Unlocking English Learners′ Potential

1. Every Teacher is Now a Teacher of English Learners

every teacher who works with at least one student acquiring English is now a teacher of ELs.

Times have changed. The educational landscape for English Learners (ELs) has shifted dramatically, with rigorous college and career readiness standards requiring all students to engage with complex content and language. This means ELs are spending more time in mainstream classrooms, making every educator responsible for their language and content development. The traditional model where only ESOL teachers supported ELs is no longer sufficient to meet these new demands and close persistent opportunity and achievement gaps.

Growing diverse population. The number of ELs in US schools is increasing, with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Understanding these changing demographics, including home languages and birth countries, is a crucial first step for all teachers. Recognizing that ELs are "everyone's kids" fosters a shared sense of responsibility and urgency to provide the necessary support for their success.

Addressing achievement gaps. Significant opportunity and achievement gaps exist for ELs, including lower test scores, disproportionate representation in remedial programs, and lower graduation rates compared to their non-EL peers. These gaps highlight the urgent need for all teachers to acquire specialized skills and resources to effectively support ELs in developing both academic language and challenging content knowledge simultaneously.

2. Embrace Culturally Responsive Teaching to Build on Strengths

Culturally responsive educators draw on the cultural knowledge, backgrounds, and experiences of their students in order to make the learning more meaningful.

Culture impacts learning. Students' and teachers' cultural backgrounds profoundly influence beliefs about education, communication styles, and classroom expectations. Recognizing potential home-school mismatches is vital to avoid misinterpreting student behavior or motivation and instead build on the rich "funds of knowledge" ELs bring from their families and communities.

Assets-based perspective. Effective EL education starts by viewing ELs' diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds as assets, not deficits. Learning about students' strengths, experiences, interests, and home languages allows educators to incorporate these into instruction, making learning more relevant and validating students' identities. This fosters a welcoming climate where ELs feel valued.

Guidelines for practice. Culturally responsive teaching is a mindset, not just a set of strategies. Key guidelines include being assets-based, placing students at the center of learning, valuing students' languages and cultures (including supporting home language use), and simultaneously challenging and supporting students with high expectations. This approach promotes equity and helps unlock students' inherent excellence.

3. Scaffolding Instruction is Essential for Equitable Access

A scaffold is a temporary support a teacher provides to a student that enables the student to perform a task he or she would not be able to perform alone.

Temporary, targeted support. Scaffolding provides ELs with the necessary temporary support to access grade-level content and tasks they couldn't complete independently. Unlike simply simplifying the task, scaffolding maintains rigor while providing linguistic and conceptual assistance. The goal is gradual removal as students gain proficiency.

Multiple types of scaffolds. Scaffolds can take various forms to meet diverse needs and tasks.

• Materials and resources: Graphic organizers, bilingual glossaries, sentence/paragraph frames, visuals, word banks.
• Instructional practices: Pre-teaching vocabulary/background knowledge, using reduced linguistic load, repetition, paraphrasing, modeling.
• Student grouping: Intentional pairing (same home language, mixed proficiency) or small group work (homogeneous for targeted support, heterogeneous for language modeling).

Planning for success. Effective scaffolding requires knowing your ELs' backgrounds and proficiency levels, analyzing the language demands of the lesson, planning specific scaffolds for materials, instruction, and grouping, and being ready to adapt based on student needs. Scaffolding assessments is also crucial to allow ELs to demonstrate their content knowledge accurately.

4. Prioritize Academic Conversations for Language and Content Growth

Academic discussions are a powerful way for ELs to learn and remember content.

Oral language foundation. Developing ELs' oral language is critical as it strongly correlates with literacy development and content comprehension. Academic conversations provide meaningful opportunities for ELs to hear, practice, and refine discipline-specific language and vocabulary in a lower-stakes environment than whole-class settings.

Structured practice is key. Simply providing talk time is insufficient; academic conversations require explicit preparation and structure. Effective activities include:

• Adapting activities for authentic talk, not just reading prepared sentences.
• Using activities that develop meaningful and robust language through practice and refinement.
• Employing open-ended discussion prompts that encourage deeper thinking, debate, and evaluation.

Student practices for engagement. Teachers must explicitly teach students how to participate effectively in academic conversations. Key practices include coming prepared with content and language support, using appropriate body language (while being culturally sensitive), participating by taking turns (using tools like talking sticks or structured activities), and making connections to others' ideas (using "talk moves" and sentence stems).

5. Teach Academic Language Explicitly, Beyond Just Vocabulary

Academic language is one key to ELs being able to access challenging content and fully engage with their classroom context and peers.

More than just words. Academic language is the formal register needed for school success, distinct from everyday social language. While vocabulary is a component, academic language also involves complex grammatical structures (sentence level) and the organization/purpose of text or talk (discourse level). ELs typically acquire social language faster than academic language.

Levels of language. Academic language operates on three interconnected levels:

• Word level: Academic vocabulary (Tier 2 & 3 words), words with multiple meanings, affixes, cognates.
• Sentence level: Complex grammatical structures like conditionals, comparisons, and relative clauses that increase text density.
• Discourse level: Organization, structure, and purpose of whole texts (arguments, sequences, reports), coherence, cohesion, voice, register, audience.

Sociocultural context matters. Academic language acquisition is not isolated; it occurs within a sociocultural context influenced by students' backgrounds, prior knowledge, culture, home language use, and the learning environment. Honoring students' linguistic and cultural assets can facilitate academic language development. Teachers must analyze texts for challenging language features at all levels and plan explicit instruction.

6. Strategic Vocabulary Instruction Unlocks Content Understanding

Knowledge of academic vocabulary in English is linked to proficiency in reading and writing.

Vocabulary is critical. A strong grasp of academic vocabulary is fundamental for ELs to comprehend complex texts, engage in academic discussions, and succeed in content areas. However, ELs often lack exposure to these words and need intentional, intensive instruction.

Selecting high-impact words. Teachers should strategically select a limited set (5-10) of academic vocabulary words from content-area texts for in-depth focus. Prioritize words that are central to text understanding, appear frequently, are useful across content areas, have multiple meanings, or contain useful affixes. Supplement with brief explanations of other words in context.

Effective teaching strategies. Intensive vocabulary instruction involves more than just definitions. Use student-friendly definitions, provide examples and non-examples, and use concrete representations (visuals, gestures). Offer varied practice activities across all four language modalities (listening, speaking, reading, writing) over several days to help students truly acquire and use the new words. Teach independent word-learning skills like using context clues, understanding word parts, recognizing cognates, and identifying proper nouns.

7. Teach Background Knowledge Concisely and Purposefully

What students already know about the content is one of the strongest indicators of how well they will learn new information relative to the content.

Background matters for comprehension. Prior knowledge significantly impacts learning and reading comprehension for all students, especially ELs navigating new concepts in a new language. While close reading emphasizes deriving meaning from the text itself, ignoring background knowledge gaps for ELs is an equity issue.

A four-step framework. A structured approach helps teachers efficiently address background knowledge:

1. Assess: Determine ELs' existing prior knowledge on the topic/text using informal methods (opinionnaires, discussions, caption writing).
2. Select: Decide which background knowledge is essential for understanding the core meaning, not just incidental or interesting details. Use criteria like necessity for comprehension, author's assumptions, and transferability.
3. Activate: Tap into the background knowledge ELs already possess using strategies like carousel brainstorming or sentence starters.
4. Teach: Concisely teach any new essential background knowledge using efficient methods like short texts, visuals, brief video clips, or home language resources.

Math considerations. Background knowledge in math includes understanding linguistic constructs, "real-life" contexts in word problems, and potentially different mathematical approaches from prior schooling. Constructing less linguistically/contextually biased problems reduces the need for extensive background teaching. Use visuals and short explanations for necessary context.

8. Use Scaffolded Text-Dependent Questions to Deepen Comprehension

TDQs are questions that cannot be answered without having read the text on which the questions are based.

