning English. This can be especially true when you have a “pre-production” or “beginning level” student and you are responsible for grade level content instruction.Visit the hotlinks section for this article for more information on specific research regarding language acquisition and recommended instructional strategies. You can also search the Colorín Colorado educator information for useful information and resources to assist you in meeting ELL student needs.ELL teachers encounter students with a variety of backgrounds and abilities, and until the babel fish comes into existence, they will need to have flexibility, creativity and skill in order to help ELL students make meaning from the new language and content they are learning. An understanding of the language acquisition process and levels will help teachers tailor instruction to meet the needs of a diverse group of learners. Students will benefit from everything teachers do to support the development of their language skills while teaching them grade level content. Together teachers and students develop their understanding of each other, the world around them, and the language that connects us all.Hot linksThe Stages of Second Language AcquisitionThis chapter from Classroom Instruction That Works with English Language Learners Facilitator’s Guide, by Jane D. Hill and Cynthia L. Björk, offers information on the second language acquisition process and effective ELL instruction. It includes a a simplified chart of language acquisition levels and the kinds of language teachers can use to help students at each level.Simple description of the stages of language acquisition and recommendations for instructional strategies according to level.Overview of Second Language Acquisition and StrategiesDownloadable booklet from the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory, “Strategies and Resources for Mainstream Teachers of English Language Learners.” Includes useful information on language levels, acquisition and 10 things teachers can do today to help ELL students.Understanding the “Silent Period” with English Language LearnersThis article describes some strategies used by two kindergarten teachers to communicate verbally and nonverbally.

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Introduction to Articulatory Phonetics (Vowels)

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Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
- Alfred Hitchcock

One of my favorite movies is The Princess Bride, which is based on the novel by William Goldman. For those of you haven't experienced this classic, the movie begins with a little boy who is sick and home from school, and his grandfather, who offers to read the boy a fairy tale that he had enjoyed when he was young. The boy isn't very interested at first, but soon realizes that he has nothing better to do, and agrees to at least hear the beginning. The story that follows, of course, is an enchanting tale filled with unforgettable characters and exciting plot twists. Despite his best efforts to resist getting drawn in, by the end, the boy is begging his grandfather to finish the story and even admits that he would be ready to hear it all over again if his grandfather returns with the book the next day.

What resonates with me in the movie is the experience of a child falling in love with a good story. While that experience is magical in its own right, it's also an important part of becoming a strong reader. Engagement is a critical piece of building reading and comprehension skills and plays an important part in reading motivation as well.

When English language learners (ELLs) read, they may have difficulty engaging with a story if:

they lack the background knowledge to understand the plot, setting, and characters

they have not had much practice "putting themselves in the story"

they only get one or two opportunities to read a text before the class moves on to something new.

ELLs can benefit greatly from having opportunities to read a text many times because this helps them develop fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. One way to reread a text while keeping it interesting for students is through Reader's Theater. In a Reader's Theater activity, students read stories that have been scripted like a play, and they act out the story together. Students may practice their parts several times before acting the story out in front of the class, which gets them thinking about their characters and the plot in a focused way. Rather than using elaborate props, costumes, or scenery, students can be encouraged to use vocal, facial, and physical expression to engage with the script and their character.

As students continue their repeated readings of the script, they are improving their reading skills and comprehension. They also will have the opportunity to practice speaking skills, such as pronunciation, inflection, expression, and varied volume. Since the activity is meant to practice reading, students don't need to memorize their lines, which keeps the spotlight on the reading practice, not the performance.

Reader's Theater offers ELLs an opportunity to completely immerse themselves in a story, and it gives students the chance to think about how engaged readers interact with print, such as by seeing pictures in their heads - very similar to watching a movie or play. Teachers can help ELLs make this connection by explaining how they can visualize the plot in their heads while they read and as they practice bringing stories to life.

Reader's Theater has something for all students, regardless of their language level. Beginning English speakers can have a small role with one or two short sentences, or if the student is at the "silent period," he or she can be assigned a non-speaking role such as an animal character. The more advanced a student's speaking skills are, the more the student can focus on improving expression and clarity in their role.

How to Get ELLs Started with Reader's Theater

Take a look at the way Amber Prentice uses a concept sort for teaching vocabulary before starting a Reader's Theater activity based on The Great Kapok Tree!

One of my colleagues in the St. Paul Public School District, Amber Prentice, frequently uses Reader's Theater with her seventh- and eighth-grade ESL students. She explained to me how she does it from start to finish.

Introduction

When she first introduces Reader's Theater to her students at the beginning of the school year, she talks a little bit about what to expect and explains that this activity is meant to help them improve their reading and speaking abilities.

Story Selection

Amber tends to get her scripts from Reader's Theater books or websites. She notes that it can be difficult to find stories with enough parts for all students in a class; while some teachers may choose different stories for different groups of students, Amber uses the same story for the entire class. If only a few roles are available in the story she has chosen, she breaks the class down into separate "casts" so that all students have a part.

Amber thinks this is helpful for her ELL students because it provides them with maximum exposure to the plot. Students will understand the story very well by the end of the activity, and they will be able to laugh at all the right lines and be more involved in other groups' performances.

Vocabulary

After she has chosen a story, Amber goes through it and selects the vocabulary words students will need to know in order to understand the plot. She then previews the vocabulary with a variety of activities until she is confident that they have mastered the definitions.

Read-Through

Next, Amber reads the whole play out loud to her students and asks comprehension questions to make sure they understand the story.

Roles

She then assigns roles or allows students to choose parts in the play, depending on the level of the students. She makes sure students know how to read the script by highlighting their parts and helping them understand that reading cues such as "Narrator" or "Woman enters the room" should not be read.

Practice

Amber gives her students ample time to practice their play and read their parts. She circulates through the room and gives feedback to students as they read. If students are reading without expression, she prompts them to try the line with more feeling. If students are stumbling with pronunciation, she models the correct pronunciation for them.

Staging

Before students do their performance for their classmates, they practice the staging and create any simple props they think will be helpful to the story.

Evaluation

Before the performance, Amber explains how the students will be graded. She reviews each element in the following list, making sure that students understand what each part means and showing examples of what she wants to see from the students as they are reading.

Students are evaluated based on:

As students become more proficient at Reader's Theater, they can use the list to evaluate each other, as well as give helpful feedback.

Performance

Once the students have practiced their lines, prepared simple props, and understand how they will be evaluated, they are ready to perform! Each group presents its version of the story, which also gives students an opportunity to compare how each group's interpretation is similar or different.

Amber has found that students approach Reader's Theater in a variety of ways. She had a group of boys that she thought might not like the activity because they would be afraid to look silly. Instead, the boys were very enthusiastic, found costumes, made masks, and gave animated performances to make the story a true dramatic success. Other students have taken Reader's Theater a little more slowly and want specific instructions as to how to put their story together.

Benefits of Reader's Theater

From the start of the activity to the finish, students read through the story about 15 times. Amber acknowledges that her students would never want to read a story so many times if it weren't for Reader's Theater. Within the context of this engaging activity, however, it has proven to be popular with the students, and she has seen noticeable improvements for her students as a result of repeated exposure to the text. They begin to develop fluency and comprehension because they become very familiar with the text and the plot structure. They also improve their pronunciation and presentation skills because they have so much practice reading and listening to the stories. Finally, the students begin to show more self-confidence while reading out loud and getting up in front of the class.

Since it's an activity she uses on a fairly regular basis, her students now know what to expect, and they can jump right into new scripts as soon as they receive them. Amber noted, too, that there is a lot of potential for using Reader's Theater to bring history and science to life, as well as narrative stories.

Variations on Reader's Theater for English Language Learners

Student Scripts

Rather than using prepared scripts, students can write a script on a topic of their choosing, or they can summarize a book by using the Language Experience Approach to re-tell the main parts of the story. The teacher then works with the students to create dialogue that makes sense for the parts of the story and formats it into a script that students can use that for their performance.

This exercise can be used to reinforce content-area concepts. For example, in history class, students can re-enact an event such as the Boston Tea Party by making up dialog to match what happened. In a science class, if the students are learning how a vaccine works, they may want to create a script about the development of vaccines, with characters who discuss how vaccines are created and used. They may wish to cast famous scientists as the main characters of the play.

Memorization for Beginners

For ELLs with emerging literacy skills, it may be easier for teachers to repeat lines verbally to help students memorize them. Also, it may be appropriate for students to first do the play in their native language, and then again in English. This helps reinforce their understanding of the story and allows them to transfer the confidence they feel from their native language performance into their English language performance.

Peer Interaction

Another way to practice the read-through is to pair students as they are rehearsing their parts with another student who can model and support the fluency of the ELL.

Diversity in Subject Matter

Teachers should try to find scripts that represent a variety of cultures, including folk tales that ELLs can relate to. Students may be able to tell the class stories that they grew up with. For example, many cultures have different versions of stories like Cinderella that students will find familiar.

Performance Opportunities

Teachers may want to create opportunities for ELLs to perform for audiences other than their classmates. This is especially beneficial if there are younger grades the ELLs can visit. For example, after performing the piece in class, ELLs can perform it for a younger child or class of children. After practicing in class, students should be comfortable performing the story in a different setting.

I believe that one of the most important things we can do as teachers is to help our students fall in love with reading. Reader's Theater is a wonderful way to engage ELLs and get them excited about great stories. Please see the Hotlinks section for more information on how to use Reader's Theater in your classroom. You'll find links to websites that offer free scripts for learners, as well as instructions for using Reader's Theater effectively. Happy teaching and happy acting!
Reader's Theater: Giving Students a Reason to Read Aloud
This Reading Rockets article explains how Reader's Theater offers an entertaining and engaging means of improving fluency and enhancing comprehension.
Reading AtoZ.com: Reader's Theater Scripts
Reading AtoZ offers scripts for all elementary grade levels which are sorted into different reading levels.
Teacher Vision: Reader's Theater
Here you'll find an article by Sam Sebesta describing Reader's Theater and its benefits, as well as a listing of recommended reading.
Teacher Vision: Popular Drama & Literature Resources
This website has "Popular Drama and Literature Resources," including links to Reader's Theater scripts. Although a membership is required to access most of the resources, the site is worth looking at, just to get ideas for the different kinds of scripts that can be used in Reader's Theater. The site also offers a free seven-day membership.
Introduction to Reader's Theater: A Guide to Classroom Performance
This book by Gerald Lee Ratliff includes background on Reader's Theater, lesson plans, recommended readings, and scripts that can be used in the classroom. The book is available for sale on Amazon.com.
Reader's Theatre Strategies in the Middle and Junior High Classroom
This book by Lois Walker discusses using Reader's Theater in language development with adolescent students.
Reader's Theater Tips
This informative site from Aaron Shephard site has step-by-step instructions on how to implement Reader's Theater in the classroom, as well as a link to a book by Aaron Shephard called, "Readers on Stage."
Reader's Theater Scripts and Plays
This section from Teachingheart.net offers links to numerous scripts, as well as some books with collections of Reader's Theater plays and activities.
Literacy Connections: Reader's Theater
This webpage has description of Reader's Theater and links to many useful websites that offer tips for doing Reader's Theater in the classroom, including where to find scripts online.

Classroom Video: Concept Sort

Take a look at the way Amber Prentice uses a concept sort for teaching vocabulary before starting a reader's theater activity based on The Great Kapok Tree. You can see more strategies from Amber's classroom and her complete interview in our Meet the Experts section.

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Reader's Theater: Oral Language Enrichment and Literacy Development for ELLs

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Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. - Alfred Hitchcock One of my favorite movies is The Princess Bride, which is based on the novel by William Goldman.

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These intentional response strategies create entry points for students who may feel reticent to share in class discussions.

"The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning." I heard this saying many times, but it finally stuck with me one day as I looked over my students' math performance data and noticed that all of my students with low mastery had something in common: They rarely participated in class discussions.

Meanwhile, many students with high levels of math mastery were those whose hands were frequently raised. Was it possible that not joining class discussions could contribute to low levels of mastery?

Ever since this aha moment, I've shifted my teaching practice to emphasize intentional response protocols that ensure all students contribute to classroom discussions, and my students' mastery has shifted with it.

The Impact of Intentional Response Protocols

When my classroom depended on hand-raising, I found that discussions were biased toward students who knew that their answers were correct. This meant missed opportunities for the class to engage with interesting mistakes.

There is benefit in hearing from a wide range of student voices, and intentional response protocols-frameworks for intentional sharing-ensure that every student has a pathway to participating in class discussions.

These protocols don't have to completely eliminate hand-raising from the classroom, but if they become routines, they normalize the participation of all students and shift the dynamic of who is doing the talking and, in turn, the learning.

Getting Started

One of the biggest barriers to student participation in my math class is concern over getting an answer wrong. Before launching new routines for intentional response in my classroom, I consider how to make my students feel comfortable taking risks by normalizing mistakes as part of the learning process.

This means breaking down preconceived ideas about who is a "math person" as well as what types of answers are worth sharing. At the beginning of the school year, I give students sentence stems for agreeing and disagreeing (e.g., "I disagree with your idea because..."), offering students a positive way to engage with errors in the classroom.

It's important to be attentive to student responses when errors are discussed and to notice and address whether students use these sentence frames. One strategy that went a long way in shifting my classroom culture was consistently praising mistakes and specifically naming the ways in which they help everyone learn.

This could sound like "I'm so glad that you gave that answer, because that is a common confusion. Now we can all look out for this type of mistake!" The specific narration about the learning process not only validates taking an academic risk but also names the direct benefit to others.

Differentiating the Protocols

In addition to classroom culture, I work to make intentional responses accessible for all students in my classroom, particularly students with learning differences or anxiety.

One strategy that is particularly helpful for students who need more processing time is to give students independent work time followed by a partner turn-and-talk before calling on students. This provides an opportunity for them to conference with a peer and potentially ask questions.

During that time, I circulate to give quick prompts or checks for understanding to students who benefit from more support. When it is time to call on students, I preplan some "break it down" questions that can quickly assist a student in the moment if they are stuck.

