How does teacher collaboration impact student outcomes here at CIA FIRST?

In what ways can we co-plan to support integrated content and language development for our emerging multlingual learners?

Excellent snapshot provided by WIDA with 5 core practices to support multlinguals on their literacy journey.

https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/metrocenter/language-rbern/resources/bilingual-glossaries-and-cognates

The Measured Mom - Fiction and Non-Fiction

Engage NY - Decodables

Starfall

Flyleaf Publishing

Open Source Phonics

Beyond Decodables

Translanguaging builds metalinguistic awareness by building bridges between students' heritage language (L1) and target language vocabulary (L2)

assessment

• K

• G1

• G2-3

• G4-5

• G6-8

• G9-12

Try dictogloss activities: read a short academic paragraph aloud, learners jot down key words, then reconstruct the text in pairs.

This builds phoneme awareness within authentic language use.

Use it to:

• Explore examples of how language shows up in real content tasks

• Try out practical scaffolding moves for Social Studies, Science, and Math

• Reflect on how to support all students in cracking the “code” of academic texts

• Revisit key visuals (like the Teaching and Learning Cycle (TLC) or Six Cs Framework) when planning lessons

Teachers can use it to:

• Identify the language demands of a task or text

• Plan targeted code‑breaking support for multilingual learners

• Understand how different genres (reports, explanations, arguments, narratives) are structured

• See examples of the verbs, connectors, participants, and sentence patterns typical of each genre

• Strengthen alignment between content goals and language goals

It’s especially helpful when planning writing tasks, analyzing mentor texts, or designing scaffolds that make academic language visible and accessible

• The "Saying Verbs Megaphone": A brilliant scaffolding activity where students rank verbs by intensity (e.g., whispered → stated → bellowed), perfect for helping MLLs understand graduation of meaning.

• Character Diagnostics: How to use texts like Peter's Chair to show students that how a character speaks reveals who they are (e.g., muttered = grumpy/resistant).

  
  

The big idea: Teach students to crack the code of complex texts — separating the Bricks (vocabulary) from the Mortar (the syntax and connectors that hold academic meaning together) — so our Multilingual Learners can access content in every subject.

What clicked for our team

• Identify the purpose first. Determining a text's Key Language Use — Narrate, Inform, Explain, or Argue — gives students a clear reason for reading and writing.

• Language is more than vocabulary. Sentence frames, syntax, and "language keys" deserve to be taught explicitly, not assumed. As one colleague put it, "this is not mere vocabularies."

• Mentor texts as a blueprint. Showing students what "good" looks like before they write reduces guesswork and cognitive load.

• The Teaching and Learning Cycle (TLC). Deconstruct a text together before asking students to write independently.

• Don't flood learners with vocabulary. Break texts down step by step and weave literacy into Science and Social Studies.

• Teach the pattern once. Crack the code of an "explanation" in Science, and that same code transfers to Math and History.

How colleagues plan to apply it

• Designing more targeted, specific sentence frames and modeling them regularly.

• Using mentor texts in Science to bridge understanding scientific ideas and writing about them.

• Applying language keys and vocabulary practice in FTI Khmer lessons.

• Identifying the key language use in upcoming units and aligning instruction, connectors, and complex sentence structures to that purpose.