Literacy Instruction in Multilingual Classrooms

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