Helping you create effective and equitable learning environments for culturally and linguistically diverse students

Our goal is to assist teachers and future teachers develop approaches to help ELL's succeed in their language acquisition process both socially and academically.

Through this endorsement we can help you develop an effective language program by addressing the following issues:

• Providing appropriate instructional support for English learners, not only in the early stages of learning conversational English, but also in the longer process of catching up in academic aspects of English
   

• Building flexibility into instruction and assessment provisions which recognizes the diversity among English learners
   

• Providing encouragement and opportunities for students to continue to develop their home language ability, as this is the foundation upon which learners construct academic development in English

Specific areas for development and training:

• Instructional accommodations for ELLs

• Integration of content objectives with language objectives

• Team-Teaching training

• Sheltered instruction training

• Language and culture projects to help with parent-teacher relationships

• Material development,

• Techniques to enhance teaching of phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension, etc.

 In Jim Cummins words:

 “Every school can benefit from articulating a language policy – a set of beliefs and practices about language learning and academic achievement that have been formulated specifically with the students we teach in mind.”