Learn how middle and high schools can partner with multilingual families to support older ELLs’ success. This article includes strategies, recommended resources, and videos featuring educator voices.
Learn about the unique responsibilities, strengths, and social-emotional needs of English language learners (ELLs) and immigrant students in middle and high school from Michelle Lawrence Biggar, a veteran ELL educator in New York State.
While it may seem the most expedient solution, it is not appropriate to put an older ELL student in a lower grade to receive the appropriate reading instruction. Age-appropriate activities integrated with academic content give older students the opportunity to make progress as readers.
Pre-reading activities can engage student interest, activate prior knowledge, or pre-teach potentially difficult concepts and vocabulary. They also offer a great opportunity to introduce comprehension components such as cause and effect, compare and contrast, personification, main idea, and sequencing.
How do district and school partnerships with community-based organizations help schools better meet the needs of recent immigrant students? This article provides some examples of promising strategies in which community-based organizations and districts work together to address linguistic and cultural differences, help newcomers gain new language skills and catch up academically with their peers, and provide educational and social support to immigrant families.
How can you hold an effective parent-teacher conference with the parents of English language learners if they can’t communicate comfortably in English? This article provides a number of tips to help you bridge the language gap, take cultural expectations about education into account, and provide your students’ parents with the information they need about their children’s progress in school.
Given that teachers often have too much to teach and too little time, teacher Dana Dusbiber suggests an alternative approach to teaching literature for secondary ELLs: the introduction of more multicultural literature in the classroom.
English language learners (ELLs) represent more than 10% of the national pre-K through 12th grade enrollment, and more than 70% of these ELLs fail to develop strong literacy skills. To increase this group’s educational, college, and job opportunities, policymakers must address the unique ELL literacy questions.
