T.ELL.E-gram

New from Colorín Colorado!

Meet the Expert Podcasts

Colorín Colorado and the American Federation of Teachers present a new series of podcasts, featuring interviews with leaders in the English language learner (ELL) education field from across the country. Topics covered range from ELLs in preschool to improving ELLs' graduation rates, as well as multicultural children's literature and professional development ideas for teachers.

Educators, administrators, researchers, librarians, and advocates for ELLs will find these engaging and informative interviews to be a wonderful resource for launching group discussions about ELL education.

Get Ready for Election Day!

If you are interested in bringing the local, state, or presidential elections into your classroom, try some of these resources on our new Election Day page! We've included links to children's booklists, lesson plans, and websites full of ideas you can use to introduce U.S. elections to your English language learners.

Colorín Colorado Weekly News E-mail Update

Many of you currently read Colorín Colorado's daily ELL News headlines on our website, but now you can have them delivered to your inbox! Colorín Colorado is pleased to announce that we will soon be starting a weekly news e-mail blast on Friday mornings that will include all of the week's top stories relating to English language learners and their families.

From news about education policy affecting ELLs, new bilingual programs, and parent outreach initiatives to interviews with multicultural children's authors, we find the week's most important stories and pass them along! We will continue to update the headlines on the website on a daily basis.

To sign up, visit your subscription page (which you can link to at the bottom of any of your Colorín Colorado newsletters) and check off option number 5 under the e-newsletters section (Colorín Colorado weekly headlines).

New Sections!

We've created two new bilingual sections on Colorín Colorado this month for teachers and parents — take a look and spread the word!

• Building Strong Parent-Teacher Collaborations (Articles for Teachers and Parents)
• How to Know When Your Child Needs Help: An Introduction to Reading Difficulties, Learning Disabilities, and Special Education for Parents

This month's highlights

Featured Articles

Like all students, English language learners (ELLs) benefit from having parents who are active participants in their education. However, there may be Hispanic parents who are hesitant to get involved because of limited English skills or lack of familiarity with U.S. culture and public schools. How to Reach out to Parents of ELLs offers some excellent suggestions for helping your ELL students' parents become more involved in school.

Federal and state law requires that students who struggle academically in a mainstream, English-only classroom due to lack of English skills must receive the support they need to be successful. Effective assessment can identify those English language learners (ELLs) who need special instructional services, such as sheltered English, ESL, or bilingual education. See Identifying Language and Academic Needs for Program Placement for tips on assessing students' home language preferences, educational background, English proficiency level, and academic content knowledge.

How to Address Special Education Needs in the ELL Classroom

When an ELL student is struggling with language difficulties, it is often difficult to know if the problem is due to a delay in language acquisition, to a learning disability, to other kinds of special education needs, or a combination of these factors. This Bright Ideas article presents an overview of practical guidelines on the steps to follow when considering if a student has special education needs, including academic interventions, factors affecting referral for assessment, and a number of related resources.

Research and Reports

In English Language Learners with Special Needs: Effective Instructional Strategies, Alba Ortiz provides a framework for ELL instruction that focuses on preventing school failure and providing early intervention for struggling learners. In this context, Ortiz discusses such topics as creating supportive learning environments, fostering school-community collaborations, designing effective instructional programs, and deciding when to refer students for special education evaluation.

English Language Learners and Learning Disabilities: Research Agenda and Implications for Practice (McCardle, Mele-McCarthy, & Leos, 2005) defines a research agenda to address issues related to identification and placement of English language learners with learning disabilities. Using information gathered during an October 2003 National Symposium on Learning Disabilities in English Language Learners, the authors recommend future research in the following areas: identification and assessment of learning disabilities among ELLs, definition of what constitutes normal developmental patterns in ELLs, identification of individual and contextual issues that affect ELL performance, the relationship between neurobiology and learning disabilities among ELLs, and development of effective interventions for ELLs with learning disabilities.