Finally, I'm always aware of students who have 504 plans that specify "no cold calling" or students who check in with me to share that anxiety is a barrier. For these students, I utilize "warm calling" by checking in with the student before calling on them to make sure they are comfortable sharing their response.

Enhancing Engagement

Three techniques have proven most impactful in increasing student engagement and mastery in my class: randomized calling, strategic warm calling, and popcorn out.

In randomized calling, I use a random picker wheel or draw names to choose student responders. This protocol eliminates teacher bias in choosing which students to call on. Choosing students randomly ensures that diverse voices are heard, and students experience a sense of fairness within the classroom. Additionally, a random selection process increases variation in the types of solutions or mistakes that are shared.

It is, however, important for a protocol to match the academic task at hand. Following a complex group work task, I found that it made sense to use a different protocol- strategic warm calling -to sequence student responses in a way that elicited learning. Strategic warm calling is when the teacher selects student responses based on how they reveal important ideas in the learning and gives the students notice before calling on them.

You might warm-call students in a predetermined order or infuse joy by adding an element of spontaneity: "Choose the tallest group member to share," for example. While debriefing a series of quick review problems, I may choose a table group or row in my classroom and call on students to "popcorn out" the responses. This protocol involves calling on students in quick succession to give single-word or short-phrase answers to problems that they have already completed. It is particularly effective for debriefing the steps of a procedure that students are already familiar with.

By planning which protocol best matches the task in the lesson, I'm able to balance representation of student voices with the pedagogical needs of the task.

Embracing Change

Changing my teaching practice from relying on hand-raising to focusing on intentional response protocols did not happen instantaneously and required practice and patience. When I first made this shift, I focused exclusively on strategic warm calling for several years before working up to randomized calling.

The first time I used the random name picker, I was nervous about how my class would respond. I was surprised to find that they thought it was really fun. Now, I regularly have students who offer to spin the name picker wheel and even see an occasional student smile when the wheel calls on them. It made me realize that my own bias was one of the biggest barriers I had to overcome in shifting my practice.

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Protocols That Get All Students Talking in Class Discussions

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These intentional response strategies create entry points for students who may feel reticent to share in class discussions.

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Linguistics is the science of language. It is the subject whose practitioners devote their energy to understanding why human language is the way it is. They study the history, acquisition, structure, and use of as many languages as possible. ~Professor David Crystal

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Fostering Literacy Development in English Language Learners

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Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print: The MIT Press. Anthony, J. L., & Lonigan, C. J. (2004). The nature of phonological awareness: Converging evidence from four studies of preschool and early grade school children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96 (1), 43-55. August, D. (2002).

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Learning to read is a complicated process. If you teach English language learners (ELLs), however, there are a number of ways you can support their literacy and language development through targeted instruction.

This article highlights ELL instructional strategies based on the five components of reading as outlined in Teaching Children to Read by the National Reading Panel (2000). This report is a study of research-based best practices in reading instruction and it focuses on the following five instructional areas: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Vocabulary, Fluency, Comprehension. In addition, the article includes information related to two additional important areas of instruction for ELLs, oral language and the role of the home language.

Each of these topics is explored below, and each section includes:

a definition

an explanation of why the component is important when learning to read

challenges that ELLs may face

strategies for ELL instruction

You will find references to more in-depth information about ELLs and effective reading instruction from recommended resources below.

Note: Since this article includes in-depth information on a number of topics, we encourage you to use it in professional learning communities, jigsaw activities, and other collaborative settings!

What does the research say?

Before jumping in, it's important to note that, in general, what we know about effective literacy instruction for English speakers holds true for ELLs, but modifications and adjustments may be needed (Goldenberg, 2008). Since the original National Reading Panel did not include ELLs' literacy development as part of its research review, a subsequent panel reviewed the research related to language learners and released a report authored by principal investigator Dr. Diane August and panel chair Dr. Timothy Shanahan titled Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth.

Within the executive summary of that report, the authors note that, "Instruction that provides substantial coverage in the key components of reading - identified by the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension - has clear benefits for language-minority students." They continue, "However, while approaches that are similar to those used with native-language populations are effective, the research suggests that adjustments to these approaches are needed to have maximum benefit with language-minority students." (p. 3)

For example, many practices may need modifications or scaffolds which may not be reflected in different reading programs or materials (August, 2018; Goldenberg, 2008), and in some cases, certain strategies may not be appropriate even with adjustments. In addition, the authors note the important role of two areas that were not addressed in the original National Reading Panel: students' home language and oral language.

Many examples of specific modifications are outlined in the strategies below, along with discussion of home language and oral language. You can find additional research resources at the end of the article, including a recent working paper published by Pivot Learning, Narrowing Down to Find Common Ground: Shared Agreements for Effective Literacy Instruction in California.

An in-depth video book study highlighting Literacy Foundations for English Learners by Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan is also publicly available on YouTube.

When working with ELLs, students' home languages are a powerful tool that educators can use - even if they don't speak those languages or are working in a classroom with students who speak many languages. Drs. August and Shanahan write, "Oral proficiency and literacy in the first language can be used to facilitate literacy development in English" (2006, p. 5). And in hisColorín Colorado article about the value of students' home language, Dr. Fred Genesee writes:

Extensive research, again from around the world, has found that children who are learning to read in a second language are able to transfer many skills and knowledge from their first language to facilitate their acquisition of reading skills in the second language. The best evidence of this comes from studies showing that students with strong reading skills in the home language also have strong reading skills in their second language. Much of this work has been done on ELLs in the U.S. (August & Shanahan, 2006; Riches & Genesee, 2006).

Tapping into students' home languages (also referred to as a first or native language) as a resource can take different forms:

Helping students make connections between their language and English in order to identify similarities and differences, such as English/Spanish cognates

Providing opportunities to use the home language in the classroom for reading, writing, and discussion

Encouraging students to draw on all of their language skills across languages, which is called translanguaging

Promoting biliteracy through bilingual or dual-language instruction, which can support students' future opportunities and family ties (not to mention brain health!), with initiatives such as the Seal of Biliteracy, which has been adopted in many states

It is important to keep in mind that the extent to which a student's literacy skills from their first language transfer depends on many factors, such as how similar the alphabetic systems between the two languages are and whether they share any connection in their origins, such as two languages that both derive from Latin (Nieser & Cárdenas-Hagan, 2020, p. 65). The students' levels of literacy in their home language will also have an impact on their literacy development in their new language. Learning more about the languages students speak can help educators target instruction, notice patterns among speakers of the same language, and help students understand the relationship between their language and English

You can also provide students and families with access to bilingual books and texts and encourage families to continue using and developing the home language through activities such as rhymes, storytelling, and conversation at home. You will also find specific strategies related to home language throughout the key components below.

Recommended resources

In addition, as you will see below, oral language has a role to play across all reading skills, yet it often does not receive much attention as a critical part of ELLs' language and literacy development. Drs. August and Shanahan write, "Instruction in the key components of reading is necessary - but not sufficient - for teaching language-minority students to read and write proficiently in English. Oral proficiency in English is critical as well - but student performance suggests that it is often overlooked in instruction." (2006, p. 5)

Oral language supports students' literacy skills in different ways. For example, students need to be familiar not only with the sounds and letters they are learning but also the words in which they appear in order to support their word recognition and comprehension. Other more global oral language skills, such as facility with English syntax and grammar, and the ability to navigate specific language functions like describing, predicting, and comparing, also contribute to both reading and writing development for ELLs.

In addition, strengthening oral language supports students' ability to participate in peer groups and their proficiency in speaking and writing using academic language. Students need opportunities to practice applying their emerging oral language skills through partner talk and peer work (scaffolded with supports such as sentence frames), activities such as partner reading, and responding to comprehension questions using academic language.

Dr. Carrie Simkin, the director of our sister site AdLit.org, offers the following suggestions related to oral language:

Make it a learning target for lesson planning (e.g. be intentional about planning for it).

Consider how much of the learning time in your classroom is text based vs. discussion. Do students have opportunities to discuss ideas or do they mostly respond in written formats? We want to engage students in lively discussions!

Consider if students have opportunities to work in pairs as well as small groups and not just respond to teacher-generated questions.

Have you modeled how to orally respond to questions using the question as a sentence starter? Do you have sentence starters visible for share-outs?

Our strategies related to oral language are also woven throughout the components below.

Recommended resources

Note: You can read more about the role of oral language in the foreword of Comprehension and English Language Learners.

Phonemic Awareness and ELLs

Keeping the areas of home language and oral language in mind, let's dive into the five key skill areas, starting with phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is an important indicator of how well children will learn to read. Sometimes it is difficult, however, for speakers of a second language to "hear" and say sounds in the language they are learning. If you have had a student who could not master a particular sound in English, the sound may not have been a part of the student's native language.

In her chapter of Literacy Foundations for English Learners, Dr. Virginia Lovelace-Gonzalez notes that, "Phonological awareness skills can transfer across languages when students have opportunities to build these skills in their native language and English" (2020, p. 53).

For example, there are multiple sounds in English and Spanish that will directly transfer between languages, even if the sounds are associated with different letters (p. 50). Dr. Lovelace-Gonzalez writes, "For ELs, phonemic activities in English can be complicated by having to recognize sounds in English that do not exist in their native language...Instructionally, it is important for teachers to determine some of the similarities and differences between English and the student's native language to ensure the opportunity to learn" (p. 53).

Phonemic Awareness: Considerations and Strategies

What: The ability to hear and manipulate the different sounds in our language.

Why it matters: Phonemic awareness is the foundation for spelling and word recognition skills.

Considerations for ELLs

Learn more about the students' home languages.

Start by visiting a resource such as MyLanguages.org or Omniglot.com, which shares an overview of many different global languages.

Ask bilingual colleagues about how their languages are similar or different from English and common areas that need attention when learning English. For example, a group of Ukrainian teachers shared some of the questions that Ukrainian speakers have when learning English in this Colorín Colorado article.

Identify whether there are any sounds that your students' languages share with English. Use these as a starting point in your instruction. In addition, find out which sounds might be new to your students and be sure to include explicit practice of those sounds.

Help students think about the connection between their language and English.

Ask students how their language is the same or different than English in terms of how the language is written, the sounds that letters or symbols make, and words that might be related.

Help students become familiar with sounds, letters, and symbols that are shared between languages, as well as those that are not shared between the languages. (Some examples across different languages are included in Literacy Foundations for English Learners.)

Ask students if they have words that begin with a particular sound, or if there are any words related to a particular word in English. This can work with students who have limited literacy skills in their first language too.

Help beginning readers learn to identify sounds in short words.

Have students practice identifying the sounds in the beginning, middle, and end of these words. You may wish to use words that begin with a consonant, have a short vowel, and end in a consonant (CVC words) such as mat, top, and bus.

One very effective method is having students match pictures of words that have the same beginning, middle, or ending sound.

Use words that students already know in English.

Videos

Learn how to pronounce the 44 phonemes in English.

Phonics and ELLs

Phonics instruction aims to help new readers understand that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds. Students benefit from learning and practicing sounds and symbols, including blended combinations. ELLs often show many strengths in mastering early phonics skills but it's important to remember that decoding while reading and correctly spelling words does not ensure good comprehension.

That's why it's important to ensure that ELLs are familiar with the words they are learning to decode in order to support their comprehension. The authors of Words Their Way with English Learners write, "English learners need structured opportunities to learn many new words to add to their repertoires so that these words can become the material of their literacy learning" (2011, p. 79).

Phonics: Considerations and Strategies

Considerations for ELLs

Use a word study approach.

Word study is a powerful approach that connects letters, sound, meaning, word parts, and usage so that students are learning explicit foundational skills within a meaningful context. For example, ELLs need lots of opportunities to connect the sounds, letters, and words they are learning.

The authors of Words Their Way with English Learners write, "What is key to literacy development for English learners in the emergent stage is that they use language with teachers and peers and see oral language they understand captured in print" (Helman et al, 2011).

Look for opportunities to reinforce phonics in context.

Using literature and content material, you can introduce and reinforce:

letter recognition

beginning and ending sounds

blends

rhyming words

silent letters

homonyms

Vocabulary and ELLs

Vocabulary plays an important part in learning to read, as well as in understanding what is read.

As students learn to read more advanced texts, they must learn the meaning of new words that are not part of their oral vocabulary. For ELLs, vocabulary development is especially important as students' develop academic language - in all subjects and activities! There are numerous ways to support explicit vocabulary instruction, which is essential for developing students' vocabulary knowledge. Dr. Coleen D. Carlson writes,

For EL students, drawing attention to unknown words during the initial presentation of the text, providing appropriate levels of definitions (e.g., providing English labels for words for which concepts and labels in one's native language are understood, quick definitions or demonstrations for simple words) and tying to background knowledge is critical. No amount of simply reading and rereading words will produce knowledge of unknown vocabulary. (2020, p. 97)

Vocabulary: Considerations and Strategies

Considerations for ELLs

Draw upon students' home languages.

You can draw upon students' home languages to build vocabulary by:

It is important to give students as much exposure and experience with new vocabulary words as possible before asking students to use them in a lesson or activity.

Select words that will support the reader's understanding of the story or text, as well as for other phrases and connectors that affect comprehension (even though, except, etc.). You can pre-teach vocabulary by using English as a second language (ESL) methods such as:

Role playing or pantomiming

Using gestures

Showing real objects

Pointing to pictures

Doing quick drawings on the board

Using the equivalent in students' languages and then asking students to say the word in English

Providing a student-friendly definition

Using graphic organizers

Cognates are words in different languages that are derived from the same original word or root. About 40% of all English words have cognates in Spanish (such as the English/Spanish cognate "family/familia"). This is an obvious bridge to the English language for Spanish speakers if the student is made aware of how to use this resource.

Teach students to recognize and use cognates, or words that are related across languages, and encourage students to be on the lookout for cognates from other languages as well.

Give students an opportunity to practice using new words.

As the teacher, you can explicitly teach word meanings to improve comprehension. However, to know a word means knowing it in all of the following dimensions:

The ability to define a word

The ability to recognize when to use that word

Knowledge of its multiple meanings

The ability to decode and spell that word

The ability to use different definitions word accurately in different contexts

Ensure students understand a new word by asking them to produce it themselves either orally or in writing.

I taught a summer school unit on habitats and healthy environments, and every student had to learn the phrase, "Reduce, reuse, recycle." Over the course of four weeks I gave students many opportunities to use those words to describe what we were doing: "We are reusing the grocery bag," or "We reused the scratch paper."

Build students' academic vocabulary.

You can increase students' academic vocabulary by teaching common structures and terms used in a specific content area. For example, sentence frames are a great way to get students familiar with these structures and can be used in writing and speaking:

You can learn more strategies in this related article.

The _____ is ______ than the _____.

I can conclude ______ because _______.

Videos

ESOL Specialist Sheila Majdi: Using sentence frames with ELLs

ESOL specialist Sheila Majdi from Arlington, VA explains what a sentence frame is and how she might use this strategy with ELLs.

Interactive reading of a story

In this classroom clip, first-grade teacher Albuquerque teacher Ali Nava leads her students through an interactive reading of Burro's Tortillas, a Southwestern adaptation of "The Little Red Hen."

Focusing on language in literacy instruction

In this classroom clip, fifth-grade teacher Clara Gonzales-Espinoza helps her students expand their understanding of the way language is used in a picture book version of Cinderella.

Instruction of key academic vocabulary with high school ELLs

In this lesson, students read a letter that Captain John Smith of the English Army wrote to Queen Anne in 1616. You can see lesson materials and reflection interviews from ELL teacher Anne Formato in our related classroom module.

Fluency and ELLs

Fluency is a tricky area when it comes to ELL reading instruction. For native English speakers, fluency and reading comprehension often share a strong correlation because fluent readers recognize words and comprehend at the same time. This is not always the case for ELLs.

Many ELLs can be deceptively fast and accurate in their reading because they are good readers in their primary language and have strong decoding skills. Yet they may demonstrate little understanding of the text, and hearing the text out loud may not necessarily provide a step towards comprehension as it is likely to do for native speakers. One important factor in the connection between fluency and comprehension is ELLs' oral language skills, which Dr. Carlson describes as "an important foundation that supports the role of fluency as a bridge to comprehension" (p. 93).

Fluency: Considerations and Strategies

Inaccurate indicator of ELLs' comprehension

It is not unusual for an ELL student to read a passage beautifully and then not be able answer more than a couple of comprehension questions correctly. Decoding skills (sounding out words) and comprehending the text are two different skills.

Limited benefit from hearing texts read aloud

Native speakers who are not strong decoders can often comprehend text that is read to them better than text that they read themselves. That's because when someone else is doing the reading, they can focus on meaning without having to struggle to get the words off the page.

With ELLs, however, comprehension problems tend to be associated with limited vocabulary and limited background knowledge. Thus, listening to text read by someone else won't enhance comprehension.

Comprehension and ELLs

Comprehension is the understanding and interpretation of what is read. To be able to accurately understand written material, children need to be able to 1) decode what they read; 2) make connections between what they read and what they already know; and 3) think deeply about what they have read. Comprehension can be the most difficult skill to master, however, and can elude students who have mastered word-level skills. According to the executive summary of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth,

An important finding that emerges from the research is that word-level skills in literacy - such as decoding, word recognition and spelling - are often taught well enough to allow language-minority students to attain levels of performance equal to those of native English speakers. However, this is not the case for text-level skills - reading comprehension and writing. (p. 4)

ELLs at all levels of English proficiency, and literacy development, will benefit from explicit instruction in comprehension skills along with other skills because improved comprehension will not only help them in language arts and ESL classes - it will help them in content-area classes and in daily activities. It will also improve the chances of their interest in reading for pleasure.

Learn more from the following articles:

Comprehension: Considerations and Strategies

Considerations for ELLs

ELLs who struggle with comprehension may read more slowly, have a hard time following a text or story, have a hard time picking out important events, and feel frustrated. They may also have problems mastering new concepts in their content-area classes or completing assignments and assessments because they cannot comprehend the texts and tests for these subjects.

Check comprehension frequently.

As students read, ask them open-ended questions about what they are reading, and informally test students' ability to sequence material from sentences or a story by printing sentences from a section of the story on paper strips, mixing the strips or word order, and having students put them in order.

Use questions after reading.

After the ELLs and/or whole class have completed the reading, you can test their comprehension with carefully crafted questions, taking care to use simple sentences and key vocabulary from the text they just read.

These questions can be at the:

Videos

This video showcases a 5 th-grade team planning a science lesson about the difference between vascular and non-vascular plants. ESOL specialist Katy Padilla plays a key role in advocating for ELLs throughout the lesson planning process and sharing her strategies for engaging and supporting students.

Making Dual-Language Immersion Work

This video provides an introduction to Claremont Immersion School's dual language model and shows how teachers collaborating to develop a language arts language in English and Spanish.

Assessment for ELLs

Learn how third-grade teacher Samantha Kirch uses informal assessment in her classroom to better evaluate ELLs and their progress.

Story setup: Pre-reading strategies for comprehension

Learn about pre-reading strategies that will lay the groundwork before high school newcomer ELLs tackle a new text.

Teaching ELLs in upper elementary, middle school, and high school

Older ELLs bring a lot of valuable experience and interests to the classroom. At the same time, they face the double challenge of needing to learn content and a new language at the same time, which is further complicated if their literacy skills are limited. While they may still need foundational skills work, it can be hard to find materials that are age-appropriate. You can learn more about specific tips for supporting this diverse population from the following resources:

For great classroom videos at the secondary level, see our classroom video library!

Concluding Thoughts

This is a lot of information, but we hope that these resources and recommendations can inform your work with students as well as the conversations about literacy in your setting. The more familiar your team is with best practices for ELLs, the more effectively you can determine which practices and resources will best support your students in their ongoing literacy development - and future successes!

Recommend Resources

This new working paper released by Pivot Learning reflects collective consensus among literacy experts on key topics concerning (1) literacy and multilingual and English learner students; (2) early screening and assessment; and (3) foundational skills.

To learn more about the paper and how it was developed, see Can common ground be found on teaching reading in California? (EdSource)

Research articles and chapters

Books

Literacy Foundations for English Learners by Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan (You can see the related book study on YouTube.)

Words Their Way with English Learners: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling (2nd Ed.) by Dr. Lori Helman, Dr. Donald R. Bear, Dr. Shane Templeton, Dr. Marcia Invernizzi, and Dr. Francine Johnston

Literacy Instruction for English Language Learners by Dr. Nancy Cloud, Dr. Fred Genesee, and Dr. Else Hamayan

Dual Language Instruction from A to Z: Practical Guidance for Teachers and Administrators by Dr. Else Hamayan, Dr. Fred Genesee, and Dr. Nancy Cloud

Webcasts

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Reading 101 for English Language Learners

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Learning to read is a complicated process. If you teach English language learners (ELLs), however, there are a number of ways you can support their literacy and language development through targeted instruction. This article highlights ELL instructional strategies based on the five components of reading as outlined in Teaching Children to Read by the National Reading Panel (2000).

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DIT Labs - Fairfax County Public Schools

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Forensic Linguistic Profiling & What Your Language Reveals About You | Harry Bradford | TEDxStoke

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CODE-SWITCHING: Jumping Between 2 Different Languages

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DESE supports you as you continue to focus on the health and well-being of your students; find innovative ways to continue teaching and learning; and provide as much normalcy as possible for students, faculty and staff. Refer to the DESE-related COVID-19 webpage for links to useful information. If you have questions about assessment, send them to assessment@dese.mo.gov or call 573-751-3545.

Missouri joined the WIDA (pronounced Wee-Duh) consortium in 2010 in response to both wanting to improve the EL standards within the state and to help provide better service and assessment to a growing EL population. The WIDA Consortium is a non-profit group whose purpose is to promote educational success for ELs. Through the development and delivery of standards, assessments, research and professional development, WIDA provides meaningful tools, training and information to educators working with ELs, which are anchored in research-based practices for serving these diverse learners.

Aside from professional development and English Language Development resources, WIDA provides the state with screener and summative English Language Proficiency (ELP) assessments.​

ELP Summative Assessment

WIDA's ACCESS for ELLs is the English language proficiency assessment that Missouri has selected to meet the requirement of the Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA) to annually assess Missouri's students who are eligible for EL (English Learner) services, including students with disabilities. ACCESS allows educators, students, and families to monitor students' progress in acquiring academic English in the domains of speaking, listening, reading, and writing and will be aligned with the WIDA English Language Development (ELD) Standards.

WIDA offer three assessments:

ACCESS for ELLs - The online assessment for students in grades 1-12 (a paper version is available for those with an IEP and for students with very limited exposure to technology)

Kindergarten ACCESS - A Paper-Based Kindergarten assessment that comes in a kit with manipulatives

Alternate ACCESS - An assessment of English language proficiency for students in grades 1 - 12 who are classified as ELs and have significant cognitive disabilities (those who do or would qualify for MAP-A) that prevent their meaningful participation in the ACCESS for ELLs 2.0 assessment. The assessment is based on Alternate Model Performance Indicators (AMPIs), which provide expectations of what students should be able to process and produce at a given Alternate ELP level.

More information about the summative ELP assessments can be found in the tabs below labeled ACCESS, K-ACCESS and Alt. ACCESS. Additionally information can be found in the annual LEA Guide to ELP Assessments.

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DESE supports you as you continue to focus on the health and well-being of your students; find innovative ways to continue teaching and learning; and provide as much normalcy as possible for students, faculty and staff. Refer to the DESE-related COVID-19 webpage for links to useful information.

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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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The Classroom | Empowering Students in Their College Journey

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Forms of Validity Used in Assessment Instruments

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Using Informal Assessments for English Language Learners

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Informal assessments (also called authentic or alternative) allow teachers to track the ongoing progress of their students regularly and often. While standardized tests measure students at a particular point in the year, ongoing assessments provide continual snapshots of where students are throughout the school year.

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In "Strengths and Limitations of Current ELL Assessment Measures and Assessment Strategies: Reliability, Validity, and Utility," Linda Espinosa explores the current trends and implications in assessment for young ELLs. This excerpt originally was published in Young English Language Learners: Current Research and Emerging Directions for Practice and Policy (Teachers College Press, 2010).

In order for ELL children's outcomes to be fairly and appropriately assessed, it is important to understand some of the major limitations to many of the currently available measures for young children. A more detailed review of the technical characteristics of common ELL assessment measures (e.g., how the measure was developed, nature of normative sample, intended use of measure, validity, reliability, predictive ability, relationship to other more in-depth assessments, prior use with similar populations, etc.) can be found in a recently compiled compendium of ELL assessment measures (Barrueco, López, Ong, & Lozano, 2007).

Similarly, it is critical that users pay particular attention to the background information on standardization procedures contained in the respective assessment manuals for each measure. This is important both to guide the initial selection of the most appropriate assessment measure or measures, and to better understand any key concerns or limitations related to the interpretation of the results derived from individual assessments.

Discussion Points

Not intended to be an exhaustive summary of considerations or limitations, the following discussion highlights some of the issues and general limitations across assessment measures and procedures for ELLs:

1. Despite the tremendous recent growth in the population of young ELL children, the corresponding development of a range of different types of appropriate measures for ELL children has lagged far behind. The limitations relate both to the overall number of available measures, and to the domains of skills and abilities covered by such measures.

2. Many of the currently available measures for ELL children have been developed essentially as basic translations or adaptations of existing English language versions of measures, with varying levels of attention to ensuring comparability in the conceptual, linguistic or semantic content and/or level of diffi culty of the translated items across languages. As such, the content validity and construct validity may not be the same for the Spanish as for the English version of the same measure.

3. Unless a test were specifically normed with a sample of similar ELL children, the tests are still less accurate and valid for dual language learners who have been judged suffi ciently fluent in English to be assessed in English. Often, the reliability coefficients for many standardized tests are lower for ELL children, even if they have been designated as fully proficient in English (Abedi, Leon, & Mirocha, 2001) meaning that the score for an individual child may not be an accurate measure of that specific child's abilities. The concurrent validity scores for some assessments have also been shown to be substantially lower for ELL students, again making the accuracy less dependable.

4. The actual developmental construct that is being assessed by a measure may vary from one language to the next. On several common measures assessing different aspects of phonemic awareness, a child may be asked either to add to or take away parts of words to form new words. On English versions of such tasks, compound words are often used. For example, a child may be asked to say a word such as mailbox and then say it without mail (box), or blend the words mail and box together to form a new word (mailbox). However, since compound words occur much less frequently in Spanish, this particular type of task is much more complex for Spanish-speaking children to understand and to be as engaged in. Thus, unless items for a given task have been simultaneously developed in both English and the other language (or the measurement equivalence has been examined with the Spanish version), as is done with some measures like the Preschool Language Scale-4, there is a much greater risk that the translation process may result in an unintended change in the content, meaning, or linguistic complexity of the desired skill or ability that is being assessed.

5. Many standardized assessment measures (both in English and other languages) contain a very small pool of test items to assess a given skill or ability of interest. Since many existing assessments are designed to assess a number of different skills and abilities, the developers often choose to keep the number of items for any given task to a small number, so as not to end up with an assessment that will be too lengthy and/or frustrating for the shorter attention span of many preschool-age children. However, given the abovenoted variability in young children's performance on many such assessments, the inclusion of a greater number of items would be one way to help to offset this inherent variability and improve the precision of the measures.

6. It is not uncommon to see the inclusion of a fairly small number of young children in the normative samples used to develop the standardized assessment measures. Given the expected, normal level of variability in performance for these preschool-age children, one might expect to see the inclusion of larger numbers of children at the younger age levels, even as compared with the number of children included at the older ages for the normative sample. This is especially true with ELLs considering the great within-group variability.

