Plain and simple: until our English learners have equitable access to the curriculum, they’ll continue to struggle with subject area content. And if you’re relying on add-on’s to fit in from your language arts basal or a supplementary program, Mary Soto, David Freeman, and Yvonne Freeman are here to equip you with much more effective, efficient, and engaging strategies for helping your English learners read and write at grade level.
One assurance right from the start: Mary, David, and Yvonne are not suggesting you reinvent your curriculum. Instead, Equitable Access for English Learners, Grades K-6, focuses on how to fortify foundational practices already in place. First, you’ll learn more about the Equitable Access Approach, then it’s time to dive into the book’s four units of study. Drawing on each unit’s many strategies, you’ll discover how to apply them to any unit in your own language arts curriculum and start differentiating:
- How to draft and implement language objectives to help English learners meet academic content standards
- How to make instructional input comprehensible, including translanguaging strategies that draw on your students’ first languages when you don’t know how to speak them
- How to utilize the characteristics of text to support readers, along with a rubric for determining a text’s cultural relevance
- How to build students’ academic content knowledge and develop academic language proficiency
Each unit addresses a commonly taught topic in today’s language arts programs and comes with ready-to-go review and preview activities, key strategies, grade-level adaptations, reflection exercises, and printable online resources. Taken as a whole, they constitute an all-new approach for providing that equitable and excellent access our English learners so rightfully deserve.
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Author Bio
Dr. Yvonne Freeman and Dr. David Freeman are professors emeriti at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. The Freemans have authored books, articles and book chapters jointly and separately on the topics of second language teaching, biliteracy, bilingual education, linguistics, and second language acquisition.
Mary Soto is an assistant professor in the Teacher Education Department at California State University East Bay. Mary works with teacher candidates and teachers working toward their master’s degree. Her research interests include using authentic texts and project based learning to teach emergent bilinguals and long-term English learners.