Literacy Instruction in Multilingual Classrooms: Engaging English Language Learners in Elementary School

This hands-on guide shows elementary school teachers how to create multilingual classroom communities that support every learner’s success in reading, writing, and general literacy development. The author provides a practical overview of key ideas and techniques and describes specific literacy activities that lead to vocabulary and oral English proficiency. Instructional chapters will help teachers build a language-rich classroom environment, scaffold reading and writing tasks to match students’ needs, and use students’ language backgrounds as a bridge to literacy learning in English. As with all titles in The Practitioner’s Bookshelf Series, this resource includes many user-friendly features such as bulleted summaries and checklists as well as photographs of linguistically diverse classrooms modeling the types of instructional interactions described in the book.

Encouraging collaboration and a deeper understanding of best practices for ELL instruction, this book covers:

• How to build on the diverse linguistic resources that students bring to school.
• The connections between oral language and literacy development.
• Developing second language learners’ reading and writing skills.
• Assessing language and literacy learning.
• Planning literacy curriculum for classrooms with diverse language learners.

Collaborating with other professionals to coordinate effective instruction

Lori Helman, Ph.D., is associate professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and co-director of the Minnesota Center for Reading Research.