7. 7Many normative samples have a smaller-than-expected representation of low-income and culturally or linguistically diverse population subgroups, as compared with the composition of the total population of young children. However, information on the specific demographic composition of the normative sample used to develop a given measure may not always be readily available in the published assessment manuals. If the normative sample for a given measure does not match the demographic characteristics of those children who are being assessed, then the resulting norms may not be appropriate for use with such a different group of children.

8. For assessments targeted toward ELL populations, there also is the consideration as to whether the normative samples used were monolingual Spanish-speaking or bilingual children, or some combination of the two. The desirability of different types of normative samples depends upon the nature of the question the user is interested in examining. On the one hand, some users may be most interested in examining a child's performance on a Spanish measure against the performance of monolingual Spanish speakers to assess the child's development against a normative group of children who primarily speak one language, Spanish. However, other users may be interested in examining how a child being raised in a bilingual environment performs in comparison to other, similar bilingual children.

Conclusion

In summary, these are just a few of the considerations that users should understand in order to be better informed when deciding which assessment measure or measures to select from among the different available assessment options, and for what purpose. While some assessments contain adequate descriptions of how the measure was developed, the composition of the normative sample, and the detailed information on the psychometric properties of the measure (e.g., reliability and validity), others provide much less information and, in some cases, contain misleading psychometric information.

For example, some assessment manuals present psychometric data, including information on the validity and reliability of the test for the English version of the measure, but don't present similar psychometric information on the specific non-English version. Caution should be exercised by potential users if any assessment does not provide detailed information on all aspects of the test. Despite the many limitations and/or concerns noted above, currently there are some available assessment measures that can be carefully utilized to gain a better understanding of the language development ELL children. Nevertheless there is still need for the continued development of newer and better ELL assessment measures and measurement strategies.

Acknowledgements

Our policy section is made possible by a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation. The statements and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.

Citations

Espinosa, L. Young English Language Learners: Current Research and Emerging Directions for Practice and Policy (Eds. García, E. and Frede, E.). Excerpts from Chapter 7, "Assessment for Young English Language Learners." Pps. 123-126. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University. 2010. Reprinted with permission.

References

Abedi, J., Leon, S., & Mirocha, J. (2001). Examining ELL and non-ELL student performance differences and their relationship to background factors: Continued analyses of extant data. Los Angeles: University of California, National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing.

Barrueco, S., López, M., Ong, C., & Lozano, P. (2007). A compendium of measures for the assessment of young English language learners. Washington, DC: Pew Task Force on Early Childhood Accountability.

Reprints

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More by this author

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Assessment for Young ELLs: Strengths and Limitations in Current Practices

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In "Strengths and Limitations of Current ELL Assessment Measures and Assessment Strategies: Reliability, Validity, and Utility," Linda Espinosa explores the current trends and implications in assessment for young ELLs. This excerpt originally was published in Young English Language Learners: Current Research and Emerging Directions for Practice and Policy (Teachers College Press, 2010).

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Some Myths Regarding ELLs and Special Education

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Several myths prevail in the area of special education for ELLs. These myths guide us in the way we approach education in general, in the way we interpret students' behaviors, and in how we teach and assess students. The following are commonly held misconceptions regarding ELLs and special education.

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The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), has evolved and changed over its 50-year history. The law was reauthorized in 2001 as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and both "ESEA" and "NCLB" have been used in recent years conversations. (See our "What's in a name?" feature below for more information on its progression.) There are a number of aspects of the law that have directly impacted English language learners (ELLs) for the past decade and a half.

As controversial as this law has been, one positive outcome is that ELL student achievement is included specifically in the law, and educational leaders are focusing their efforts on meeting the needs of students who are learning English as a second language. For families of ELLs, NCLB includes provisions for family involvement and communication in a language they understand, especially in regard to informing parents of the kind of ELL support their child will receive.

For teachers, the law means heightened accountability in their practice, and for many it translates into increased pressure to improve test scores. National unions, such as the American Federation of Teachers, have made public statements regarding their recommendations for building more equity and value in the NCLB law, and they continue to advocate for teachers and quality education for all.

Teachers may feel overwhelmed with the responsibility of helping ELLs achieve proficiency on required exams. I will share some general information about NCLB testing and some ideas for assisting ELL students, but since each state has some autonomy in how they implement the law, there may be differences according to the state you live in. I recommend you check with your state education department to see what the requirements are regarding ELL student testing in your state. Our ELL Resources by State section offers some information to help you get started.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does NCLB say about testing ELLs?

NCLB requires that ELLs in grades 3-8 take the same state academic content assessments as all other students in Reading/Language Arts, Math, and Science. For ELLs, NCLB allows for certain accommodations:

one-year testing exemption in Reading/English Language Arts for ELL students new to the country (less than 12 months)

the possibility of taking the required exams in their native language

the use of appropriate testing accommodations, such as small group administration of the test, extra time, dictionaries, and simplified instructions.

In addition to the required content exams, ELL students must also take an annual English Language Proficiency test to demonstrate English language development in reading, writing, listening, and speaking every year. States are required to have English Language Proficiency standards in place to guide instruction of language development.

What are English Language Proficiency levels?

Each state adopts their own English language standards and leveling system. Since 36 states use the WIDA English language standards and assessment system, I will use it as an example. The WIDA ACCESS assessment determines English language proficiency (ELP) levels in the four domains of listening, speaking, reading and writing, using a scale of 1 - 6. The ACCESS assessment provides test items in five areas - Social & Instructional language, language of Mathematics, language of Science, language of Language Arts and language of Social Studies. Students grades K - 12 take the assessment and receive a proficiency level score for each domain on a scale of 1 - 6. The levels are as follows:

1 = Entering

2 = Beginning

2 = Emerging

3 = Developing

4 = Expanding

The WIDA ACCESS assessment is transitioning into an online assessment. This online version will allow students to interact with social and academic language and allow students an opportunity to provide a recorded speaking sample that can be evaluated.

Each state sets their own "cut off" or "reclassification" score for determining English language proficiency. A common cut off score for an ELL student would be a 5 and he or she is considered proficient in English and no longer receives ELL services.

How can English Language Proficiency levels help teachers?

If a teacher is familiar with the English level of his/her students, lessons can be differentiated to meet developing language needs within content areas. WIDA has English Language Development Standards that describe examples of student language connected to the content standards. The Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) standards also provide very good guidance in this area. In addition, a TESOL standards book entitled " PreK-12 English Language Proficiency Standards," provides guidance with the standards divided by grade bands: K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12. Each section is broken into categories based on content and language level. For example, math standards for 3rd grade with a beginning-level English speaker recommend that the teacher focus on activities such as pointing to examples of math concepts and introducing basic math vocabulary. Each content area has examples to help guide teachers in their instruction of ELL students.

Since NCLB has not been reauthorized, many states have requested waivers from the requirements and submitted plans to the Department of Education outlining their own plans for accountability. While waivers have become increasingly popular to address NCLB issues, the laws governing instruction and assessment of ELLs have remained unchanged in most states. A few states have gotten waivers to exclude ELL test scores from accountability for two years, but other than that most states continue to meet federal accountability measures for ELLs as outlined in NCLB.

How can teachers help ELL students prepare for tests when the students have limited English language skills?

Every teacher handles test preparation differently, especially when weighing the cost and benefit of time spent on test preparation vs. language development. However, there are some things that teachers can do (besides offering the accommodations listed above) to assist students in feeling more comfortable and performing their best on the test.

1. Make sure the ELL students understand the format of the test and the different types of questions. These formats may include multiple choice, filling in the missing word, or a constructed response where they must show their work. On the Minnesota writing exam, students are given a test booklet with certain pages marked for their draft writing, and then they are supposed to write their "final" response on designated pages. If students do this incorrectly, they do not receive any points for the writing section. The department of education for each state probably has sample tests available either online or in packets that can be sent to your school. Teachers should familiarize themselves with the different testing requirements and different types of questions in order to introduce the format to students.

2. Help ELL students recognize that it is okay to skip questions if they find them too difficult and return to them later if they have time. This is a simple strategy, but without this knowledge an ELL student may spend too much time on one question and lose valuable points on questions they could have answered more easily.

3. Provide instructions or tests in the students' native language if they are available and allowed by the state, and if the native language truly is the student's stronger language. For example, if a student has never had math instruction in his or her native language, it may be easier to take the test in English, the language of instruction. The reverse is also true. If a student has studied a subject in the native language, it will be beneficial to take the test in that language, if it is available. Regardless of the language of instruction, students may benefit from listening to directions in their native language.

4. Help more advanced ELL students understand the difference between literal and inferential questions. I have seen ELL students scour a reading passage desperately searching for a direct answer to an inference question. Use everyday examples to assist students with the idea of inference. For example, a teacher may respond to a student's question of, "Can we turn the heat down?" by saying, "Oh, I can infer that you think it is too hot in here because you want me to turn the heat down." She challenged the students to look for other ways that messages are inferred and to share them with the class.

5. Ask students to give evidence for their answers in daily classroom discussions. This gets students into the habit of examining their own thinking and recognizing the need to link ideas to content. This is helpful on a test where they may need to explain why they chose a certain answer. It also can help them in checking their answers before turning in the test.

There are many articles, books and programs on how to help students achieve better on required tests. It is important to recognize that some of these will work well for ELL students, and some will not. Teachers need to know their individual students' language backgrounds and English levels to determine what is most appropriate.

How can teachers and administrators effectively talk to parents and students about the tests?

Again, this depends a lot on the ELL community your school serves. A refugee community in which most residents have had very few opportunities for formal schooling will have different needs than a second-generation bilingual community in which most residents have received a lot of their education in the U.S. The most important thing is not to assume that parents know what you are talking about when you discuss the tests. This is even true for many of my English-speaking friends who have children in the schools. The tests and government requirements change regularly, and the reporting of scores can be confusing.

If an explanation of the administration and scoring of the test is available in a parent's native language, it should be provided, but again, that doesn't mean the parent will definitely understand the explanation. Some languages do not have direct translations for vocabulary related to academic content areas, testing, and accountability. The test scores and the impact they can have on a child's education may not be clear to many parents. In addition to meeting parents at conferences and discussing student performance, it is helpful to have a parent meeting where testing requirements and scoring can be explained in the parents' native language and they have an opportunity to ask questions.

Assure parents that the teachers and administrators at your school are working hard to provide quality instruction for their child, and give specific examples of the kind of support that is available. It is also helpful to highlight the difference between social and academic language because many parents may have the impression that their child is very fluent in English so they won't understand why they didn't perform better on the test. Educators may want to provide parents with a list of academic content words and phrases that they can reinforce with their children while doing homework.

It can be difficult to have a school's success evaluated in part by student test scores, especially when many of the students live in poverty or are learning English. However, teachers have a unique opportunity to assist ELL students in accelerating their academic English and content knowledge, which will lead to dramatic improvement on tests and success in school. While it is difficult to see ELL students worry about taking tests in a language they don't understand and to see schools and districts receive poor ratings because they are responsible for educating large numbers of ELL students, I am glad that ELL students' academic needs are being recognized and their performance is being measured.

When everyone takes on the responsibility of educating students who are learning English as a second language, they are more likely to receive increased support and quality instruction. In this way, we will ensure that future generations have the knowledge and skills to succeed regardless of their language or economic background.

CAL presents a number of projects and resources designed to encourage and foster higher levels of academic achievement among English language learners through its assessment projects.

The Northwest Regional Comprehensive Center provides training, technical assistance, and research to support states and school districts in the administration and implementation of Title III programs under the No Child Left Behind Act. Here you'll find direct links to materials NWREL has created for teachers, staff, and families; State guidance and regulations; and National clearinghouses for the most up-to-date, useful information to help you serve English Language Learners in your schools and communities.

Schools Moving Up has an archived collection of educational Webcasts and resource materials on topics such as formative assessment, closing the learning gap in California schools, and quality teaching for English-language learners.

The new PreK-12 English Language Proficiency Standards, an augmentation of the WIDA English Language Proficiency Standards, provides extensive matrices elucidating sample performance indicators, organized by the five standards (targeting language in social/intercultural interactions, language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies) and grade-level cluster. This publication is available for purchase from TESOL.

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No Child Left Behind and the Assessment of English Language Learners

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The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), has evolved and changed over its 50-year history. The law was reauthorized in 2001 as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and both "ESEA" and "NCLB" have been used in recent years conversations. (See our "What's in a name?" feature below for more information on its progression.)

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Interpretive rubrics are analytic scales that describe various aspects of spoken and written language to help educators recognize what speaking and writing sound and look like at various levels of English language proficiency. Use the WIDA Writing Rubric to understand the scores students earn on ACCESS for ELLs (Online and Paper) and WIDA Screener, analyze student performance in the classroom, and plan ways to scaffold language learning.

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This week's new question-of-the-week is:
What are effective assessment strategies for multilingual learners?
Assessment is a key element of teaching-we need to know where our students are in the learning process, how effective our instructional strategies have been, and if there are additional challenges we need to be aware of as we plan future lessons and student support.

Assessments, however, cannot be used in a one-size-fits-all strategy.

Today, Margo Gottlieb, Vivian Micolta Simmons, Cindy Garcia, and Karen Nemeth, Ed.M., share strategies educators can use to effectively assess English-language learners. Margo, Vivian, and Cindy were also guests on my 10-minute BAM! Radio Show. You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

Maximizing 'Linguistic and Cultural Equity'

Margo Gottlieb, WIDA co-founder and lead developer, introduces assessment as, for, and of learning in her 2016 book, Assessing English Language Learners: Bridges to Equity, and expands on the approaches in subsequent books, chapters, and articles. Her most current publication is Classroom Assessment in Multiple Languages: A Handbook for Teachers (Corwin, 2021):

When thinking about effective assessment strategies for multilingual learners, what if we switched our attention away from school or district scores generated from testing that leave "gaps" in student performance and revisit data through the lens of stakeholders? Let's start with a series of questions about multilingual learners, our most important stakeholders, to help position their centrality in the assessment process and provide a context for interpreting assessment data.

What are the languages, cultures, and educational backgrounds of your multilingual learners?

To what extent does your language program leverage your multilingual learners' languages and cultures in curriculum and instruction?

