Principle #1 Academic Literacy Across Curriculum
Instruction focuses on providing ELLs with opportunities to engage in discipline- specific practices which are designed to build conceptual understanding and language competence in tandem. Learning is a social process that requires teachers to intentionally design learning opportunities that integrate reading, writing, speaking, and listening with the practices of each discipline.
What Teachers Do
- Teachers explicitly discuss the characteristics of texts, language functions, and discourse in the discipline with students.
- Instruction is designed with attention to language functions and progressions, and grows ELLs’ competencies with discipline-specific language functions such as obtaining information, demonstrating understanding, constructing explanations, engaging in arguments, etc.
- Instruction is designed to engage students in productive struggle as students build content knowledge and develop rich discipline-specific language and discourse.
- Teachers provide multiple opportunities to practice oral language - in flexible and fluid grouping structures, both homogeneous and heterogeneous.
- Teachers analyze texts and tasks for discipline-specific language and content demands.
-Students engage in linguistically rigorous and content-rich tasks
-Students talk about content in multiple formats (e.g. to their peers in think pairs; to their class in prepared statements or speeches; to their teacher in informal responses; to themselves as they work out a structured response using a sentence starter, together in choral reads or reader's theatre, etc.)
-Students engage in structured peer-discussions (e.g. Team Pair Solo, Teammates Consult, Numbered Heads Together, Team Statements, etc.); conversation groups and discussion circles; small-group interactions with students reporting back to class.
-Students participate in flexible & fluid language proficiency groupings whereby they are sometimes with same-language or same-proficiency level students and at other times with different-language or different- proficiency level students in order to provide varied contexts for language acquisition.
-Students practice and rehearse the use of complex oral academic language for oral language summative assessment tasks (e.g. oral presentations, debates, etc.)
-Students produce output beyond word- or phrase-level responses (teacher facilitates this by using effective questioning techniques to elicit language; teacher- and peer generated questioning, wait time, etc.)
Areas of Concern
-Lack of conceptual understanding of academic language proficiency or confusion with world language proficiency (i.e. foreign language, second language, & academic language proficiency)
-Thinking that teaching academic language is separate from content instruction
-Thinking that the teaching of academic language is the responsibility of English or EAL teachers
-Exclusive focus on ELLs' expression of the 'right answer' instead of the 'right answer with the right language'
-Thinking that ELLs require modification of classrooms tasks (vs. instructional scaffolding for linguistically-rigorous, content-rich tasks)
-Overreliance on teaching academic language skills to ELLs' current proficiency levels rather than the progressive level
-Overreliance on classroom interaction patterns which limit ELLs' oral language practice opportunities (i.e. more teacher talk than student talk, sequential interaction patterns, evidenced by students responding to questions or speaking one at a time rather than simultaneously in cooperative groups for purposeful structured verbal interaction)
-Overreliance on traditional questioning pattern of recall vs. open ended questions