When a Year 7 student physically reacted to a prompt of another student by anxiously drumming the desk with his ruler, exclaiming "uuuuhh", the initial thought of the observing researcher, Laura, was: "this is an interesting account". This started a reflective journey of first applying robust research methodologies to the…

The authors present evidence-based digital literacy practices and resources for teaching and learning English as an additional language in two different educational contexts where these practices have been applied successfully with adolescent learners.

In a small rural village in the Cambodian province of Kampong Cham, a group of 7th-grade students huddle around Android tablets, engrossed in an English language lesson. Guided by their teacher, they swipe from one interactive learning module to the next. They are not only building English literacy, but also developing digital skills. As they do…

This article focuses on student engagement, and the use of digital games in language classrooms. Contributing to the mapping of student engagement across SLA (Dörnyei, 2019a), and in line with the need to use established theories to develop insights into engagement in contexts of digital gaming, a case is made for the concept of immersion (Brown…

This article aims to show how the findings from written corrective feedback (WCF) research can be applied in practice. One particular kind of WCF--focused WCF--is brought into the spotlight. The article first summarizes major findings from focused WCF research to reveal the potential advantages of correcting a few preselected language items…

In this article, we put forward 4 pedagogic principles that we consider to be particularly important in helping English language learners (ELLs) to succeed in school. These principles are: creating multiple and varied opportunities for ELLs to use the target language in both speech and writing, promoting high engagement by building on students'…

In this article, the authors describe how Jenae, a seventh-grade English language arts teacher, modified I-Charts (Hoffman, 1992; Randall, 1996) and I-Search papers (Macrorie, 1988) to support the needs of her adolescent English Language Learners (ELLs). They highlight how she improved upon two timeless instructional practices by integrating…

This new addition to Math Solutions "Supporting English Language Learners in Math Class series" offers a wealth of lessons and strategies for modifying grades 6-8 instruction. Section I presents an overview of teaching math to English learners: the research, the challenges, the linguistic demands of a math lesson, and specific strategies and…

The authors interviewed 17 middle school reading and language arts teachers as part of a larger study on an evidence-based intervention called Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR). CSR is a multi-component reading instructional model combined with cooperative grouping and peer discussion. We show from the teacher interviews that CSR has benefits…

This paper proposes the identification and use of principle-based pedagogical patterns to help teachers to translate design principles into actionable teaching activities, and to scaffold student learning with sufficient flexibility and creativity. A set of pedagogical patterns for networked Second language (L2) learning, categorized and…

In this paper I want to focus on the difficulty perceived by seventh grade students in connection to listening activities in the English class, at some public schools in San Juan, Argentina. This analysis will lead to the examination of contextual factors that might act as unforeseen constraints on the language learning situation. (Contains 5…

Word Links, an effective strategy for developing students' vocabulary, is based on four principles. It provides contextual and definitional information; offers repeated exposure to words and opportunities to practice them; encourages students to think about relationships among word meanings; and involves active engagement in learning tasks. Yopp…

Although she is now teaching Spanish in a new school full time, Linda Smrokowski, spent 9 years teaching in a once-per-week second language program. Because many once- or twice-per-week programs still exist, she shares strategies for writing and implementing detailed lesson plans that worked for her while she was teaching in a once-per-week…

In this article, I describe mainstream middle school classrooms designed to re-think the conditions under which language minority students who have lived in the United States for a number of years can develop English language skills while also gaining access to a rigorous curriculum. I describe a variety of transactions that students used to…

The purpose of this working paper is to review current literature on literacy programs for parents of English language learners (ELLs). The paper includes a summary of five literacy programs for ELL parents throughout the United States of America. Four of these were system-wide interventions affecting more than one school or classroom. Each…