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Today’s Reasons Why We Need Students to Write for Authentic Audiences
Why students’ voices, interests, stories, and experiences should reach real readers and some ways to support this.
Breaking the Boundaries of Texts: Video Game and Literacy Curriculum Development for English Language Learners
This article describes a study of a literacy video game designed to help English learners negotiate new vocabulary and unfamiliar language structures as they read. The game, collaboratively created on Gamestar Mechanic by a team including a public high school teacher, actively engaged that…
We Are All Teachers of English Learners (NWP Radio)
Many NWP sites have retooled their recruitment efforts, inservice offerings and institutes in light of the significant demographic changes that have placed English learners in almost every classroom. On this NWP Radio show, teacher consultants from four sites offer a look at their work with…
Overview of the Common Core State Standards Initiatives for ELLs: A TESOL Issue Brief
This issue brief, from the TESOL International Association, is an overview of the Common Core State Standards that also outlines some of the initiatives in place to address the needs of English learners (ELs) in relation to the Standards. Excerpts from this resource may be useful in study…
A Fourth Grade Service Learning Project Engages English Learners
In this video, a teacher of fourth-grade English learners describes how he integrated service learning and digital literacy in a civic engagement project. They used "My Voice," a service-learning framework, as a guide to choose a project about water conservation and pollution. The teacher…
Whose Core Is It?
An elementary school teacher and bilingual coordinator pushes back against the mandated content/performance descriptors provided by her district to assert that the "core" of her curriculum is her students' learning. "I teach with an ear close to the core of each child, to the core of the…
Theory, Politics, Hope, and Action: Building Immersive Writing Experiences for Bilingual Writers
This article is a great resource for study groups, inquiry communities, and professional learning of all types with a focus on English learners and writing. After introducing two pieces of "gorgeous" writing from fifth graders in a dual language classroom, Edelsky explains how this writing…
Grammar—Comma—a New Beginning
Teaching grammar through inquiry and seduction? In this piece, Mary Ehrenworth shares strategies for moving away from direct instruction (which seldom works) to making it possible for students to "have an apprenticeship relation with great authors, even at the sentence structure level." By…
Preserving the Cultural Identity of the English Language Learner
With an advocacy goal of helping immigrant students retain their cultural identities and succeed within the mainstream classroom while also learning a new language, the authors share several effective writing practices that validate students’ primary language in meaningful ways and promote a…
Book Review: English Learners, Academic Literacy, and Thinking: Learning in the Challenge Zone
How can we best support English learners in classrooms where rigorous curricula focus on intellectual practices across content areas? How can we engage in practices that enable students to construct rather than reproduce knowledge, develop deep understanding of disciplinary knowledge and…
When Third-Grade Writers Do Case Studies
Bilingual third grade students acted as helpers to first graders in a collaborative writing workshop. The third grade teacher guided her students through a process similar to teacher inquiry--to reflect on their own experiences as writers in order to help the younger writers, to take notes…
Supporting English Language Learners: What Happens When Teaching in Students' Native Language is Made Illegal?
This inspiring story of Floris Wilma Ortiz-Marrero, a teacher-consultant with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project and 2011 Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, describes how she became a vocal advocate for her ELL students in a time when the state made it illegal to teach students in…
Write Now Teacher Studio
Where teachers write, share, and talk shop about writing and the teaching of writing
Hosted by the National Writing Project, the Write Now Teacher Studio is an open, online community of educators for educators. It’s a place to write together, examine our teaching, create and refine curricula, and work toward ever more effective and equitable practices to create confident, creative, and critical thinkers and writers in our classrooms and courses.