Meeting the Needs of English Language Learners in the Content Area Classroom

English Language Learners make up a significant special population in American schools. Content area teachers often look for help balancing subject area instruction while trying to meet the needs of language learners. In this course, Montana teachers will learn strategies to successfully meet the needs of English Language Learners in all subject areas.

The course begins with overarching strategies that all teachers can use. Teachers will learn how to create a welcoming and culturally affirming classroom environment, analyze common struggles for ELL students, and analyze how academic vocabulary instruction can take place in all classes. Then the course dives deeper, providing ideas specific to all the subject areas. Mathematics, ELA, science, social studies, and the special area teachers will all find presentations that help them support ELLs.

Additionally, educators will learn about planning lessons with Universal Design and accommodations so that ELLs can fully participate . This course will help understand the needs of ELLs, and also directly implement concrete strategies in content classes.

Selected Objectives for Montana K-12 Teachers

• Understand the norms of a brave learning space
• Describe statistics about ELLs in the United States
• Reflect on the experiences of ELLs
• Identify foundational principles to serve ELLs in content classrooms (e.g. high expectations, comprehensible input, etc.)
• Analyze school wide practices that can be put in place to support ELLs.
• Learn to build on strengths of ELL students
• Analyze ways to affirm home culture of ELLs
• Describe ways to build rapport with ELL students and their parents
• Analyze the CR-SE Framework
• Describe classroom instructional models that support inclusive practice
• Establish an ELL friendly classroom
• Identify common struggles experienced by the ELL student
• Explain how differing background knowledge can be a barrier in the content classroom
• Explain the importance of vocabulary to success in the content area
• Differentiate between tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 vocabulary
• Analyze how transferable tier 2 academic vocabulary has a high utility for success across content areas.
• Analyze vocabulary acquisition strategies
• Develop a vocabulary activity for ELL students
• Utilize visual aids and non-verbal cues support ELL students
• Analyze specific challenges faced by ELLs in science and technical subject area classrooms
• Describe ways to support ELLs in science and the technical subjects
• Analyze specific challenges faced by ELLs in mathematics classrooms
• Analyze specific challenges faced by ELLs in the humanities subjects of social studies, ELA, and the arts
• Describe ways to support ELLs in the humanities