A Framework for Teaching English Learners

This article was first published in WestEd's R&D Alert^®, 2004.

English learners face the daunting task of learning the academic curriculum and a new language concurrently. With their numbers rising across the nation, and increased accountability requirements focusing on their performance, schools are under pressure to better serve these students.

In New York City, the nation’s largest school system is addressing this challenge head on. City officials recently turned to WestEd’s Aida Walqui and her Teacher Quality Initiative for help to build capacity throughout the system. A three-year partnership between WestEd and the New York City Department of Education provides professional development districtwide to accelerate the linguistic and academic development of English learners.

Called “Quality Teaching for English Learners,” this partnership focuses on developing educators’ theoretical understanding and practical knowledge of effective practices for providing challenging and responsible instruction to students needing to learn English and academic content simultaneously. A conceptual framework developed by Walqui’s Teacher Quality Initiative (TQI) guides this work.

SETTING THE RIGHT CONTEXT
TQI’s conceptual framework begins with general approaches for creating classroom conditions that are particularly supportive for English learners:

• Instead of presenting the curriculum as a linear progression of concepts, teachers reintroduce key information and ideas at increasingly higher levels of complexity and interrelatedness.
• Teachers help students understand their own learning, in particular, the feelings of vagueness and frustration that are a natural part of the learning process. For students with the extra task of learning English, such feelings can have an especially strong, undermining effect if not understood.
• Teachers become expert at observing students in order to know when to gradually hand over more responsibility as students become capable of handling it.
• Teachers learn to amplify and enrich — rather than simplify — the language of the classroom, giving students more opportunities to learn the concepts involved. For example, rather than avoid a complex term, a teacher might use it in context and then paraphrase it.

INSTRUCTIONAL SCAFFOLDING
Building on the foundation of these general approaches, TQI’s framework identifies six types of instructional scaffolding — supportive activities that engage learners in interactions that help them perform beyond their current level of competence.

Scaffolding offers strong, temporary, “as-needed” support and abundant learning opportunities, akin to the physical scaffolding that provides support for construction work. Scaffolding is intended to be flexible. Just as the scaffolding on a building under renovation can be shifted and is ultimately removed, classroom scaffolding is also temporary and requires adjustment as needs change. Experienced, effective teachers use scaffolding with all learners. For English learners, Walqui asserts, teachers must do so more intentionally and more extensively.

Modeling
Students need clear examples of how to carry out what is expected of them if they are to learn to do so independently. Teachers can model expectations by conducting an experiment themselves or having students undertake an activity as a class. Pointing to examples from prior students’ work also helps, as does providing analytic tools, such as a standard set of questions to ask about a text.

Bridging
Students learn new concepts and language when firmly built on previous knowledge and understanding. Teachers can help lay this foundation by tapping into students’ prior knowledge, by asking students what they already know about an upcoming topic, for example.
Teachers also use bridging to establish personal links between the students and the subject matter.

Contextualization
One of the greatest challenges for English learners is reading portions of textbooks that have no illustrations or other context clues. Teachers can support their understanding by providing manipulatives, pictures, a few minutes of film, or other types of sensory experience to make the language more accessible and the content more engaging.

Schema building
Students build understanding by weaving new information into structures of meaning, or schema. Teachers can help English learners do so by presenting activities that help them make connections. For example, teachers might preview a reading assignment with the class, noting such features as heads and subheads, illustrations and captions, and chart titles. This kind of preview can help students begin to read independently by giving them a sense of the topic and its organization.

Text re-presentation
Students begin to acquire and use new language effectively by transforming content from one genre to another. Teachers of English learners might facilitate this process by having students turn an article into a drama, a poem into a narrative, or a third-person historical narrative into an eyewitness account.

Metacognitive development
Students manage their learning though metacognition, the act of reflection or thinking about thinking. Teachers can help English learners develop metacognition by explicitly teaching them strategies that enable learners to tackle academic tasks. The strategy of reciprocal teaching, for example, involves pairs of students independently reading a text, questioning each other, discussing questions that go beyond recall, and trying to solve problems related to understanding the text. To enable students to engage in reciprocal teaching, the teacher first must introduce all of its steps and guide students in practicing and discussing the steps.

Throughout New York City, WestEd’s TQI staff have been training coaches, teachers, and administrators in this framework. In the summer of 2004, TQI staff worked with the city’s instructional support specialists (who had been through TQI training) to provide five-day institutes for over 1,000 teachers and, separately, provided training for 800 of the district’s principals.

To assess the impact of this critical work, an independent evaluator is carrying out an extensive study that includes random assignment to experimental and control groups.