Teaching Emergent Bilingual Students Flexible Approaches in an Era of New Standards

Recent educational reform initiatives such as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) largely fail to address the needs--or tap into the unique resources--of students who are developing literacy skills in both English and a home language. This book discusses ways to meet the challenges that current standards pose for teaching emergent bilingual students in grades K-8. Leading experts describe effective, standards-aligned instructional approaches and programs expressly developed to promote bilingual learners' academic vocabulary, comprehension, speaking, writing, and content learning. Innovative policy recommendations and professional development approaches are also presented.

C. Patrick Proctor, EdD, is Associate Professor in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Previously he was a third- and fourth-grade bilingual teacher and worked in district, state, and nonprofit settings on issues pertaining to bilingualism and literacy. Dr. Proctor’s research is broadly focused on emergent bilingual learners from Spanish-speaking homes in K-8 settings. Within that context, his work targets language use and development, cross-linguistic relations, instructional interventions, and teacher practice. He has published many articles and book chapters, has developed language-based and reading curricula, and has worked in close collaboration with Boston-area schools facilitating the translation of research to practice.

Alison Boardman, PhD, is Assistant Research Professor in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. A former elementary and middle school special education teacher, Dr. Boardman works closely with teachers and school leaders to study and innovate reading instruction across content areas in classrooms that include emergent bilingual students and students with disabilities. She recently led a project to build school- and district-level capacity to sustain best practices for literacy instruction in language arts, social studies, and science classrooms, and is currently involved in developing project-based learning curriculum and multimodal composition opportunities for diverse learners in ninth-grade language arts classrooms. She has published numerous articles and books on reading comprehension.

Elfrieda H. Hiebert, PhD, is CEO and President of TextProject, Inc. She has worked in the field of early reading acquisition for more than 40 years as a classroom teacher, teacher educator, and researcher. Her research, which addresses how fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge can be fostered through appropriate texts, has been published in numerous scholarly journals and books. Dr. Hiebert’s contributions to research and practice have been recognized with such honors as the Research to Practice Award from the American Educational Research Association and the Oscar S. Causey Award from the Literacy Research Association.  

I. Policy
1. Language Education Policies in the Common Core Era: Policy Initiatives That Affect Emergent Bilingual Youth, Francesca López
2. Effective Instruction for Emergent Bilingual Children: Accelerating English Acquisition While Developing Biliteracy, Kathy Escamilla and Susan Hopewell
3. Response to Intervention for Emergent Bilingual Students in a Common Core Era: Guiding Principles for Distinguishing between Language Acquisition and Learning Disability, Amy M. Eppolito and Vanessa Santiago Schwarz
II. Pedagogy
4. English Learners and Instructional Texts: Evidence, Current Practice, and a Call to Action, Elfreida H. Hiebert
5. Supporting Linguistically Diverse Students to Develop Deep, Flexible Knowledge of Academic Words, Amy C. Crosson
6. Using Strategy Instruction to Promote Reading Comprehension and Content Learning, Alison Boardman and Cristin Jensen Lasser
7. Dialogic Reasoning: Supporting Emergent Bilingual Students’ Language and Literacy Development, Marcela Ossa Parra, Christopher J. Wagner, C. Patrick Proctor, Christine M. Leighton, Dana A. Robertson, Jeanne R. Paratore, and Evelyn Ford-Connors
8. Writing Arguments: The Experience of Two Mainstream Teachers Working with Multilingual Students, María Estela Brisk, Yalda M. Kaveh, Pat Scialoia, and Beverly Timothy
9. Energizing Reading: Engagement in Teaching and Learning, Ana Taboada-Barber and Peet Smith
10. Situating the English Language Arts Common Core Standards in Science: Enhancing Access to Language for Emergent Bilingual Students, Marco A. Bravo
III. Professional Learning
11. Academic Language and Literacy in Every Subject (ALLIES): A Capacity-Building Approach to Supporting Teachers in Grades 4–8, Susan P. O’Hara, Robert Pritchard, and Jeff Zwiers
12. Supporting Linguistically Responsive Teaching: e-Learning Communities for Academic Language Learning in Mathematics and Science (eCALLMS), Kara Mitchell Viesca, Boni Hamilton, Anne O. Davidson, and the eCALLMS Team
Index