Connecting Content and Academic Language for English Learners and Struggling Students, Grades 2–6


Book Description

Create unit plans that will empower your EL students In this supremely practical book, award-winning principal Ruth Swinney and college professor Patricia Velasco focus on the careful planning needed to develop the academic language of all students. For English learners especially, it is critically important to integrate language development with the content that the curriculum demands. What makes this book unlike any other is the detailed guidance it provides to: • Help students advance from social to academic language • Encourage verbal expression in the classroom • Plan language arts, social studies, and science lessons that connect language and content • Use shared reading and writing, read alouds, and conversation to teach language skills Hands-on tools include graphic organizers, sample lesson plans, concept maps, semantic webbing, word walls, and worksheets—everything teachers need to help emergent bilingual and struggling students master the academic language they need to excel in school.




Academic Language in Diverse Classrooms: English Language Arts, Grades 3-5


Book Description

Make every student fluent in the language of learning. The Common Core and ELD standards provide pathways to academic success through academic language. Using an integrated Curricular Framework, districts, schools and professional learning communities can: Design and implement thematic units for learning Draw from content and language standards to set targets for all students Examine standards-centered materials for academic language Collaborate in planning instruction and assessment within and across lessons Consider linguistic and cultural resources of the students Create differentiated content and language objectives Delve deeply into instructional strategies involving academic language Reflect on teaching and learning




Passing the English as a Second Language (ESL) Supplemental TExES Exam


Book Description

Master the TExES with down-to-earth test prep strategies ESL certification is attainable if one understands the domains and competencies represented in the test and masters test prep skills. Dr. Elaine Wilmore, known for her popular TExES preparation seminars, synthesizes her knowledge and experiences and gives readers a practical approach to passing the ESL Supplemental Exam. Written in a conversational tone, the book uses real examples to help readers connect theory with actual practice and offers: Thorough discussions of relevant concepts related to domains and competencies Tables and graphics for visual and kinesthetic learners Chapter summaries highlighting “Important Points” and the author’s “Guess My Favorites” learning tips Test-taking strategies and sample exam questions




English Language Learners Day by Day, K-6


Book Description

This guide recognizes the challenges teachers face when working with English language learners, and responds with realistic and practical solutions. This book on ELL instruction will help mainstream and preservice teachers better understand how they can make their classrooms a place where English language learners thrive.--[book cover].




Assessment and Learning in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Classrooms


Book Description

This volume builds a conceptual basis for assessment promoting learning in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms and proposes practical assessment approaches and activities that CLIL teachers can apply in the classroom. CLIL as an educational context is unique, as language and content learning happen simultaneously. The efficacy of such instruction has been studied extensively, but assessment in CLIL classrooms has drawn much less attention. The present volume aims to fill this gap. Arranged based on different ways that content and language are integrated in CLIL, the chapters in this book together build a solid theoretical basis for assessment promoting learning in CLIL classrooms. The authors discuss how assessment eliciting this integration yields insights into learners' abilities, but more importantly, how these insights are used to promote learning. The contributors to the volume together build the understanding of classroom-based assessment as cyclic, of teaching, learning, and assessment as inter-related, and of content and language in CLIL classrooms as a dialectical unity. This volume will spark interest in and discussion of classroom-based assessment in CLIL among CLIL educators and researchers, enable reflection of classroom assessment practices, and foster collaboration between CLIL teachers and researchers. The assessment approaches and activities discussed in the volume, in turn, will help educators understand the scope of applications of assessment and inspire them to adapt these to their own classrooms.




Translanguaging and Transformative Teaching for Emergent Bilingual Students


Book Description

A critical and accessible text, this book provides a foundation for translanguaging theory and practice with educating emergent bilingual students. The product of the internationally renowned and trailblazing City University of New York-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB), this book draws on a common vision of translanguaging to present different perspectives of its practice and outcomes in real schools. It tells the story of the collaborative project’s positive impact on instruction and assessment in different contexts, and explores the potential for transformation in teacher education. Acknowledging oppressive traditions and obstacles facing language minoritized students, this book provides a pathway for combatting racism, monolingualism, classism and colonialism in the classroom and offers narratives, strategies and pedagogical practices to liberate and engage emergent bilingual students. This book is an essential text for all teacher educators, researchers, scholars, and students in TESOL and bilingual education, as well as educators working with language minoritized students.




Translanguaging in Science Education


Book Description

This edited volume explores diverse translanguaging practices in multilingual science classrooms in Hong Kong, Lebanon, Luxembourg, South Africa, Sweden and the United States. It presents novel opportunities for using students’ home, first or minority languages as meaning-making tools in science education. It also invites to explore the use of language resources and other multimodal resources, such as gestures and body language. In addition, it discusses and problematizes contingent hindrances and obstacles that may arise from these practices within various contexts around the world. This includes reviewing different theoretical starting points that may be challenged by such an approach. These issues are explored from different perspectives and methodological focus, as well as in several educational contexts, including primary, middle, secondary levels, higher education, as well as in after-school programs for refugee teenagers. Within these contexts, the book highlights and shares a range of educational tools and activities in science education, such as teacher-led classroom-talk, language-focused teaching, teachers’ use of meta-language, teachers’ scaffolding strategies, small-group interactions, and computer-supported collaborative learning.




Understanding Second Language Acquisition


Book Description

Whether we grow up with one, two, or several languages during our early years of life, many of us will learn a second, foreign, or heritage language in later years. The field of Second language acquisition (SLA, for short) investigates the human capacity to learn additional languages in late childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, after the first language --in the case of monolinguals-- or languages --in the case of bilinguals-- have already been acquired. Understanding Second Language Acquisition offers a wide-encompassing survey of this burgeoning field, its accumulated findings and proposed theories, its developed research paradigms, and its pending questions for the future. The book zooms in and out of universal, individual, and social forces, in each case evaluating the research findings that have been generated across diverse naturalistic and formal contexts for second language acquisition. It assumes no background in SLA and provides helpful chapter-by-chapter summaries and suggestions for further reading. Ideal as a textbook for students of applied linguistics, foreign language education, TESOL, and education, it is also recommended for students of linguistics, developmental psycholinguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. Supporting resources for tutors are available free at www.routledge.com/ortega.




The Knowledge Gap


Book Description

The untold story of the root cause of America's education crisis--and the seemingly endless cycle of multigenerational poverty. It was only after years within the education reform movement that Natalie Wexler stumbled across a hidden explanation for our country's frustrating lack of progress when it comes to providing every child with a quality education. The problem wasn't one of the usual scapegoats: lazy teachers, shoddy facilities, lack of accountability. It was something no one was talking about: the elementary school curriculum's intense focus on decontextualized reading comprehension "skills" at the expense of actual knowledge. In the tradition of Dale Russakoff's The Prize and Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars, Wexler brings together history, research, and compelling characters to pull back the curtain on this fundamental flaw in our education system--one that fellow reformers, journalists, and policymakers have long overlooked, and of which the general public, including many parents, remains unaware. But The Knowledge Gap isn't just a story of what schools have gotten so wrong--it also follows innovative educators who are in the process of shedding their deeply ingrained habits, and describes the rewards that have come along: students who are not only excited to learn but are also acquiring the knowledge and vocabulary that will enable them to succeed. If we truly want to fix our education system and unlock the potential of our neediest children, we have no choice but to pay attention.




Teaching English Language Learners Across the Content Areas


Book Description

Strategies, tools, tips, and examples that teachers can use to help English language learners at all levels flourish in mainstream classrooms.