Updated: Feb 14, 2024
Researchers Sharon Vaughn and Catherine Snow have both been involved in designing interventions to support adolescent students’ reading and learning of social studies content.
Professors Vaughn and Snow will give specific examples of the curricular content and classroom practices that have shown work well with adolescent learners, and of the kinds of adaptations that make this same deep and engaged learning accessible to second language speakers of English.
Both would argue that the best way to support reading skills is to leverage engaging content and big, important, discussable questions. These questions generate authentic opportunities to read for information and to prepare oral and written position statements. Supports that striving students, especially DLLs, may need to succeed in these lessons featuring active learning and conceptual approaches include: orienting questions, academic vocabulary, good language models, tasks that help them integrate the new information with existing conceptual structures. In addition, all students need to see the relevance of the learning to their own lives.
Updated: May 17, 2022
We have reached participate capacity. Thank you for your interest in CSEL!
We invite you to participate in a research study to understand the experiences of English Learner (EL) students as they navigate coursetaking in middle and high school.
YOUR ANSWERS ARE CONFIDENTIAL • YOUR PARTICIPATION IS VOLUNTARY • YOUR EXPERIENCES ARE IMPORTANT
We also hope to learn about the supports, challenges, and overall experiences of the teachers and adults who support English Learners at school. Your participation will provide important information about how to improve experiences for English Learners.
Who Can Participate?
You may participate if:
You are a middle school or high school (grades 6-12) educator. This includes: general education teachers, ENL/TESOL teachers, EL specialists/ELPAC coordinators, school administrators, and guidance counselors;
You work at a public (non-charter) school in the United States;
You work with students officially classified as English Learners.
What You'll Do:
Participate in a 30-minute survey with questions about:
How English Learners in your school access grade-level content courses;
Your experience taking the survey.
Compensation:
Educators who participate will receive a $25 Amazon gift card delivered to their email.
YOUR ANSWERS ARE CONFIDENTIAL • YOUR PARTICIPATION IS VOLUNTARY • YOUR EXPERIENCES ARE IMPORTANT
If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Jeremy Miciak via email, Jeremy.Miciak@times.uh.edu
This presentation was given at the 2022 AERA Annual Meeting on April 22, 2022.
The Center for the Success of English Learners was funded in 2020 by IES to carry out a focused program of research on Middle and High School ELs. This program has both a Policy and an Instructional Focus. The primary instructional focus is on improving outcomes in Science and Social Studies drawing on findings from recent consensus reports of the NASEM. This work leverages the role of content area instruction in the development of language proficiency.
Download the presentation slides: