T.ELL.E-gram

During this month of holidays, cultural celebrations, and religious observances, we would like to offer you some ideas about ways to incorporate multicultural content in your classroom. What better way to celebrate the diversity of our ELLs than creating a rich multicultural environment where they can thrive and engage with each other?

We also would like to take this opportunity to thank you, our subscriber and supporter, for your interest in Colorín Colorado, for your ongoing suggestions, and for spreading the word about our website. Thanks to you, we continue to grow from year to year, and we look forward to bringing you lots of new and exciting resources for ELLs in 2008!

Finally, we would like to thank our partners — the American Federation of Teachers (with special thanks to Giselle Lundy-Ponce), the National Institute for Literacy, and the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs — along with our advisors, our contributors, and the AFT ELL Educator Cadre for all of their support and for ensuring that you receive high-quality content from Colorín Colorado each month.

This month's highlights

Featured articles

Culturally Responsive Instruction for Holidays and Religious Celebrations

The first step in implementing more culturally responsive instruction is recognizing how our own cultural conditioning is reflected in our teaching: how we set up our classroom, establish relationships with students, and even how we design and deliver our lessons. Culturally Responsive Instruction for Holidays and Religious Celebrations shows teachers how to bring rich cultural content into their teaching in a way that expands students' knowledge, interest, and respect for other cultural traditions. The article offers suggestions that can be used throughout the year, as well as when celebrating cultural and religious holidays.

Time is Not on Our Side: Literacy and Literature for High School Language Learners

Given that ELL teachers often have too much to teach and too little time (especially if they are teaching adolescent students who are newcomers with little or no prior formal schooling), California teacher Dana Dusbiber suggests an alternative approach to teaching literature for secondary ELLs by introducing more multicultural literature into the classroom in Time is Not on Our Side: Literacy and Literature for High School Language Learners. The article is featured on our sister site about adolescent literacy, AdLit.org

Vocabulary Development

Did you know that the average native English speaker enters kindergarten knowing at least 5,000 English words? The average English language learner may know 5,000 words in his or her native language, but very few words in English. Vocabulary Development has some great ideas for helping ELLs build a strong foundation of English vocabulary so that they can begin to close the gap with their native English-speaking peers.

Research and Reports

Integrated Vocabulary Instruction

The goal of Integrated Vocabulary Instruction: Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners in Grades K-5 is to provide the information that teachers and other educators need to implement an integrated and comprehensive approach to vocabulary instruction. This approach makes vocabulary a core consideration in all grades across the school and in all content areas across the school day, and encompasses much more than a list of words to teach at the beginning of the week.

In the Classroom

Bright Ideas that Work

How to Connect Background Knowledge to Content in the ELL Classroom

As you teach content areas to ELLs of diverse cultural backgrounds, you may find that they are struggling to grasp the material, and that they are all approaching it from very different perspectives. Drawing on your students' background knowledge and experiences, however, can be an effective way to bridge those gaps and to make the content more accessible. How to Connect Background Knowledge to Content in the ELL Classroom offers a number of suggestions of ways to draw upon your students' own experiences in order to help them master new skills and concepts in the content areas with which they are struggling.

Frequently Asked Questions

As a teacher of English language learners, you are constantly striving to make assessment, placement, and evaluation equitable for students with a wide variety of needs. You may want to consider the following:

• One part of my lesson planning is to develop lessons with a multicultural perspective. Are you aware of a rubric or questionnaire that evaluates texts based on multicultural qualities?
• Many of the ELLs in my class are able to decode English text, but continue to struggle with reading comprehension. How can I help them develop comprehension skills?

Find the answers to these and many other Frequently Asked Questions About Teaching ELLs on Colorín Colorado.

Achieving Success: From the Heart

Claudia Navarro is an ELL paraprofessional at Coral Gables Senior High School in Coral Gables, Florida. A native of Colombia, Claudia has lived in the U.S. for more than 27 years. She now provides academic support in content areas to ELL students at her high school through the federal Home Language Assistance Program. In this exclusive interview with Colorín Colorado, Claudia describes what makes her work as a paraprofessional unique, how teachers and paraprofessionals can best work together, and the support she offers to her students to help them succeed.

Beyond the Classroom

Book of the Month

N Is for Navidad
By Susan Middleton Elya & Merry Banks

Join a joyous Latino celebration of Christmas from A to Z (angel to zapatos), enjoying the sights and symbols of the holiday. Spanish words and additional explanations conclude this energetic book with colorful and vibrant illustrations.

For a list of more bilingual books for kids and teens, see our Books and Authors section.

TESOL Resources

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) is pleased to announce two new web resources for teachers!

The Tapestry for Teachers of English Language Learners is the result of a collaboration between the leading organizations in the ELL field, in which they addressed the complex questions on helping language minority students improve their literacy in English. The goal of this Tapestry and its Library is to present the research on second-language literacy acquisition and on instructional methods effective with language minority students to educators. The Tapestry also includes a bibliography of the research studies cited and teaching resources supporting the research.

Partners include: the International Reading Association (IRA), the National Institute of Child Heath and Human Development (NICHD), the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), the National Association of Bilingual Education (NABE), the National Institute for Literacy (NIFL), the U.S. Department of Education's Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA), and Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL).

Read the latest news from the ELL field, post your comments, and then see what other educators have to say about the headlines!

About the Colorín Colorado T·ELL·E-GRAM and ColorinColorado.org

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