Using the Language Experience Approach With English Language Learners: Strategies for Engaging Students and Developing Literacy

"Nessel and Dixon show teachers how to effectively support English language development by using the Language Experience Approach."
―David E. Freeman and Yvonne S. Freeman, Professors of Literacy, ESL, and Bilingual Education
The University of Texas at Brownsville

"Provides the tools teachers need to use this natural way of helping English Language Learners. The Language Experience Approach makes language and language arts accessible to the students in need of basic skills."
―Roberta E. Dorr, Associate Professor of Education
Trinity University, WA

Support ELLs while meeting the goals of your literacy curriculum!

English Language Learners (ELLs) enter the classroom with different levels of proficiency―and confidence―in English. The Language Experience Approach offers K–12 teachers an instructional framework and classroom strategies for meeting students at their level and helping them use their strengths as speakers and listeners to build reading and writing skills.

Research-based and used successfully in practice, this method actively engages students by allowing them to construct their own texts and bring their personal experiences into the learning process. The authors:

• Offer detailed, step-by-step directions for using the Language Experience Approach in English language instruction
• Include examples of the kinds of texts that are generated by ELL students
• Describe activities teachers can use with those texts to refine and extend learners′ literacy skills

Appropriate for teaching students at varying levels of English proficiency, Using the Language Experience Approach With English Language Learners is a valuable reference for teachers, literacy coaches, and reading specialists.

Denise Nessel is an associate of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education (NUA), where she focuses on teaching reading and writing as thinking processes in grades K-12. She has worked as a secondary English teacher, elementary reading specialist, reading clinician, university professor, district-level curriculum supervisor, co-director of a statewide staff development project, curriculum manager at educational software companies, and consultant to schools around the country and abroad. Nessel has conducted numerous workshops and demonstration lessons for teachers and administrators and has served as a consultant and writer for educational publishers and multimedia firms. She has written several books and classroom resources for teachers and a number of articles for professional journals.

Carol N. Dixon has worked as a reading clinician, university professor and administrator, and consultant to schools and universities around the country and abroad. In her role as a university faculty member, she directed a reading clinic and an MA in Reading/Reading Specialist Credential Program for 20 years. She has conducted numerous workshops and demonstration lessons for classroom teachers and has made numerous presentations at scholarly conferences in the United States and internationally. She has written or co-authored books and journal articles as resources for teachers, as well as over 50 research-based articles for professional publications. In her current work, she focuses on classroom research that investigates the teaching of reading and writing as thinking processes, particularly to English Language Learners.