Abstract:

English language skills, especially reading and writing, are no longer only developed in the ESL classroom. The trend around the world is toward integrating English literacy instruction with content areas, whether this instruction is called Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), Content Based Instruction (CBI), or the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA). In the United States, both the standards of the World Class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) consortium, which created the assessment tools widely used to determine the proficiency levels of non-native speakers of English, and the Common Core Standards (CSS) adopted under the Obama administration emphasize the need for the development of academic literacy, not just in the Language Arts class, but in content areas such as social studies, science, and math classes. Increasingly, all content area teachers are held responsible for the reading and writing skills of their students, and for incorporating activities that will build these skills. ESL teachers are now often responsible for supporting these content area teachers, with workshops, consultation, and supplementation of instruction with EL students.

The presenter has worked with teachers of content-area classes, including STEM subjects, on ways to develop the literacy skills of all students, with special emphasis on working with non-native speakers of English. The presenter will show how she worked with these teachers on identifying the characteristics of academic English, and developing strategies to help students analyze informational texts to build reading comprehension, and the skills required for academic writing tasks. She will demonstrate, using samples from social studies, science and math textbooks, the activities that content-area teachers found to be most effective in leading students through the texts to understand how to reconstruct references, unravel complex syntactic structures, and extract information from dense passages. These activities include text reconstruction tasks, guided writings, quick writes, and vocabulary building exercises.

Attendees at this session will participate in some of these activities to experience hands-on, interactive literacy activities that can be used with texts from any content area. They will generate ideas for differentiating the activities for students of varying proficiency levels. The presenter hopes to take back ideas from participants about how teachers around the world are incorporating English with content.

Keywords:

CLIL, CBI, ESL, Integrated English, Common Core Standards, STEM, literacy.