Sometimes the key to getting ELL parents involved in their children's education can be as simple as helping them understand the workings of the U.S. education system and the services it provides for children who are English language learners. One publication of the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education (NCELA) does just that. If Your Child Learns in Two Languages: A Parent's Guide for Improving Educational Opportunities for Children Acquiring English as a Second Language, available in seven different languages, discusses many of the topics parents might have questions about, including how schools determine which students need additional instruction in English and how to tell if your child's school is meeting his/her needs.

Book Review

Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning: Teaching Second Language Learners in the Mainstream Classroom
By Pauline Gibbons

In this practical guide for elementary teachers, Gibbons offers a compelling rationale for her belief that the content area classroom is the best environment for teaching English as a second language. Basing her discussion on accepted language development and learning theory, the author recommends an integrated curriculum, in which language learning takes place in the real-life context of content material learning. The book is filled with clear, detailed descriptions of hundreds of easy-to-use activities that teach listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills across the curriculum. There is also a very useful glossary of teaching activities for quick reference.

Gibbons, P. (2002). Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning: Teaching Second Language Learners in the Mainstream Classroom. New York: The Guilford Press.

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In the Classroom

Bright Ideas that Work

Teaching Content: How to Develop a Lesson Plan that Includes ELLs

English language learners (ELLs) often struggle in content-area courses such as literature, science, math, and social studies because they cannot comprehend the textbooks for these subjects. One way to address that challenge is through effective lesson planning. This article offers a number of ideas for planning lessons that will support ELLs' mastery of content areas, including ideas for teacher preparation, teaching reading comprehension and vocabulary, and building on a students' background knowledge.

From AdLit.org: Classroom Strategy Library

For more great classroom strategies that will support ELL instruction, check out the reading strategy library from our sister site, AdLit.org! The library organizes the strategies by those that you can use before, during, or after reading, and many strategies can be applied across content areas as well.

Also, don't miss the great resources AdLit.org is featuring on adolescent ELLs this month!

Frequently Asked Questions

Teachers continually strive to understand the individual needs of their students so that they can ensure that each child receives the best possible instruction. When students are English language learners who may have special needs, this can be a complicated task. If you have questions about English language learners and special services, you may want to explore the following FAQs:

• What academic behaviors tell you it is time to make a special education referral for an ELL student?
• I heard that learning disabilities affect 15% of the population. Does this number increase when students are immersed in a second language?

Find the answers to these and many other Frequently Asked Questions about Teaching ELLs.

Achieving Success: From the Heart

Ma'Lena Wirth is an ESL interpreter paraprofessional at North Baker School in Baker City, Oregon. As part of her position, Ms. Wirth has developed a family literacy and parent involvement program in her district, and has made great strides empowering and engaging her students' parents. In this interview with Colorín Colorado, Ms. Wirth discusses how she increases parent participation and confidence, and how she has helped her school and community learn how to support ELLs and their families.

Beyond the Classroom

Book of the Month

My Name Is Gabito: The Life of Gabriel García Márquez / Me llamo Gabito: la vida de Gabriel García Márquez
By Monica Brown
Illustrated by Raúl Colón

As she did in My Name Is Celia / Me llamo Celia, Monica Brown tells the story of young Gabriel García Márquez's life in this bilingual picture book. Brown also provides children with a simple introduction to magical realism by showing how young Gabriel's surroundings and imagination merged in fantastic ways, fostering his creativity and building the foundation for the legendary characters and stories he would later create. Beautiful illustrations complement the lyrical text.

In a Word: Pull-out ESL

This month's glossary term refers to a program in which LEP students are "pulled out" of general, mainstream classrooms for special instruction in English as a second language.

Social Networking with Colorín Colorado

Check out our new Facebook and Twitter pages, and join as friends to follow news from the site!

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

The ¡Colorín Colorado T·ELL·E-GRAM is a free monthly electronic newsletter from ColorinColorado.org, created and sustained thanks to support from the American Federation of Teachers.

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