Retool your whole school for EL achievement

For any student, middle and high school can be challenging. But for an English learner or striving reader—and the myriad words, phrases, syntax, texts, and concepts they must negotiate on a daily basis—the stakes seem a whole lot higher. Fortunately for content-area teachers, Margarita Calderón and Shawn Slakk make available in a single resource all the best instructional and professional development combinations for expediting comprehension across the secondary grades.

Really a tool to assist all learners across all language needs, the second edition of Teaching Reading to English Learners, Grades 6-12, provides evidence-based strategies for helping content-area teachers and schools at large:

• Teach academic language in all subject areas


• Embed discourse practice through interaction strategies


• Integrate basic and close reading comprehension skills into lessons


• Teach drafting, revising, and editing for content-specific writing


• Use cooperative learning to develop social emotional skills and enhance academic achievement

Calderón and Slakk know firsthand that if we’re to counter the commonly held narrative of predictable failure among our ELs, it takes a whole school, and they have the evidence to prove it. Read Teaching Reading to English Learners, Grades 6-12, implement its strategies across all classrooms, and soon enough you, too, will maximize the comprehensions skills so critical to our ELs’ long-term success.