Even among educators who have been successful at educating ELLs under traditional supports and programs, the level of knowledge required to do the job successfully has increased. This paper considers more aggressive and creative capacity-building initiatives that strengthen and integrate the disciplinary teaching strategies with literacy and language development strategies. The authors discuss the value and implications of new partnerships, of structures for collaboration, and of time dedicated to engaging experts from different fields in the design and delivery of teacher preparation and professional development.

Stories and poems that have a familiar structure can create a supportive context for learning about the writing process, building students' background knowledge, and scaffolding their creation of original stories. In this lesson for students in second or late first grade, teachers help students explore the concepts of beginning, middle, and ending by reading a variety of stories and charting the events on storyboards. As they retell the stories, students are encouraged to make use of sequencing words (first, so, then, next, after that, finally). A read-aloud of Once Upon a Golden Apple by Jean Little and Maggie De Vries introduces a discussion of the choices made by an author in constructing a plot. Starting with prewriting questions and a storyboard, students construct original stories, progressing from shared writing to guided writing; independent writing is also encouraged.

Teaching Pragmatics explores the teaching of pragmatics through lessons and activities created by teachers of English as a second and foreign language. This book is written for teachers by teachers. Our teacher-contributors teach in seven different countries and are both native-speakers and nonnative speakers of English. Activities reflect ESL and EFL classroom settings. The chapters included here allow teachers to see how other teachers approach the teaching of pragmatics and to appreciate the diversity and creativity of their endeavors.

Students tell their life stories in this lesson about autobiographies based on family photographs.

The importance of reading aloud to children is an established tenet of reading instruction. This lesson supports the language development and reading comprehension of kindergarten through second graders. Through the use of the text talk strategy, students explain, develop, and expand story ideas. This lesson is designed to help students learn how to gain meaning from words that are taken out of their original context.

Folk tales and fairy tales are of interest to and part of the language arts curriculum for young learners. This lesson supports the study of this genre and the study of irregular patterns and letter-sound relationships related to decoding and spelling. After reading the folk tale Jack and the Beanstalk, students discuss the word giant and its beginning sound. Students then create their own lists of words that begin with the same sound. Then, students are introduced to words with the soft g sound and create a new list of words with this beginning sound. As a culminating activity, students work individually or in groups to categorize animal names into groups according to their beginning g sound.

Looking to help students practice "reading" images for a variety of contextual meanings while engaging in content area study? This lesson uses images of the Boston Massacre to deepen students' comprehension of both the event and the effects of propaganda. Students begin by completing an anticipation guide to introduce them to Boston Massacre, propaganda, and British/colonial reactions to the massacre. They then complete an image analysis to make inferences about various images of the massacre. The culminating activity-a presentation about students' observations and inferences-demonstrates students' knowledge of the Boston Massacre and propaganda in a variety of ways. This lesson benefits English-language learners (ELLs) and struggling readers because it involves viewing images, participating in discussions, working with peers, and listening to a read-aloud that reinforces the lesson content and vocabulary.

This article describes seven strategies for assisting English Language Learners with science vocabulary development.

Purpose of UnitThe purpose of this Climate Science NTC Project GLAD® unit is a call to action, providing equity of access for all students. Through a model of instruction that promotes language development within core content, the Voices of Hope unit teaches students the science behind climate change and equips them with the tools necessary toward making a positive impact on our planet. This unit was written for 4th - 7th grade.

In this lesson, designed for a heterogeneous group of students that includes English-language learners, students work together to plan a website based on their home knowledge. An introductory lesson outlines the structure and components of simple websites (home page, titles, headings, links). Students take home and complete a bilingual student and family interest survey, then work in groups of four or five to identify common themes among the responses. Each group makes a flow chart to think graphically about the contents of their planned website. Each student keeps a project notebook to record new ideas, summarize group work, and share the project with family members. The teacher can make the planned websites a reality using one of the online website-building platforms in the Resources list.

Creating an inclusive and welcoming environment for newcomers (any recently arrived foreign-born student) is the very first step in establishing a supportive school culture for newcomers. This strategy is for both teachers and leaders who hope to create a welcoming environment for EL newcomers to their school. In this strategy, teachers and leaders can learn five actionable steps to take to create a supportive environment for all EL newcomers.

This paper addresses the implications, for ELLs, of the new standard's requirement that students be able to read and understand complex, informationally dense texts. The authors discuss the types of supports that learners need in order to work with complex texts. They also provide a sample of what academic discourse involves, using an excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail. They demonstrate how English learners can be provided with strategies for accessing complex texts, such as closely examining one sentence at a time. The authors argue that instruction must go beyond vocabulary and should begin with an examination of our beliefs about language, literacy and learning.

This site provides an overview of research-based resources for teaching English Language Learners available from the Doing What Works web site, a site sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education.

What's in the Bag? invites primary students to play with vocabulary common to their environment.

This online activity helps students recognize word patterns by having them sort a series of words into short-vowel word families.