But How Does This Work with English Learners?

But Does This Work With English Learners? A Guide for English Language Arts Teachers, Grades 6-12

Mary Amanda Stewart - Texas Woman's University
Holly Genova

Secondary ELA teachers, be excited: here at last is that crash course in utilizing the best of what we already know about teaching reading, writing, and language to ensure our English learners thrive.

Take Penny Kittle and Donalyn Miller’s reader’s workshops. Take Kylene Beers and Robert Probst’s “signposts.” Take the best writing techniques advanced by the National Writing Project. Take Jim Burke’s essential questions for life. Award-winning EL authorities Mandy Stewart and Holly Genova describe immediate adaptations you can put in place to simultaneously build your ELs’ language and literacy, while affirming their languages, cultures, and unique lived experiences.

A rare blend of the humane and practical, But Does This Work with English Learners? is a book on how to leverage our ELs’ full linguistic repertoires in the ELA classroom, while remaining sensitive to those barriers that could restrict learning. With this book as your guide, you’ll learn how to:

Look beyond the labels, and better understand the diversity of ELs, English language proficiency levels, and sociopolitical influences
Teach and assess through reader’s workshop, recognizing where comprehensible input fits in and adapting recurring features like support, choice, conferencing, and academic conversations
Teach and assess through writer’s workshops, including modifications to quick-writes, minilessons, conferencing, sharing, and more
Teach through structures and community with classroom schedules and behavior norms, and activities like All About Me Paragraphs and Six Things You Need to Know About Me Listicles
Embrace identity in inquiry cycles via research and family interviews, mentor texts and essays, pictorial autobiographies, memory paragraphs, and more
Answer your own FAQs such as How do I teach students if I don’t know their language? What about grammar? How do I teach the grade-level ELA standards while I teach the language?