Teaching English Language Learners: A Differentiated Approach

by Carol Rothenberg

Are you looking for a methods book to facilitate literacy and academic development in your K-12 classroom? Building on a solid foundation in language acquisition and learning theory, this book will show you how to examine your own practice and design lessons that consider the individual needs of English language learners and accelerate their achievement.This book is designed to help your students develop proficiency in both everyday and academic English while developing listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. It also serves as a great guide for promoting high-level, high-quality, and high-expectation instruction with respect to language, literacy development, and academic achievement for all of your students. FEATURES Constructed from a strong research base, each chapter highlights specific research topics to provide you with practical ideas in applying this research to your own practices. Accessing Prior Knowledge Activities allow you to engage your own background knowledge in visualizing, brainstorming, previewing, reflecting, and observing to help you get the most from each chapter. Spotlight on Instruction features visit classrooms of effective teachers of English language learners providing an authentic context as you learn. Application to Practice case studies build upon one another from chapter to chapter illustrating how to apply this growing wealth of strategies in your own classroom. Teacher Tools in the back of this book provide a collection of reproducibles for use in your classroom, including planning tools, writing assignments, and self reflection tools. "

Genres: Education

312 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 2006

Reviews

[James]

Are you looking for a methods book to facilitate literacy and academic development in your K-12 classroom? Building on a solid foundation in language acquisition and learning theory, this book will show you how to examine your own practice and design lessons that consider the individual needs of English language learners and accelerate their achievement. This book is designed to help your students develop proficiency in both everyday and academic English while developing listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. It also serves as a great guide for promoting high-level, high-quality, and high-expectation instruction with respect to language, literacy development, and academic achievement for all of your students.   FEATURES: Constructed from a strong research base, each chapter highlights specific research topics to provide you with practical ideas in applying this research to your own practices. Accessing Prior Knowledge Activities allow you to engage your own background knowledge in visualizing, brainstorming, previewing, reflecting, and observing to help you get the most from each chapter. Spotlight on Instruction features visit classrooms of effective teachers of English language learners providing an authentic context as you learn. Application to Practice case studies build upon one another from chapter to chapter illustrating how to apply this growing wealth of strategies in your own classroom. Teacher Tools in the back of this book provide a collection of reproducibles for use in your classroom,  including planning tools, writing assignments, and self reflection tools.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

My four-star rating is probably undeservedly high. I believe the reason I got so much out of this book is because my professor taught in a way that complimented it so well. This was the text, of course, for the required class in Second Language Development; the same professor had taught the Classroom Management class I'd take the prior semester, and she did a great job with our text there, too.

Principles of Classroom Management: A Professional Decision-Making Model is heavy on theory, as this book is, but with dynamic teaching and good student activities, both texts played a strong role in the classroom.

Ironically, one of the ways I think this will be most helpful to me isn't with Second Language Learners, but with English-language students who are weak in academic language (or discourse/praxis, or discourse/Discourse, as I got from my class in "Literacy Across Content Areas"). The skills involved in differentiating lessons for language learners is largely applicable to the latter as well.

[Stacey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I use this for my ESL methods class and would give it a 3.5. It's not the best, but not horrible either. It does give you a lot of information, my only complaint is that it's mostly theory and very little practice.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a cheating review. I read as little of this as I could to get through my class. It was fine but I will probably sell it!

[Katherine Fountain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the most interesting book for teaching English Language Learners but does offer ideas for adaptations or modifications.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Used to teach Assessment of ELLs course