Progressing Students′ Language Day by Day

"I’ve worked with ‘mainstream’ content area teachers in my role as a program developer and school change coach for many years, focused on building their skill in working with the English Learners in their classrooms. In the past I’ve relied heavily on promoting the sheltered instruction practices (i.e. SIOP) that we know help make content accessible for students who are learning language. But until the DLLP appeared, we’ve never had a tool that allows mainstream teachers to understand where their students are in terms of their English language development.

"I see the need most immediately when teachers tell me standards-based assessments don’t reflect what they know their students know. What they are really saying is their students lack the language skills to provide rigorous, academic explanations of their knowledge. As a former science teacher, I could not be satisfied with watching a student engage in a lab activity. They also needed the scientific language skills to explain what they had done and what their results were. Guessing that they understood the concepts while failing to nourish and build their scientific language skills meant I was only doing half my job.

"The DLLP provides the tools to dig in and understand where students are in terms of their specific language development, and gives insight to every teacher on how to support and build those skills. The progressions are clear and intuitive, you don’t need to be a linguistics expert to work with them. In my role as a program developer the DLLP has been a game changer, giving ME a language and a skill I can support and nurture in all the teachers I work with." -- Laureen Avery, Director, Northeast Regional Office
"Despite the importance of language development for English Learner (EL) school success, teachers have surprisingly few research-based tools that enable them to observe and guide the language development process as it unfolds. This book provides "Dynamic Language Learning Progressions" that serve as a clear and easy-to-use framework for maximizing language learning and promoting formative progress monitoring in classrooms. WIDA is thrilled to have sponsored this ground-breaking work." -- Tim Boals, Ph.D. WIDA Founder and Director

"While teaching academic core content is what teachers focus on, teaching the language of the content to support English learners is a challenge. Alison Bailey, Margaret Heritage and colleagues skillfully weave these two together. They provide strategies for teachers to not only make the content language accessible to students, but also to demonstrate how to assess students’ ability to explain the content being taught through the DLLP. Teachers at Hope Online Learning Academy have begun implementing the DLLP. One teacher commented, "When I started applying more language strategies to whole group instruction, I noticed a difference in my students′ oral language progressions." The DLLP strategies in Progressing Language Day-by-Day will benefit all teachers who work with English learners."

 

 

 

-- Carol Prais, English Language Specialist
"Progressing Students’ Language Learning Day by Day is a practical guidebook which should be on every teacher’s bookshelf, dog-eared because of its valuable content and easy to implement style. The language development structures are applicable to all grade levels and all subjects areas especially since all of our classrooms are language development classrooms."
-- Michele R. Dean, Ed.D. Field Placement Coordinator & Lecturer, California Lutheran University
"Formative assessment and analyzing student work can help teachers to better target their instruction of students.  The Dynamic Language Learning Progression (DLLP) approach to making use of formative assessments and for planning and implementing instruction across the content areas explored in Bailey and Heritage′s work will help all teachers to better meet the needs of the diverse learners, not only the English learners acquiring English as an additional language in their classrooms." -- Katherine Lobo, ESL Teacher and Teacher Trainer, Newton South High School and Brandies University