Teachers in English-medium classrooms can support students' translingual composing by inviting students to write using all their language resources. However, students in these contexts often express hesitancy about their ability to spell in languages beyond English. This article describes support strategies teachers can use to scaffold students'…

Vocabulary knowledge, which is key to the reading comprehension of English learners (ELs), must be a focus for every teacher in today's increasingly diverse schools, including those in the mainstream classroom. This article strives to increase awareness of the five characteristics of effective vocabulary instruction as well as demonstrate how such…

In this column Manyak and Bauer summarize key research addressing the English vocabulary development of English learners (ELs) and distill implications for instructional practice. First, the authors discuss several key studies that demonstrate the limitation of many ELs' English vocabulary knowledge and the negative impact of this limitation on…

Explicit code and comprehension instruction is important for English learners (ELs), and several key findings from research on young ELs learning to read initially in English can offer guidelines for developing effective code-based instruction for these children. The authors of this column address comprehension instruction for ELs, suggesting…

Many approaches to literacy instruction treat language as an object of study. The curricular assumptions that inform such instruction are that language is located outside the person, extracted from context, neutral, and explicable through defined rules. An underlying assumption in many language arts classrooms is that children will not pay…