Academic Language and ELLs

Product Description: Authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford have identified five core communication skills to help students hold productive academic conversations across content areas. These skills include: elaborating and clarifying, supporting ideas with evidence, building on and/or challenging ideas, paraphrasing, and synthesizing.

Product Description: The Freemans provide the information busy secondary teachers need to work effectively with English learners and struggling readers. They examine academic language at different levels: the text level, the paragraph level, the sentence level, and the word level. For each, they provide examples of academic language and specific strategies teachers can use as they teach language arts, science, math, and social studies.

Product Description: This companion (foundational) book to the six-book series, Academic Language Demands for Language Learners: From Text to Context, captures the broad ideas of the series by presenting the theory behind academic language, a definition and examples of each of its components, and a template for direct classroom applicability.

Product Description: The authors of this practical guide delve into the social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds of America s school children to discover how today s teachers can tap into their students strengths and background knowledge. Each chapter provides examples from real classrooms where first- through fifth-grade teachers are working to serve students from a wide variety of backgrounds. This powerful guide shows how to integrate best practices across the content areas of science, mathematics, and social studies, while fostering high levels of academic proficiency.

Product Description: Jeff Zwiers explains the functions and features of academic language that every teacher (language arts, history, math, & science teachers, etc.) should know for supporting academic reading, writing, and discussion. Major topics and themes include how language-building activities (discussions, small groups, etc.) can support content understanding; how we can build on students' diverse ways of understanding, learning, and communicating about the world; and how we can more effectively model and scaffold academic language in our teaching and assessment.

Product Description: Jane Hill and Kathleen Flynn have examined decades of research, interviewed mainstream teachers with ELLs in their classrooms, and reviewed the classroom recommendations the seminal Classroom Instruction That Works (2001) through an ELL lens. The result is a comprehensive guide to helping elementary school students at all levels of English language acquisition succeed.

While many educators may understand why academic language is important, they may wonder how to teach it more explicitly and effectively. In this hands-on guide, experts Ruth Swinney and Patricia Velasco offer a number of strategies and approaches to help ELLs and struggling learners master the language necessary to access grade-level curriculum and to succeed in related reading, writing, and speaking tasks.

Product Description: This practical, hands-on guide outlines strategies for creating and managing environments that spur sophisticated levels of student communication, both oral and written. Paying special attention to the needs of ELLs and using numerous classroom scenarios, the authors detail steps for designing lessons that spark student talk; describe easy-to-use assessments for all grade levels; provide rubrics, worksheets, sentence frames, and other imaginative tools that encourage academic communication; and offer guiding questions to help teachers plan instruction.

In this groundbreaking guide, Debbie Zacarian, EdD, provides a new perspective on the role of academic language in the engagement and success of all students, including English language learners. Using numerous classroom examples, she outlines strategies for connecting academic language to students' lives, building upon students' previous literacy experiences, and engaging parents around activities that foster academic language development. Zacarian also includes reflection questions and guiding graphic organizers and rubrics.

Product Description: In this book, educators and consultants Pérsida and William Himmele present a five-part, research-based framework that teachers can use to help ELLs, as well as other students, attain greater language skills and deeper content comprehension. This field-tested framework includes diagnostic tools, comprehensive overviews on second-language acquisition, and teaching techniques to boost language learning in any classroom. Teachers will also find more than 25 classroom and team-building activities and specific tips about how these activities benefit ELLs.