Sentence Strategies for Multilingual Learners: Advancing Academic Literacy Through Combinations

This book presents Combinations as a set of high-yield instructional strategies for advancing academic literacy for multilingual learners and all students. It discusses the strategies themselves as well as how they work to advance content and language learning simultaneously, across the grades and content areas.

The book is particularly beneficial for all teachers working with linguistically and culturally diverse learners to accelerate their language and content learning. Utilizing these strategies will not only greatly improve students’ writing but also supports their critical thinking, content area reading and language comprehension skills. This book argues for utilizing Combinations with Strategic Inquiry, presenting evidence of how each amplifies the impact of the other, and how together they address many of the challenges to learning new and counter-cultural methods and to establishing school and district cultures in support of multilingual learners’ success.

This book is a great resource for classroom teachers, literacy coaches and school and district administrators who want to support multilingual learners and all students to thrive.

Nell Scharff Panero is an associate professor of educational leadership in the School of Education at Hunter College, City University of New York and the former director of the Center for Educational Leadership at Baruch College, City University of New York.

Joanna Yip is a multilingual learner instructional specialist in New York City. She has worked in the field of education as a teacher, college counselor, instructional and leadership coach and consultant on specific projects focusing on multilingual learners.