To what extent do your multilingual learners connect their personal interests and their home/community life to school?

The first step in planning classroom assessment is to determine its purpose. How might you prioritize the primary reasons for assessing multilingual learners in one or more languages?

Do you want to get a pulse on multilingual learners' thinking, how they are feeling, and their self-reflection on learning? Being more inclusive of students' views and encouraging student agency are features of assessment as learning.

Do you want to provide feedback to multilingual learners to move their learning forward? Acting on insight from the interaction between students and teachers during instruction reflects assessment for learning.

Do you want to contribute to programmatic or schoolwide accountability? Using student projects, performances, and products, along with uniform criteria for success formulated by teachers with input from students, are representations of assessment of learning.

Now that you have a purpose and a corresponding approach to assessment in mind, let's explore their associated effective strategies.

Assessment as learning as a classroom practice is a student-driven activity that broadcasts multilingual learners' voice, empowerment, and identity. Assessment as learning can occur face to face or online when multilingual learners interact with their peers in the language(s) of their choice to:

explore topics or issues of mutual interest

contribute to crafting classroom activities or tasks

engage in self- and peer assessment

pursue learning from their own perspectives

select preferred mode(s) of communication (e.g., oral, written, graphic, visual) for processing information and expressing learning.

Assessment for learning might begin with teacher and student conversations leading to collaboration in making mutually agreed upon learning goals. Both are keenly aware of where multilingual learners are in their learning that is anchored to grade-level academic content and language proficiency/development standards. In assessment for learning, multilingual learners interact with their teachers in English or their shared language(s) to:

co-construct criteria for success and types of acceptable evidence for their work

apply criteria for success to give criterion-referenced feedback

plan differentiated instruction for content and language learning

give feedback in real time to student performance or needs.

Assessment of learning at a classroom level is shaped by teachers, individually or as a department or grade-level team, with input from students. It represents what students have accomplished at the culmination of a period of instruction, such as a unit of learning. Assessment of learning is geared to determining student growth over time and centers on collaboration among teachers with support of school or district leaders to:

match evidence for assessment with learning targets

document extent of meeting standards for units of learning

share of learning for products, performances, or projects

guide student production of capstone projects or portfolios

Together, assessment as, for, and of learning offers a comprehensive system that optimizes opportunities for multilingual learners to participate as educators strive to maximize linguistic and cultural equity for their students.

'Formal and Informal Assessments'
Vivian Micolta Simmons was born in Colombia and has been in the U.S. for seven years. She has been a teacher for 14 years and is currently working as a ESL/DLI lead teacher for the Iredell-Statesville schools in N.C:
When assessing my culturally and linguistically diverse students, I always like to think about my own experience as a language learner. We all function differently; we are all smart with certain dominant areas or language skills. For instance, I consider myself good at speaking and pronunciation, but writing is an area where I need extra help. That does not mean that I cannot produce in a second language. It only means that I need to polish specific language skills.

I like to rely on both formal and informal assessments and make my recommendations-to homeroom teachers and parents-based on the data I can gather from these instruments.

Listening and reading activities, writing prompts (that provide sentence starters), formal and informal conversations (my favorite), and role-plays are some of my preferred activities to assess my students.

Pop quizzes, games, note-sketching, prior knowledge questions, video recordings (like Flipgrid), and formal pretests and post-tests are all part of my assessment arsenal. You can pick and choose from a great selection of data-collection options. For sure, I loathe paper-pencil assessment as the only performance measurement (for children and adults). They do not show what we are all capable of in terms of language production.

Rubrics, Portfolios, & Conferences
Cindy Garcia has been a bilingual educator for 15 years and is currently a districtwide specialist for PK-6 bilingual/ESL mathematics. She is active on Twitter @CindyGarciaTX and on her blog:
When assessing multilingual learners, teachers have to keep in mind both content and language. Teachers also have to be focused about what they assess and academic-language development might not always be something they need to assess.

Rubrics can be an effective way to assess student understanding because there are multiple indicators that students are trying to meet. Rubrics are also a good tool for assessing multilingual learners because they provide a consistent criterion for grading when tasks or projects might be subjective. This criterion helps teachers ignore other factors and use only the criteria in the rubric to assess student learning. Instead of multiple-choice type of assessment where there is only one correct response, a rubric allows the teacher to pinpoint what the student is understanding and what the student has yet to master. A rubric has a rating scale that provides the teacher with a way to provide feedback for students that will help them think about their work, ask questions, seek clarification, and improve their work. Rubrics also help students take ownership of their learning, because they are able to use the rubric to evaluate their work before they submit it for grading.

Portfolios are another great way to assess multilingual learners because the teacher is able to see evidence of student work and learning for a longer period of time than an end-of-unit assessment. This allows the teacher to see if the students "got it" right away and have they been able to "keep it" for longer than the length of the unit of instruction. When compiling a student portfolio, there are usually multiple pieces of evidence or student work for each concept, standard, or topic. Student-work samples could be writing prompts, a project, multiple-choice test, etc. This means that student portfolios also show a clearer picture of how a student learns.

Another effective strategy to assess multilingual learners is student-teacher conferences. Conferring with students provides students the opportunity to explain and share what they have learned without the usual stress of completing a formal test. Conferring also allows the teacher to provide more authentic feedback because it's real-time feedback that addresses student questions, wonderings, or misconceptions. Conferring makes it easier for the teacher to focus the conversation just on content, academic-language development, or another area. The goal of each conference can be focused on the precise needs of each student and provide the specific data that teachers need to plan for instruction.

'Portfolio-Based Assessment'
Karen Nemeth, Ed.M., is an author, consultant, and advocate focusing on early-childhood education for ELLs/DLLs. She has leadership roles in NAEYC, NABE, and TESOL. She hosts a resource website, Language Castle:
Developmentally appropriate assessment strategies for young English-/dual-language learners do not focus on one-shot test scores. The truth is, 4- and 5-year-old children are just not that interested in displaying their knowledge on demand. Terms like portfolio, sampling, and multiple measures guide best practices for the early years.

Children who are developing multiple languages have separate language systems for each of their languages. They learn some content in one language and some content in the other language. Even if they seem very strong in English, they may not have English words for all of the knowledge they've developed in their other language(s).

It is important to provide all screening and assessment in both of their languages. Further, the bilingual brain does not function the same way as two monolingual brains. According to research, the best screening and assessment tools would be designed specifically for bilingual thinkers and would capture what they know and can do in both of their languages. These kinds of tools are not available with sufficient quality and in the variety of languages needed. Kindergarten-entry assessments and other district-mandated monolingual assessments are not very accurate for young children who are multilingual learners. The best approach is to gather data about a child's skills and knowledge through a variety of measures over time. I like to say that, in the early years, assessment is not a score, it's a folder. Scores might be in the folder along with lots of other information that teachers can use to chart a child's progress and determine their learning needs.

The solution recommended by most experts is to practice portfolio-based assessment. Instead of focusing on a snapshot or numeric score, portfolios allow teachers to gather authentic evidence about what each child understands and talks about. Portfolio-assessment software is available with some curriculum models or as independent products. They may include prompts, benchmarks, and a variety of ways to enter data on an ongoing basis.

It is very important that teachers should be allowed to use phones or tablets to record language and activity at any time during the day. This is critical for multilingual learners because it is the most accurate way to fully capture what the children actually say when they are talking in a language that is unfamiliar to the teacher. It is also critical that teacher assistants who are bilingual must be carefully prepared to participate in the assessment process as they may be the only adults who have home-language interactions with some of the bilingual children.

Information obtained from families can be another important component of the assessment process. A teacher might not ask the parents of a 7 th grader about how they are doing with algebra at home, but many preschool and kindergarten children show advances in language and learning at home that may not be evident in the classroom. For example, a shy English-learner may not participate in singing activities at school but the family might send a video of the child singing happily with sophisticated lyrics at home. Young children may not always perform on demand or in expected ways at school. Families can also provide cultural context and information about the young child's interests that help the teacher scaffold learning for each individual child. Multiple measures over an array of activities and times of day will make it possible for young children to show more accurately what they know and can do-and what they are ready to do next.

Thanks to Margo, Vivian, Cindy, and Karen for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.
Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email (The RSS feed for this blog, and for all Ed Week articles, has been changed by the new redesign-new ones won't be available until February). And if you missed any of the highlights from the first nine years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below. I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column.
You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It's titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching.

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Four educators share practical assessment strategies to support English-language learners.

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It is our absolute privilege to host Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff in this very special storytime. In celebration of Read Across America Day and Women's History Month, Mr. Emhoff is reading the book I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark by Debbie Levy and Elizabeth Baddeley, published by Simon Kids.

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It is our absolute privilege to host Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff in this very special storytime. In celebration of Read Across America Day and Women's History Month, Mr. Emhoff is reading the book I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark by Debbie Levy and Elizabeth Baddeley, published by Simon Kids.

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An important first step in helping English language learners (ELLs) succeed is making them feel welcome in the classroom.

This will:

increase their confidence

make them feel more comfortable in the class

build a foundation for positive relationships with you and their peers.

Here's how you can get started!

The ELL student population includes students who were born in the U.S. and students who have immigrated from another country. For ELLs who have recently arrived in the U.S., they will face the challenge of learning a new language in addition to adjusting to an unfamiliar cultural setting and school system.

On a daily basis, ELLs are adjusting to new ways of saying and doing things. As their teacher, you are an important bridge to this unknown culture and school system.

In the same way that ELLs go through stages of English language learning, they may also pass through stages of cultural accommodation. These stages, however, may be less defined and more difficult to notice. Being aware of these stages may help you to better understand "unusual" actions and reactions that may just be part of adjusting to a new culture.

Euphoria: ELLs may experience an initial period of excitement about their new surroundings.

Culture shock: ELLs may then experience anger, hostility, frustration, homesickness, or resentment towards the new culture.

Acceptance: ELLs may gradually accept their different surroundings.

Assimilation/adaptation: ELLs may embrace and adapt to their surroundings and their "new" culture.

It is also common for students who are learning a new language to be 'silent' for a period of time, when they are listening to the language around them without speaking yet (much as a young child listens to language first before learning to talk). This is considered the first stage of language acquisition.

Patience and creating opportunities for small successes in speaking with you and peers can help build students' confidence. In addition, keep in mind that students' silence could also be a sign of respect for you as an authority - and not a sign of their inability or refusal to participate.

Students may also have experienced trauma or face different kinds of hardship in the U.S. You can better prepare yourself for this possibility by:

Learn more from the following:

This award-winning documentary highlights how the Dearborn, MI public school district is helping its immigrant students succeed. Learn more about this project and see related videos.

Getting to Know Students

Learn how to pronounce students' names correctly

Don't forget to smile and use positive body language!

A lot of communication happens through expressions, body language, and tone. Smiling and using positive body language can go a long way in making students feel welcome and comfortable, particularly if they are newcomers, as seen in the vignette shared by a teacher below.

Build relationships with students

Veteran teachers of ELLs always point to building relationships as the most important step in their work with ELLs. Not only does it increase engagement and support students' later academic success, it also provides invaluable information that can inform your instruction and family engagement.

In addition, it can help build bridges with students who may have particularly unique experiences, such as children in migrant farmwork families or Indigenous students.

See more ideas on how to build these relationships from the following:

Video: Showing students you care

Corpus Christi teacher Christine Price talks about the importance of showing students you care early on.

Identify students' strengths and interests

It's important to remember that ELLs bring lots of strengths, talents, and rich experiences to the classroom. Getting to know students' interests can help:

build rapport

engage students in learning

find connections with new friends.

Families are also an important source of information and are often happy to talk about the activities that their child enjoys. They may also appreciate the fact that their child's teacher is taking an interest in the child's strengths and talents. (This is especially true in special education settings.)

Teacher Omar Salem describes a student who not only sings and dances but manages her own YouTube channel and edits all of the video she posts of her performances.

Video: Using parent letters to get to know my students

Albuquerque teacher Clara Gonzales-Espinoza asks her parents to write her a letter at the beginning of each school year telling her about the child's personality, interests, strengths, and anything else they think she should know. In this interview, Clara speaks more about this strategy and its impact on her relationships with parents and students.

Ensure that students have information about activities and clubs

Make sure that students have information about extra-curricular activities, sports, and clubs related to their interests. You can also encourage them to start their own club within the school.

ELL educator Christine Rowland notes, "Many students find involvement in school clubs and teams to be extremely helpful, as they are often experts in these areas, and they can provide a space where they more easily feel they belong."

Welcoming Students' Language and Culture

Invite students' cultures into the classroom

Encourage ELLs and their families to share their culture with you and your class. Show-and-tell is a good opportunity for ELLs to bring in something representative of their culture, if they wish.

Invite students and families to:

share photographs, visuals, or meaningful artifacts such as flags or mementos

tell a popular story or folktale using words, pictures, gestures, and movements

share information about important holidays or celebrations.

Looking beyond the classroom

Imagine that you are walking into your school for the first time as a parent.

What do you see on the walls?

If your first language weren't English, would you see signs in your language?

Would you see flags, maps, or books representing your home country?

Would you see your child's work on display in the hallway?

If you think more could be done to make families feel welcome, consider:

sharing some ideas with colleagues or administrators and taking small steps that you can point to as successes

looking for opportunities to celebrate all families and their languages, customs, and cultures, whether in the classroom or at a school-wide event

keeping a lookout for a special part of their lives that other families might appreciate getting to know.

See more ideas in the following:

Video: What happened when the students realized the Yemeni flag wasn't on stage

ELD Specialist Diana Alqadhi tells the story of some students who realized that the Yemeni flag was not featured prominently enough on stage before a school show.

Invite students' languages into the classroom

Label classroom objects to allow ELLs to better understand their immediate surroundings. These labels will also assist you when explaining or giving directions, and it gives peers an additional opportunity to learn some words in their classmates' language.

Start with everyday items, such as "door/puerta," "book/libro," and "chair/silla."

You may wish to ask students who can write in their first language or family members to help you with this project.