Unlocking complex texts. Text-Dependent Questions (TDQs) are a powerful tool for guiding students through close reading and helping them understand complex texts by requiring them to find evidence within the text itself. For ELs, TDQs must be carefully scaffolded to ensure they can access both the questions and the text to respond effectively.

Reading for multiple purposes. Scaffolded TDQs support ELs in reading for different purposes across multiple reads:

• First Read: Focus on key ideas and details ("What does the text say?").
• Second Read: Focus on craft and structure ("How does the text work?").
• Third Read: Focus on integrating knowledge and ideas ("What does the text mean?").

Creating effective TDQs for ELs. Developing scaffolded TDQs involves a process:

1. Analyze the text thoroughly for language demands and potential challenges for ELs.
2. Decide on additional supports (background knowledge, vocabulary, visuals, glossaries).
3. Develop guiding questions to frame the reading purpose.
4. Write TDQs for each close read, providing sentence stems/frames and word banks as needed.
5. Plan a culminating activity where students synthesize their understanding, supported by scaffolds.

9. Leverage Formative Assessment to Inform and Adapt Instruction

If assessment is reliable, valid, and fair (for ELs) from start to finish, then it can serve as the bridge to educational equity.

Assessment for learning. Formative assessment is an ongoing process embedded in instruction used to monitor student learning, provide timely feedback, and adjust teaching strategies. For ELs, it's crucial for assessing both content knowledge and academic language development.

Ensuring validity and fairness. Summative assessments designed for native speakers are often unreliable and unfair for ELs due to linguistic barriers. Formative assessments, when designed with ELs in mind, can provide a more accurate picture of their learning. Key considerations include:

• Reducing linguistic load in questions and tasks.
• Providing appropriate scaffolds (visuals, word banks, home language support).
• Using multiple modalities for response (oral, written, visual, kinesthetic).
• Assessing language and content separately where possible.

Informing instruction. Formative assessment results provide valuable data to identify specific areas where ELs are struggling (content, language, or both) and inform next steps for instruction, scaffolding, and differentiation. It empowers teachers to make data-driven decisions tailored to individual EL needs. Preparing ELs for computer-based assessments also requires specific formative practice with the technology and question formats.

10. Collaboration is Crucial for Comprehensive EL Support

When teachers successfully collaborate, they are able to leverage their specific expertise in the complex task of supporting of ELs’ acquisition of language and content knowledge.

Shared responsibility. Effective EL education requires content teachers and ESOL specialists to work together, sharing the responsibility for student success. Collaboration allows educators to combine their unique expertise – content knowledge from the mainstream teacher and language acquisition strategies from the ESOL teacher.

Structured planning time. High-quality collaboration requires dedicated time and administrative support. Schools must build time into schedules for co-planning, co-teaching, and discussing student progress. When formal time is limited, teachers can find creative ways to collaborate informally or online.

Leveraging distributed expertise. Collaboration allows teachers to leverage each other's strengths in specific areas, such as analyzing texts for academic language, selecting essential background knowledge, designing scaffolded activities, or interpreting assessment data. This shared approach benefits both teachers' professional growth and students' learning experiences.

11. Advocate and Lead for Equity and Excellence for All ELs

Because many inequities and injustices still exist for ELs, it’s up to educators like you to speak on behalf of those ELs and their families who have not yet developed a strong voice of their own...

Championing ELs. Supporting ELs goes beyond instructional strategies; it requires actively advocating for their equitable treatment and access to high-quality education. Educators must be aware of systemic inequities and be willing to speak up for students and families who may face linguistic or cultural barriers.

Developing leadership skills. Advocating for ELs requires leadership. Teachers can develop and leverage interpersonal skills to influence colleagues, administrators, and the wider school community. This involves building relationships, communicating effectively, and mobilizing others around the needs of ELs.

Driving systemic change. Advocacy can start small, focusing on achievable priorities identified through reflection or equity audits. Teachers can become allies to ELs, challenge deficit perspectives, promote assets-based thinking, and work towards creating a school climate where all ELs feel welcomed, valued, and empowered to reach their full potential.

Last updated: September 18, 2025