Teaching MLs

One in five students are identified as speaking English as an Additional Language (EAL) and all teachers are highly likely to be teaching multilingual students in their classrooms. As our schools become more culturally and linguistically diverse, they must respond to the needs of the students in front of them, and this book provides a range of strategies and resources to ensure teaching is adaptive and responsive so that all learners thrive and fulfil their academic potential.

At the heart of the book is developing an understanding of how languages are acquired and an awareness that all students, regardless of their current English language proficiency, need to be offered a challenging and supportive environment. Chapters offer:

• High-yielding, practical approaches and strategies to ensure that students are able to access content-appropriate lessons and simultaneously develop their language

Each teacher is positioned as a language teacher, with the responsibility of planning sessions where language is not perceived as an add-on, but as an integral and pivotal part. This book will empower you as an educator and ensure that your classroom is a language-aware and stimulating environment for your students. It will be essential reading for all secondary school educators and teaching assistants who support EAL students in mainstream lessons and are responsible for producing resources and implementing classroom strategies.

You can access the article that Ruslana referenced in this podcast conversation.

https://www.colorincolorado.org/article/teaching-writing-content-areas-research-practice

• Teaching Writing in the Content Areas: from Research to Practice https://www.colorincolorado.org/article/teaching-writing-content-areas-research-practice 

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In its second edition, Breaking New Ground for SLIFE builds on its model for supporting students who are new to English and may have experienced a disruption in their schooling. The practices presented in this book emerge from the belief that education for students with limited or interrupted formal education, also known as SLIFE, should not be remedial but should build on the students’ prior learning experiences and existing areas of knowledge. This second edition has been significantly updated, informed by recent research in the field, feedback from teachers, and new scholarly treatments of the topic. Breaking New Ground for SLIFE, second edition, explores the MALP approach, highlights how technology can be incorporated into classroom activities, and includes actual MALP projects implemented by MALP-trained teachers of both young and adolescent learners. In addition, the authors provide a newly revised MALP Teacher Planning Checklist.

By reading Breaking New Ground for SLIFE, educators will:

- Further develop their understanding of the needs of students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE)

Join bestselling authors Margo Gottlieb and Andrea Honigsfeld on an engaging journey to showcase collaborative assessment within assets-driven instructional practices. Integrating instructional and assessment cycles, explore how multilingual learners can interact with each other and their teachers to form lasting partnerships. Using evidence-based, research-informed strategies, Gottlieb and Honigsfeld invite educators to form partnerships to fortify linguistically and culturally sustainable assessment within their classroom routines.

Collaborative assessment approaches AS, FOR, and OF learning encourages relationship building to foster multilingual learners’ academic, linguistic, cultural, and social-emotional development. This practical guide supports educators in enacting collaborative assessment and welcomes multilingual learners to be partners in the process.

Cooperation, coordination of services, and impactful collaboration are critical to the success of multilingual learners with exceptional needs. Written by experts in the fields of language and literacy development, equity, and special education, this practical guide emphasizes the power of partnership and inclusive pedagogy to transform educational practices for culturally and linguistically diverse students. Through six comprehensive chapters, the book offers strategies for effective co-planning, co-assessment, and co-teaching, while emphasizing the importance of cultural diversity and equitable classroom-based approaches for students with exceptionalities.

Links mentioned in the podcast: 

https://udlguidelines.cast.org/    

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/1-500-decisions-a-day-at-least-how-teachers-cope-with-a-dizzying-array-of-questions/2021/12 

Please visit https://supported.com to learn more about their generous work for the field.

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Though multilingual learners (MLs) comprise nearly 25% of the school-age population, the most widely-used social emotional learning (SEL) frameworks and programs lack an intentional focus on these students’ unique strengths and challenges. To foster MLs’ academic success and wellbeing, educators must consider students’ cultures, languages, assets, expectations, norms, and life experiences when integrating SEL practices.

In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Diane Staehr Fenner and Mindi Teich break down how each of the five competencies in the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) SEL framework can be implemented with ML success in mind. Staehr Fenner and Teich’s practical and engaging guide provides SEL considerations that are unique to MLs, relevant research, easy-to-implement educator actions, and tools to seamlessly integrate SEL practices into content and language instruction.

https://amzn.to/3VvNeNh

Decades of research (Wright, 2016), and the experience of millions of educators, make one thing abundantly clear about the modern classroom: students need to talk about their learning. Engaging students in small-group, academic conversations is one of the most effective ways to: enhance comprehension reduce misbehavior build academic language proficiency support literacy develop socioemotional skills promote question-asking and deep thinking, and create a sense of community within the classroom So why don’t all lessons have all students talking about their learning, all the time?

Unfortunately, asking students to “turn and talk” to their partners has proven frustrating for many educators, who see students not talking, or students talking about non-academic subjects, or gregarious students dominating conversations while shier students are voiceless. As a teacher, I had all of these frustrations, too. I gave my students the opportunity to talk about their learning, but I wouldn’t see them doing it—at least not the majority of my students. When I asked them why they weren’t talking, I heard a variety of responses, which I dismissed as excuses at the time:

“I don’t want to go first.” “I don’t know what the question is asking, sir.” “I didn’t learn this.” “I don’t even know what we’re supposed to be doing.”

I knew that students engaging in new activities tend to thrive with more structure, but I wasn’t sure what structure I could add to these conversations. And then I came across QSSSA. The Question, Signal, Stem, Share, Assess routine was first introduced in 7 Steps to a Language-Rich, Interactive Classroom by Seidlitz and Perryman in 2011, and has since taken modern classrooms across the nation by storm (as evidence, try an image search of QSSSA).

Research has shown that regularly using QSSSA results in enhanced participation and enthusiasm from students (Seidlitz et al., 2024). QSSSA is so effective because it provides exactly that structure I was looking for in my classroom. Students feel safe and confident in the QSSSA process and are intuitively engaged in participation. In all content areas and at all grade levels, it is one of the most versatile, effective tools in the teacher toolkit, and can be used any time you want to have students participate in structured conversations using academic language.

A Routine for Academic Language Development Each step of the QSSSA routine was deliberately designed to help students develop academic language, first by reducing the affective filter, and second by providing supports that encourage students to use academic language. Here is how to implement each step of the routine.