You can also invite students to teach the class some words from their home language.

Learn more about the resources available in students' home languages

Students benefit from support in their home language - what Dr. Fred Genesee calls their " most valuable resource." You have may have access to learning material in students' languages, or you may be able to find resources that support those languages.

Language access for multilingual families

In addition, it's critical to understand what language access resources you have available through your school and district, particularly for communication with families. Keep in mind that all families have a legal right to information in their home language. Family liaisons, interpreters, ESL teachers, or administrators may have more information about what language access resources are available in your district.

Video: What Do School Districts Need to Know About Language Access?

This helpful overview about what language access means for school districts is a great introduction to the requirements, best practices, and funding streams related to language access in public education. This interview features Dr. Jennifer Love, the Supervisor of Language Access and Engagement in Prince George's County Public Schools, Maryland.

Video: Language Access for Multilingual Families

What does appropriate language access mean for multilingual families? This interview also features Dr. Jennifer Love.

Ensure your students see themselves reflected in the classroom

Ask yourself if students can see representations of their culture, race, gender, and other aspects of identity reflected in your:

classroom materials and library

lesson plans and activities

classroom visuals (both in-person and virtual).

In addition:

Success in the Classroom

Encourage your students

Some ELLs may not answer voluntarily in class or ask for your help even if they need it. ELLs may smile and nod, but this does not necessarily mean that they understand. Offer one-on-one support and encouragement as much as possible. For convenience, it may be helpful to seat ELLs near your desk.

Assign a buddy

Identify a classmate who will make a good buddy for new students - someone who is friendly, patient, and a good communicator to be a buddy. This student can make sure that the new student understands what he or she is supposed to do during class activities. It is helpful if the peer partner knows the ELL's first language, but not necessary. However, remember to never use another student as an interpreter in any situation.

Learn more about ways to increase peer interaction and collaboration in these related strategies.

Ask the class how they can help welcome new students

Ask students to brainstorm ways to help ELLs in particular. You may wish to make a list of ideas on how to welcome new students at the beginning of the year so that students have these strategies in mind if a student comes with little advance notice.

Be vigilant about health issues, dietary concerns, and allergies

Students may have specific health issues or dietary restrictions due to health, cultural, or religious reasons. Be sure that you learn all essential information you need to know about student health and diet from parents or guardians. For ELLs, be sure to confirm and clarify this information with the help of interpreters.

If you learn information about a student that would be helpful for other staff to know, particularly regarding health or food allergies, talk with administrators about how to keep the child safe. In addition, be sensitive to cultural or religious norms, such as fasting for religious reasons.

Keep an eye out for signs of culture shock

Moving to a new country and leaving a familiar life, relatives, friends, and language behind can be traumatic for children in the best of circumstances. Those challenges are compounded if children have experienced trauma, violence, or upheaval. Learn more about how culture shock can impact students in the classroom and affect student behavior so that you recognize signs if newcomers act out.

Encourage students to take ownership of the classroom culture

Ask students to answer the following questions through drawings or written responses.

How can I be a good classmate to others?

What are examples of unkind or disrespectful behavior in the classroom?

To support ELLs in their discussions of these questions:

Encourage students who speak the same language to discuss their ideas in groups.

Provide scaffolded materials such as graphic organizers, sentence stems, and sentence frames.

Use a picture book to talk about different kinds of behavior with students.

Create a shared set of classroom expectations together

Return to your earlier discussion of what a respectful classroom looks like.

Brainstorm ideas on possible class rules based on that discussion.

Streamline the list of class guidelines or rules.

Add any rules or guidelines that are missing.

In order to establish appropriate consequences for disrespectful behavior, you may wish to come up with ideas with the class or determine those consequences yourself.

Post the final list classroom rules in the classroom.

Translate the rules into ELLs' native languages so that they can keep the list handy and share it at home.

To see an example of this proces in action, take a look at ELL expert Carol Salva's process for developing a community contract each year.

Help your ELLs understand expectations for the classroom

ELLs may need some extra support in understanding expectations for classroom behavior. Helping them understand these expectations can avoid misunderstandings, discipline problems, and feelings of low self-esteem.

At the same time, it's important to remember that students bridging two cultures may need guidance which behaviors are appropriate in which setting (such as eye contact, physical proximity, etc.). If you have questions, talk with a cultural liaison in the school to learn more about appropriate responses and ideas for helping students navigate a new culture. You can also learn more about cultural norms of your students, particularly related to schooling, to help inform your approach.

Here are a few strategies that you can use in class:

Use visuals like pictures, symbols, and reward systems to communicate your expectations in a positive and direct manner.

Physically model language to ELLs in classroom routines and instructional activities. ELLs will need to see you or their peers model behavior when you want them to sit down, walk to the bulletin board, work with a partner, copy a word, etc.

Be consistent and fair with all students. Once ELLs clearly understand what is expected, hold them equally accountable for their behavior.

Post a daily schedule. Even if ELLs do not yet understand all of the words that you speak, it is possible for them to understand the structure of each day. Whether through chalkboard art or images on Velcro, you can post the daily schedule each morning. By writing down times and having pictures next to words like lunch, wash hands, math, and field trip, ELLs can have a general sense of the upcoming day.

Finally, remember ELLs can make unintentional "mistakes" as they are trying hard to adjust to a new cultural setting. They are constantly transferring what they know as acceptable behaviors from their own culture to the U.S. classroom and school. Be patient as ELLs learn English and adjust - and remember that you will learn a lot from this experience too!

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How to Create a Welcoming Classroom Environment for ELLs

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An important first step in helping English language learners (ELLs) succeed is making them feel welcome in the classroom. This will: increase their confidence make them feel more comfortable in the class build a foundation for positive relationships with you and their peers. Here's how you can get started!

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How to Support ELL Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFEs)

