Equity Access empowers and engages English language learners by helping diverse students meet the challenges of standards and become successful readers and writers. It is also a way of teaching. Authors of the book address foundational concepts that demonstrate how these concepts are put into practice by describing in detail that are being taught in Language Arts units.
Foundational Concepts
Foundational concepts help teachers support English Learners as they read, write about, and discuss their ELA curriculum. These concepts are put into practice by describing commonly taught ELA units. In each unit, it will describe how teachers differentiate their language arts curriculum to make it accessible to all students, including multilingual language learners (MLLs). Strategies teachers can use are designed to build background knowledge, help students develop language arts skills, and actively engage students in reading, writing, listening, and speaking.
Key Practices for Working with English Learners
Key practices for working with English Learners are essential to effective teaching. The key practices are:
- Organizing around big question units of inquiry
- Getting to know your English Learners so you can best support them
- Understand the language proficiency of your students
- Using the Gradual Release of Responsibility model of reading and writing
- Drawing on English Learners’ background knowledge and cultures
Teaching Academic Language and Content
To help students develop academic language proficiency, teachers must include both language and content in every lesson. When you write content objectives, you can refer to the content-specific academic vocabulary that represents key concepts students should learn, i.e. students will describe the main character in the story. To write language objectives, teachers begin with their content objective and ask “what language forms and functions will students need as they read, write, and discuss this academic content?” The language objective is based on the content objective, which could be that students use descriptive adjectives to describe the character.
Krashen (1982) developed a theory called comprehensible input, in which he explains that we cannot learn what we don’t understand, and teachers should make anything they teach comprehensible. When we receive oral or written messages that we understand, we acquire proficiency in a language.
Here are techniques for making the input comprehensible:
- Using visuals and realia (real things). Always try to move from the concrete to the abstract
- Use videos, DVDs, and images
- Speak clearly and pause often, but don’t slow speech down unnaturally
- Write key words and ideas down. This slows down the language for English Learners
- Paraphrase – say the same thing in different ways
- Make frequent comprehension checks
- Working in small groups
Language Arts Units
A Seeds, Plants, and Plant Growth unit will show teachers how to write and implement language objectives to help students meet the academic content objectives required in the standards.
A Habitats unit will provide specific ways teachers can make their instructional input comprehensible.
Earth, Natural Disaster Unit will explain how teachers can help students develop academic content knowledge and develop greater academic language proficiency in the context of a unit on natural disasters.
Conclusion
You can access online resources for Equitable Access for English Learners and find information about the book by going to the Corwin website: