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.
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.
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Updated: Feb 14, 2024
In this first of several webinars on Teaching for Success presented by the Center for the Success of English Learners (CSEL), Drs. Michael Kieffer and David Francis presented on work of the Policy Strand of the center that was recently shared at the IES Principal Investigators meeting.
Dr. Francis opened the session with a discussion on diversity in education settings, focusing on diversity among ELs and the interplay between language proficiency and content area achievement. Dr. Kieffer followed with a presentation on content area course taking among ELs in NYC and Houston high schools, examining how ELs are sorted within and between schools and the wide variation that is observed in the extent to which ELs have opportunities to learn with their non-EL peers.
Drs. Francis and Kieffer discussed differences between NYC and Houston, as well as implications for our ongoing policy analysis to set the stage for future webinars focused on instruction.