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SIFEs and SLIFEsAnother related term that educators may see is “Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education” (SLIFEs).When immigrant students enroll in a new school, their prior educational experiences may vary widely. Students who have not had an opportunity to attend school or have had multiple interruptions in their education are commonly referred to as “Students with Interrupted Education” (SIFEs).While educating students with interrupted education may seem daunting, they bring numerous talents and strengths to their new schools and communities. And they can indeed obtain a high school diploma with the right kind of support and go on to future academic and professional success.In fact, each spring, we read about SIFEs who are at the top of their class or who have been chosen to give a commencement speech, such as Juliane Lukambo, who spent her early years in a refugee camp before coming to the U.S. and graduating as class valedictorian. And, in this video clip, Canadian ELL expert Paula Markus talks about a special Somali student who had also been in a refugee camp before arriving in her classroom. Today, the world knows him as the artist K’naan.This article provides a profile of SIFEs and their needs, recommendations of best practices, and examples of the kinds of quality support and resources that will accelerate their academic achievement.A warm welcome for immigrant families in the front officeNorieah Ahmed, the Child Accounting Secretary at Salina Elementary School in Dearborn, MI, talks about her role in welcoming newcomer immigrant families to the school from the moment they walk in the door. Who are SIFEs?While there are some general characteristics that SIFEs share, students’ situations will vary widely:Some SIFEs may be refugees fleeing violence or conflicts, while others may have had interrupted schooling due to poverty, migration, or crises such as natural disasters.Some SIFEs may have had no schooling, while others may have had some education or long gaps in their education.Many are English language learners (ELLs), but some may come from countries where English is a primary language.Students who come from the same country and speak the same language may have had vastly different experiences related to schooling.For this reason, it is crucial to learn about each individual student in order to identify their strengths and needs. You can learn more about specific characteristics in the articles below. And you read more about how different states define SIFEs from this data map.Related resources10 Things You Need to Learn About Your English Language LearnersStudents with Interrupted Formal Education: Understanding Who They Are (American Educator)Unaccompanied Children in Schools: What You Need to KnowIndigenous Students from Latin America in the United StatesPartnering with Indigenous Families from Latin America (Outreach videos in Spanish, English, and Mam)Where do SIFEs come from?SIFEs may come from countries where poverty, disaster, and civil unrest affect the development of literacy and opportunities for education. According to UNESCO, the number of children missing out on any schooling now numbers 250 million, according to figures released in 2023.Students may also come from countries where persecution or strict rules about gender, social class, or ethnicity prevented them from attending school. Girls in many nations still don’t have equal access to education, which is particularly concerning in nations where girls can only attend classes taught by women. UNICEF estimates that 129 million girls are out of school worldwide.In addition, SIFEs may have been born or raised in a developed nation but in impoverished circumstances that affect their family’s stability. For example, many migrant workers in the U.S. move frequently based on agricultural seasons, and as a result their children move from one to school to another, making it nearly impossible for children to stay caught up with their peers.What are SIFEs’ strengths?It’s critical to identify SIFEs’ strengths and talents, as well as the value of their unique perspectives and life experiences. These strengths make include resilience, resourcefulness and responsibility, as well as their multilingual skills, which they may be using to translate for their families. Starting with an asset-based perspective can make an important difference helping students get settled. In addition, it can provide more opportunities to connect content and learning opportunities to students’ background knowledge. You can find additional ideas in Using a Strengths-Based Approach with ELs: Supporting Students Living with Trauma, Violence and Chronic Stress.Principal Nathaniel Provencio: The gifts that ELLs bring to schoolPrincipal Nathaniel Provencio talks about some of the gifts that ELLs bring to schools, including multilingualism and emotional intelligence. Enrolling SIFEsIt’s important to ensure that all staff working with SIFEs understand the following:K-12 students in the United States have the legal right to enroll in a public school, regardless of their immigration status or that of their caretakers and family members.Families have a legal right to enroll their children in school in the maximum age set by each state even if they have recently arrived in the country and even if they do not have documents like birth certificates.Many families may be living in shelters or in unstable housing; these students may have additional rights under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. Educating SIFEs in Dearborn, MIThe Salina neighborhood in Dearborn, Michigan has long been home to diverse immigrant communities who came to work in Detroit’s factories. Today, many of the families who live in the neighborhood are from the war-torn country of Yemen, and as a result, students of all ages have experienced violence, hardship, and family separation. In addition, educators at Salina Elementary and Intermediate Schools have noticed that the longer the conflict has continued, the less schooling students have had by the time they arrive in Dearborn.Both schools have developed robust partnerships with families and wrap-around services and activities for students. They have also gone to great lengths to create and maintain calm, welcoming environments within the school and ensure that all staff are trained in culturally and linguistically responsive practice, as well as trauma-informed practice. Since the schools are serving the same families, they also work closely together to reach families more effectively. To learn more about Salina, see Colorín Colorado’s award-winning film, You Are Welcome Here.What do SIFEs need?When students who have grown up with little or no education experience enroll in U.S. schools, they have much more to learn than a new language; in order to be fully functional at school, they need to learn how to:read and writecomplete assignments and follow instructionsuse school suppliesfollow a school scheduletake the businteract with students from different culturesparticipate in school activitiesAll of this is happening while they adjust to a new country and new social norms and possibly take on family responsibilities such as working, caring for younger siblings, or doing a significant share of housework. They also may have experienced trauma and need mental health support or additional social and emotional support.Older siblings’ responsibilities during family separationTeacher Diana Alqadhi discusses the responsibilities her students have when caring for younger siblings during extended family separations. What makes SIFEs’ needs unique?While needs of the SIFE population may overlap with those of ELLs in some ways, SIFEs are likely to need additional support and instruction. In an article adapted from their book about SIFEs, Brenda Custodio and Judith B. O’Loughlin write, “Students with interrupted education need specialized programming and assistance, above and beyond what is normally provided to ELLs.“They continue, “This belief is supported in a recent statement from WIDA...about SIFE: ‘Students with this background often need their emotional, psychological, and physiological needs to be met before they are able to engage fully in the educational setting.‘“Social and emotional factors impacting SIFEs may include:1. Stress and trauma: SIFEs may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, may be under severe distress, or may be completely overwhelmed by the need to assimilate to a new school environment in a new language. In addition, some SIFEs may have traveled her as unaccompanied minors, alone or carrying for younger relatives, and may be reuniting with family members they have not seen for a long time or have never met.2. Frustration: A SIFE may be very excited to finally attend school regularly, and may have high hopes for his ability to work and support his family; however, the discovery that he is in fact far behind his peers can be a source of great frustration. Even as he makes great academic progress throughout the year, he is still chasing a moving target because English-speaking, grade-level peers are continuing to learn as well, and the realization that meeting his goals will be harder than expected may be devastating.3. High risk of dropping out: SIFEs are considered to have a high risk for dropping out of high school given the precarious nature of their relationship with school.While these reasons present numerous challenges to school educators and administrators, students with limited or interrupted schooling can succeed if their school makes a commitment to help them achieve that goal. The following lists of suggestions offer some ideas that educators can implement to support SIFEs throughout the school and in the classroom.Why creating a calm, safe environment matters for students and staffPrincipal Susan Stanley describes how creating a calm and safe environment helps students and staff alike, especially in a school where many students have experienced trauma. 10 Ideas for Teaching SIFEsHere are some things you can do in your classroom to support SIFEs:1. Activate prior knowledge.Once you know what prior information your students have, you can link new information to what they already understand. Not only can this stimulate student motivation, but it can also determine where to start instruction as well as lay out the next steps. Some strategies include: word associations, wordsplash relationships, KWL charts, and anticipation guides.2. Provide a print rich environment.Cover your walls with lots of visuals that correspond to text (maps, charts, signs, posters with motivational phrases, the alphabet in print and script, etc.). Include appropriate texts that are written at a basic reading level, high interest/low ability books, native language materials, and bilingual glossaries.3. Engage students in hands-on learning so students are physically involved.Have students write, illustrate, and record their own books, let them create their own picture dictionaries and flash cards, incorporate drama to act out events and stories, use interactive activities on a SMARTBoard, use manipulatives, reciprocal teaching, and teach to the multiple intelligences. In addition, look for ways to include and support SIFEs in project-based learning.4. Keep the amount of new vocabulary in control. When using new vocabulary or explaining new concepts, you may need to rephrase, define in context, and simplify your explanation so as not to confuse students. Limit your sentence length, but don’t patronize students by raising your voice as if they were hard of hearing. Instead, use intonation and pauses for emphasis.5. Give frequent checks for communication.Try to avoid Yes/No answers. Instead, ask that students summarize what they understood. Increase your wait time, because students will need extra time to process your question, think of the answer, they find the words they need in English.6. When assessing understanding, be open-minded. Provide multiple opportunities to demonstrate understanding (instead of writing: explain, act out, discuss, defend, draw, compare, predict, etc.). Emphasize formative assessment versus evaluative assessment and individualize what you ask students to do.7. Allow students to work in cooperative groups.There are a number of ways to support peer learning. Remember to teach the necessary social skills they need to interact productively with one another. Forming skills such as getting into groups, taking turns, and encouraging one another provide the foundation for higher-order thinking in collaborative groups.8. If possible, build the native language content and literacy instruction in order to build on English.Use of graphic organizers is very helpful to make learning visual and incorporate thinking skills, and can be done without any writing. Use reading logs and journals to incorporate reading and writing.9. Use teaching strategies that weave together language and content instruction, such as the SIOP model (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol).Often when SIFE student enroll in a U.S. school, the gaps in their educational record lead to them being placed in remedial courses. While this kind of instruction may be necessary or helpful for some students, native-language instruction and sheltered instruction may provide a viable alternative to remedial instruction (Spaulding, Carolino & Amen, p.13).Look for ways to relate material to students’ prior knowledge and experience, and start with the concrete before building up to the abstract. What they don’t have you can try to create for them through visuals or by using technology. In addition, teach students learning strategies that they can use in the future. These strategies may include how to recognize cognates, looking for the heading of a chapter in pre-reading exercises, using a dictionary, or how to take effective notes (p. 28). Remember that SIFEs haven’t learned the basic skills that many students have learned at a young age, and may have no background knowledge in the areas that you expect them to have learned.10. Provide intensive literacy/language instruction.SIFEs will need explicit instruction in literacy skills in an age-appropriate manner, access to literacy-rich environments and print materials, and unified language and content instruction (Spaulding, Carolino & Amen, p.30). SIFEs may also benefit from increased time in language development or ESL courses, particularly if the class sizes are small.11. Use culturally and linguistically responsive instruction. Consider how you might make your instruction more culturally and linguistically responsive to reflect students’ home cultures and languages. That might mean tying content to students’ background knowledge or prior experiences, posting some signs in students’ languages with welcoming or useful phrases, and inviting students’ to share their culture with the class.12. Keep your expectations realistic at the beginning of the year.Raise your expectations up as students reach them and keep them high enough that students will stretch to reach for them, but not too high that they give up. If you expect success from your students, supply them with the necessary tools, remain optimistic, and offer to help as they need it, they will gain the self-confidence to be successful.For additional ideas, see WIDA’s Focus Bulletin on SLIFEs.Why Collaboration MattersA collaborative instructional model reinforces student learning and accelerates SIFEs’ academic progress. For elementary-level teachers this may come more easily since classroom teachers are responsible for more than one subject, and they often work collaboratively in grade-level teams. For secondary-level teachers this may be more challenging and may require a review of the instructional system, curriculum and content, school resources, and teacher planning schedules (Office of English Language Learning & Migrant Education, p.1).In the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition’s Interrupted Formal Schooling Toolkit, DiCerbo and Loop write,Schools that are prepared to meet the needs of students with interrupted formal education do not require classroom teachers or individual resource teachers to take on these responsibilities alone. Instead, administrators, counselors, classroom teachers and resource teachers need to work together to ensure that the students and their families have the necessary information needed to provide school supplies, documentation for meal programs, and other requisites for assimilation. Working together to create a climate of acceptance and accountability ensures that the student’s academic success is secured on many levels. (2003)Regardless of how the collaboration is done or at what grade level, the important thing for teachers to keep in mind is how to continually reinforce new concepts and language in academic instruction and integrate concepts across content areas and language/literacy classes. For example, if students are learning about aquatic life in science, the math teacher can teach mathematical examples that reinforce the scientific concepts while applying math skills, and the language arts teacher can review the language structures and vocabulary used in the math problems and science lessons being taught. Teachers who collaborate have the opportunity to be intentional about the academic language and skills they want students to learn and practice, and they will begin to make connections across content areas to reinforce learning.Eight Ideas for Providing School-Wide Support to SIFEsSchools can support SIFEs in a number of ways. The ability to implement these measures will vary greatly by school and district, as well as by the involvement and investment by administrators, teachers, counselors, and staff. Consider reviewing these ideas with your colleagues to see which suggestions may be viable options in your school.1. Ensure that all chool-wide staff understand SIFEs’ unique experiences and needs.An educational environment that is supportive of SIFEs will have staff members who are well-educated on the needs and backgrounds of their students, and highly attuned to the emotional strain these students may experience as they adjust to a new country, language, and customs. Students may be facing complex identity issues, culture shock, and a sense of loss of having left their home behind, particularly if they didn’t want to move to a new country (Spaulding, Carolino & Amen, 2004, p.12). It’s also important for staff to understand students’ legal rights access a public K-12 education, detailed in Immigrant Students’ Legal Rights: An Overview.A supportive environment is often created by one or more of the following:bilingual/bicultural staff from the students’ home countrya teaching staff highly trained in cross-cultural communication, the cultural and historical backgrounds of the students, and instructional methods that are designed to accelerate the academic achievement of SIFEs.student and parent access to support services (ideally in the family’s native language) provided by counselors, tutors, mentors, and parent coordinators. (Walsh, 1991, as cited in Office of English Language Learning & Migrant Education, p. 10)a buddy system with peers or classmates who can show students around and help them adjust to the daily schedule (p.4)2. Parter with community organizations to provide social and emotional support.Community resources can be a very powerful tool in meeting the needs of SIFEs. SIFEs will benefit greatly from contacts with community resources such as after-school tutoring, job programs, and ethnically/linguistically based community groups. In addition, schools can connect students and families with basic need and services related to health, wellness, housing, food and clothing security, employment services or other areas that can help with resettlement and acclimation in a new community.Isolation and discouragement can be two negative and powerful influences on a SIFE student’s education. The more SIFEs feel connected and supported, the more likely they will be to rebound from health, economic, or cultural challenges. A Newcomer Center is often well-connected with such community resources and likely offers community organization services on-site to the students.3. Look for ways to address students’ trauma and stress. SIFEs may have experienced (and may still be experiencing) trauma, stress, hardship, family separation and other daunting challenges. In order to maximize students’ access to mental health support:Make sure that students and families are aware of any counseling and mental health services that are available.If language access is a barrier, work with administrators to find ways to help families access support in their home languages.Work with family liaisons or community members to come up with some culturally responsive practices to support families’ well-being.If counseling itself isn’t something that families feel comfortable with, talk about other ideas that might be more effective, including supports that are available in group settings. In addition, talk with administrators about whether more staff need training in trauma-informed practice and how to accomplish that training if so.4. Keep in mind that students may have significant responsibilities outside of school.These responsibilities might include caretaking, jobs, or translating for family members. One way to help students manage multiple obligations is through flexible scheduling, which can help support the real needs and obligations of high school immigrants (Spaulding, Carolino & Amen, 2004, p.11). A flexible schedule allows students with interrupted schooling the opportunity to balance home and school responsibilities, a chance to spend extra time in school to accelerate learning, and the opportunity to keep working while attending school. Many SIFEs come to the U.S. with the goal of working and financially supporting their families (p.13). Without an education or fluency in English, students may not have a lot of choice as to what kind of job they find or the hours they work. It is common for SIFEs to have to work very late hours or two jobs, and this becomes a barrier to education due to fatigue and conflict with the school schedule.If there comes a point in which the students cannot both work and attend school, they may choose to drop out of school in favor of working without realizing that “the educational sacrifices made for short-term financial gain tend to lead to limited long-term financial success.” (p.13) Schools that can offer “non-traditional” school hours, such as afternoon, evening, or Saturday schedules, will help more SIFEs have access to education. Also, schools that offer longer school hours and a year-round school calendar ensure that there are many opportunities for students to make up for lost time (p.14).5. Consider developing a newcomer center or program within your setting. Newcomer centers and programs are very effective when a district needs to meet the needs of many SIFEs. A newcomer center may provide numerous services included in the newcomer program, such as academic support, language instruction, an introduction to basic school activities and skills, and community resources for immigrant families (Spaulding, Carolino & Amen, p.13). Enrollment in a newcomer program, which is often transitional, allows the student time to adjust to the U.S. educational system in a supportive environment with instructors who understand their needs and have been specially trained to assist in accelerating SIFEs’ academic achievement while monitoring cultural and emotional adjustments.And even as SIFEs learn the basics such as the alphabet or how to hold a pencil, they can also begin developing academic content concepts and language through bilingual or sheltered instruction content courses. When SIFEs leave an effective program at a newcomer center after 1-2 years and transition to a mainstream educational environment, they will be much better prepared to participate successfully.You can learn more about newcomer centers by reaching out to existing newcomer programs and visiting with a team of colleagues to see what they are doing. While some newcomer programs may be school-wide, others are house within traditional school settings as a focused support for newcomers or students with interrupted schooling. You may be able to identify some small steps your school community can take to move in that direction.6. Ensure that SIFEs have specialized guidance counseling.SIFEs need access to ongoing and personalized guidance support, particularly in middle and high school, to help them map out their coursework, the kinds of credits they need to graduate, and their opportunities beyond high school. This will take a very specialized kind of expertise. If there is not a dedicated counselor for newcomers or students with interrupted education in your setting, ensure that the counselors who are working with this population not only have appropriate training but have the persistence and inclination to support SIFEs navigate many kinds of obstacles.7. Provide information about extra-curricular activities. It’s important for SIFEs to become familiar with the extra-curricular activities that schools offer, understand how to sign up and participate, and understand that they are eligible to participate. Activities and sports can be an important bridge for students who can tap into their interests and make new friends.8. Build partnerships that will support students’ future options. It can be very helpful for schools to make a partnership with local businesses, adult basic education, or higher education programs in order to provide a seamless transition for SIFEs who will need more than four years to graduate or are older and will “age-out” before completing high school graduation requirements (p. 11, Office of English Language Learning & Migrant Education, p. 4). Students are allowed to attend high school until the age determined by their state, and if a connection exists with the adult basic education or local higher education institution, SIFEs are much more likely to continue their education and complete a high school degree. A connection with a local business may also boost students’ confidence and provide opportunities that might not have been available.Related resourcesUsing a Strengths-Based Approach with ELs: Supporting Students Living with Trauma, Violence and Chronic StressHow Schools Can Partner with ELL Families Who Resettle in Their Community: 10 Strategies for SuccessWorking with Community Organizations to Support ELL StudentsCo-Teaching ELLs: 8 Strategies for SuccessPartnering with Multilingual Families in Brockton, MAClosing ThoughtsAs you work with your students, keep in mind that many came to U.S. ready to get a good education, become successful citizens, and leave a troubled past behind. They may be discouraged and frightened when they find out exactly what is entailed in order to reach their goals.Don’t let frustration and the seemingly insurmountable barriers affect the instruction and support they receive from you or your school. It may take your students longer to achieve what they wanted; they can succeed, however, if they have quality support and continue to believe in themselves.Recommended ResourcesResources from Colorín ColoradoSupporting Newcomer Students: Resource GallerySpecial ELL Populations: Resources and RecommendationsColorín on the Go: 100+ Strategies for Working with ELLs (Colorín on the Go is free web app, and no app store download is needed!)Resources from SupportEdSLIFE Resource Collection: Tools, Courses, Webinars, and ArticlesArchived SLIFE Training and Resources (Maine Department of Education)Resources from Dr. Carol SalvaDr. Carol Salva is an ELL expert based in Texas with extensive experience in serving refugee students and students with interrupted schooling. She has also supported numerous schools in their efforts to partner more effectively with SIFEs and their families.Newcomers at Grade Level and Beyond (Blog)Videos, Interviews, Webinars, and More with Dr. Salva (YouTube)Boosting Achievement: The ESL PodcastSuccess for SLIFE (Padlet)Guides and ReportsWelcoming, Registering, and Supporting Newcomer Students: A Toolkit for Educators of Immigrant and Refugee Students in Secondary Schools (Institute of Education Sciences)Newcomer Toolkit (NCELA)English Learner Tool Kit (OELA)SLIFE: Focus Bulletin (WIDA)Immigrant Students and Secondary School Reform: A Compendium of Best Practices (Council of Chief State School Officers)Students with Interrupted/Inconsistent Formal Education (New York State Resources)ArticlesStudents with Interrupted Formal Education: Understanding Who They Are (American Federation of Teachers)“I Have”, “I Am,” & “I Can.”: Serving Students with Interrupted Formal Education (BRYCS)The Vancouver Sun: A Tough Beginning (featured in the original version of this article)BooksTeaching and Supporting English Learners: A Guide to Welcoming and Engaging NewcomersStudents With Interrupted Formal Education: Bridging Where They Are and What They NeedPowerful Practices for Supporting English Learners: Elevating Diverse Assets and IdentitiesThe New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant TeensThe School I Deserve: Six Young Refugees and Their Fight for Equality in AmericaMultimediaPodcasts from Teaching MLs with Tan HuynhCreating nurturing newcomer programs w/Lindsey BirdMaking Americans w/ Jessica LanderPamela Broussard: Believing in newcomersVoice of Newcomers w. Dr. Denise FurlongKris Jagasia: The language that older newcomers needEnglish and SLIFE w/ Dr.Luis Javier Pentón HerreraSLIFE: Bridging Where They Are and What They Need w/ Dr. Brenda CustodioFrom SLIFE to principal: Dr. Andrew XiongBridges to Academic Success for SLIFE w/ Dr. Lisa AuslanderSLIFE: What every teacher needs to know w/ Dr. Andrea DeCapuaFilmsI Learn AmericaOrganizations and InitiativesWelcoming Refugees (Office of Refugee Resettlement )Association of Farmworker Opportunity ProgramsBridging Refugee Youth and Children’s Services (BRYCS)

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Youth from our partnered schools have created and posted the stories. Many of our young storytellers are new to English. Consequently, some of the texts may not be grammatically perfect. Unfiltered, unedited, raw and from the heart, they are that much closer to the students. LISTEN, LEARN and CARE.

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One High School, One School Year, Five New Americans

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In our work with educators of English language learners (ELLs), we often find that there is a lack of resources in our field about how to equitably grade ELLs. This blog post offers some insights and ideas that we hope will spur further discussion.

First, we'll share the reason behind our focus on this topic, as well as a summary of challenges related to grading ELLs. Next, we'll give you a brief overview of related research before sharing our own recommendations developed in response to our research, which we call the Five Pillars of Equitably Grading ELLs. (You can find a related infographic on the SupportEd website.) We'll end the post by providing a space for you to share your thoughts, add some additional resources, and share some references with you.

Resources from Larry Ferlazzo

This post complements the following from Larry Ferlazzo:

We also produced a webinar with Larry, available on the SupportEd website (scroll down to "The Five Pillars of Grading ELs Equitably).

COVID-19 updates

For more information on grading equitably during COVID-19, see the following:

Why this topic?

As part of developing a blended ELL assessment professional development course for the Mid-State Regional Bilingual Education Resource Network in Central New York State, we were asked to create a component on grading ELLs. We thought our task would be straightforward enough, but once we started researching the topic, we found very limited resources specifically for ELLs.

In an effort to gather more information, we reached out to our online professional learning network. Diane posted the following questions on the Colorín Colorado Facebook page, the Advocating for ELLs Facebook page, and Twitter in early January 2018:
We're doing a little research on grading ELs at SupportEd. Could you please share your answers to these questions? 1. What are the challenges that you and your colleagues may have in grading ELs? 2. What are some strategies or tools that you find particularly helpful in grading ELs? 3. Do you have any exemplary EL-friendly report card samples you can share?
The responses were numerous and came quickly. Many of our online colleagues shared that they were also looking for guidance around this topic. We also took part in a Twitter #ELLCHAT on January 8 on the same topic with a similar response from colleagues around the country. (You can see a transcript from that Twitter chat by registering for a free account from Participate.com.) We'll summarize the top three challenges that we read about next. Please note we don't share answers to questions 2 and 3 since we incorporate some resources to address these questions in our Five Pillars.

Challenges from the Field

The challenges we saw most often were:

1. Issues with the structure and content of report cards: Teachers mentioned not having an ELL-specific report card, and they also mentioned not being able to adapt their curriculum or school report card so that the ELA skills graded are "on level". (Example: 4th grade beginner student failing ELA because she does not meet grade four ELA standards and is performing at a grade two level.)

2. Lack of validity in grading content: One comment was, "Sometimes a child's grades are just a reflection of how well the teacher taught to their learning style, rather than a true representation of what the child knows." Another colleague wrote, "Separating ELD from content knowledge! So integral to each other - how to assess accurately??" She noted these are listed separately on report card, but there is no tool to assess them.

3. Challenges with school or district policy: Often, educators commented that existing policies at the school and district level don't address the unique considerations inherent in grading ELLs, such as inflexible time limits for exemption from letter grades regardless of the students' language proficiency and educational backgrounds.

Synthesis of Research on Grading Challenges for Teachers of ELLs

The challenges our colleagues reported on social media are in line with what the research tells us, namely that there are many obstacles that may prevent ELLs from benefiting from equitable grading practices. Here we summarize some of findings from relevant research. Please note that this is not an exhaustive literature review!

Research shows that grading, even among teachers at schools with clear grading policies, is often inconsistent (Reeves, 2008; Seeley, 1994). This inconsistency can lead to inequitable grading practices and even failure for certain groups of students, such as ELLs (Waldsburger, 2012). Many teachers believe that report card grades should be based solely on students' mastery of grade-level content standards, which can be challenging for some students. Jung and Guskey (2012) note that while an ESOL teacher may complete a supplemental progress report for ELLs, that piece of assessment information does not often support the general education teacher in assigning grades.

Another obstacle in grading in general is that many classroom teachers feel uncertain about how to hold all students to the same expectations for performance as other students (Guskey, 2011). Teachers can find it challenging to differentiate instruction and grading for ELLs while trying to meet the needs of the other students in their classroom (Pawan & Craig, 2011). Even those teachers who are able to differentiate instruction may find it difficult to score learning tasks and assign grades based on differentiated student work.

Still another challenge that stands in the way of equitable grading for all students is the belief that grades should be used to identify and maximize differences among students (Guskey, 2011). Many teachers feel that there should be students who perform well and students who perform poorly, such as with a normal bell-shaped curve. Jung and Guskey (2012) share that teachers often grapple with questions of fairness, such as giving a passing grade to an ELL who did not meet grade-level content standards. However, Guskey (2011) notes that when teachers identify what they want students to learn and be able to do and when they do all they can to support students in meeting these goals, it is possible for all students to obtain high scores on academic tasks and thereby receive high grades.

The literature we reviewed notes several recommendations for improving ELL grading systems as a whole (e.g., Waldsburger, 2012). For example, one recommendation is not giving letter grades to newly arrived ELLs who are beginning to learn English. Another option is to provide narrative assessments only or use a system of pass, fail, and high pass that measures effort, language growth, and content standard mastery based on students' levels of language proficiency. Tomlinson (2001) suggests providing two grades for all students. The first would be a traditional, standards-based grade, and the second would be a grade based on an individual student's progress towards language and content learning goals. Similarly, several authors (e.g., Jung & Guskey, 2010; Tomlinson, Moon, & Imbeau, 2015) recommend three grades for differentiated classrooms based on a student's product (mastery of content), process (effort, motivation, and participation), and progress (improvement over time).

Our Recommendations: The Five Pillars of Equitably Grading ELLs

We drew from our colleagues' responses, the research we synthesized on grading ELLs, our review of best practices in ELL grading, as well as our own expertise in the field to create five recommendations for equitably grading ELLs. We call them the Five Pillars of Equitably Grading ELLs. For each pillar, we provide a few steps to incorporate that pillar. In defining and describing the five pillars, we fully realize how intertwined effective instruction and equitable grading are. You simply can't fairly grade ELLs if you haven't already positioned them to access the instruction of content.

Pillar 1: Identify the content and language standard(s).

In setting up a system in which ELLs can be graded fairly, teachers first need to define which content as well as language standards they would like their students to meet. Hand in hand with these two sets of standards go content and language learning objectives for ELLs based on these standards. We recommend that teachers share these content and language learning objectives with ELLs using "student-friendly" versions to the degree possible. Also, we recommend that teachers identify success criteria for ELLs in meeting the objectives, and share models of strong work samples with ELLs so that students are aware of teachers' expectations. Model work samples should also include models produced by ELLs at different levels of proficiency so ELLs can see themselves reflected in exemplary student work.

Pillar 2: Incorporate scaffolding to support ELLs in achieving the standards.

Depending on their level of English proficiency, most ELLs will not be able to access grade-level content standards without appropriate scaffolding. We recommend using three types of scaffolds in the areas of materials, instruction, and strategic grouping of students to work toward removing linguistic barriers for ELLs. In implementing scaffolds, we recommend you do so based on ELLs' English language proficiency level as well as individual ELL strengths and needs and also the demands of the particular lesson (Staehr Fenner & Snyder, 2017). In addition, we recommend that teachers set expectations with students for the gradual removal of scaffolding, as appropriate. ELLs should be aware that scaffolds are temporary and will be removed as they gain language proficiency and content knowledge and skills. Further, we stress that it's crucial for ESOL and content teachers to collaborate to determine appropriate scaffolds for their ELLs to meaningfully access content.

Pillar 3: Support ELLs' progress toward mastery.

We believe that grades should not be used punitively for any students, and especially not for ELLs who are already more inclined to drop out of school than non-ELLs. Therefore, we suggest providing ELLs sufficient time and opportunities for learning, such as offering " lunch bunch" and after-school opportunities to do schoolwork with guidance from teachers, tutors, or peers. In addition, we recommend focusing on ELLs' progress towards mastery as well as their achievement. It is important to underscore that we are evaluating ELLs' progress towards mastery, not just whether they have mastered the objective or not. In spite of careful scaffolding, all grade-level standards may not always be 100% achievable for certain ELLs. It may be more motivating for an ELL to recognize his or her progress than to see an achievement score alone.

Also, since many ELLs have responsibilities such as work and taking care of siblings outside of school, they may not be able to complete all assignments on time. Therefore, we recommend allowing ELLs to turn in some work late without penalty if they are in communication with the teacher about the unique circumstances. Moreover, late work may be a sign that an ELL is needing more support to be able to access the content, understand the directions, and/or complete the task. Finally, if homework is given, we recommend using it as an opportunity for non-graded practice.

Pillar 4: Assess ELLs' progress equitably.

In order to equitably assess ELLs, teachers need to design assessments and supports that allow ELLs to access and demonstrate mastery of content and/or language objectives. To equitably assess ELLs' progress, it is critical to also scaffold assessments (not just instruction) for ELLs based on individual ELL strengths and needs. For example, depending on an ELL's level of English proficiency, that student could be provided sentence frames, images, or a word bank to lighten the "linguistic load" of the assessment to be able to provide a more valid picture of what that student knows and can do in a particular content area. During instruction, ELLs should have ample classroom opportunity to practice with any scaffold that will also be provided during an assessment. Another aspect of equitably assessing ELLs' progress comes in the form of group work. While we recommend strategically grouping ELLs as a form of scaffolding instruction, for grading group work we recommend assigning individual scores instead of a group grade to students, including ELLs. In this way, individual students aren't penalized if all students aren't contributing equally to a particular group project.

Pillar 5: Involve ELLs, families, & colleagues.

We have often found that ELLs and their families do not have a full understanding of grade-level expectations, how grades are given, and what each section of a report card means. We advocate for explaining grade level expectations, the grading process, and report cards to ELLs in their home language whenever possible. In addition, ELLs and their families should be involved in the entire grading process, beginning the school year or their enrollment in school with an overview of what the grading expectations and processes look like. Such meetings are also a good time for ELLs and their families to set goals for their learning. Finally, while collaboration and co-teaching have been on many teachers' radar for some time now, co-grading may not be. We strongly recommend that ESOL and content teachers co-grade, collaborating to assign grades to ELLs on formative and summative assessments as well as discuss final grades on report cards. In that way, the level of collaboration will strengthen, and all teachers can leverage their expertise when it comes to ELLs.

Your Thoughts

While we offer our ideas on guidance around equitably grading ELLs, we also encourage you to share your thoughts here. If you have any samples of ELL-friendly report cards, grading policies, success stories, or additional considerations, please share them in the blog post comments!

Additional Resources

References

Guskey, T. (2011). Five obstacles to grading reform. Educational Leadership, 69(3), 16-21.

Jung, L. A., & Guskey, T. R. (2010). Grading exceptional learners. Educational Leadership, 67(5), 31-35.

Jung, L.A. & Guskey, T. R. (2012). Grading exceptional and struggling learners. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Pawan, F. & Craig, D. (2011). ESL and content area teacher responses to discussions on English language learner instruction. TESOL Journal, 2(3), 293-311.

Reeves, D. (2008). Leading to change: Effective grading practices. Educational Leadership, 65(5), 85-87.

Seeley, M.M. (1994). The Mismatch Between Assessment and Grading. National Education Association. National Education Association. Retrieved from http://www.nea.org/teachexperience/ ask040326.html.

Staehr Fenner, D., & Snyder, S. (2017). Unlocking English learners' potential: Strategies for making content accessible. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Tomlinson, C. A. (2001). Grading for success. Educational Leadership, 58(6), 12-15.

Tomlinson, C.A., Moon, T. and Imbeau, M.B. (2015). Assessment and student success in a differentiated classroom, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/siteASCD/publications/assessment-and-di-whitepaper.pdf

Waldspurger, T. (2012, March). A? B? C? Assigning meaningful grades for ELLs. Presented at the TESOL Convention, Philadelphia, PA.

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The Five Pillars of Equitably Grading ELLs

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How can teachers equitably grade ELLs? Learn more about challenges, related research and resources, and recommendations developed by the Diane Staehr Fenner, Jill Kester, and Sydney Snyder.

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Collaboration: Working Together to Serve Multilingual Learners

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This WIDA Focus Bulletin emphasizes the many benefits of collaboration. The collaborative approach is presented as a cyclical process with shared responsibility by educators assessing, reflecting upon, planning for and teaching multilingual learners.Vea y descargue en español.

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Collaborative teaching models for co-teaching EL students

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Collaborative teaching models for co-teaching EL students

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Ellevation: ML Program Management Tools for K-12

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Identifying and Supporting Gifted and Talented ELs

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English learners (ELs) are largely underrepresented in gifted and talented programs. We know many multilingual students qualify, so to a large extent, the issue is rooted in poor identification, deficit-based thinking, and other barriers that stand in their way. We had a conversation with Marcy Voss, Educational Consultant and ELL Coach with 36 years of experience in public education, to discuss what teachers need to know to better identify gifted and talented ELs and how to create learning environments that both support and challenge these and all students. 1.

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There are many ways that families of English language learners (ELLs) can support language and literacy at home! Colorín Colorado's new series of 8 tips for families is available in 16 languages. Share these tips with your families in two ways:

1) A tip sheet: One single page with all 8 tips
2) One tip at a time
If you see any issues with translations, please email us at: [email protected] Artwork by award-winning illustrator Rafael López is used with permission.

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Share 8 Great Reading Tips with Families (in 16 languages)

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There are many ways that families of English language learners (ELLs) can support language and literacy at home! Colorín Colorado's new series of 8 tips for families is available in 16 languages.

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Using Informal Assessments for English Language Learners

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Informal assessments (also called authentic or alternative) allow teachers to track the ongoing progress of their students regularly and often. While standardized tests measure students at a particular point in the year, ongoing assessments provide continual snapshots of where students are throughout the school year.