Rationale
As a high school English language arts teacher of English learners, teaching students about history is a responsibility that frequently crops up in my syllabus, as both a district requirement and a necessary scaffold to provide access and to support comprehension of grade-level texts that reference historical and/or cultural events. Teaching seminal, primary source documents from U.S. history is a standards-based cornerstone of my district ELA curriculum that presents unique challenges in my classroom. Many of my students are English learners with developing English language proficiencies, ranging from beginner to high-intermediate. Historical documents often contain archaic words, phrases, and references to objects and ideas that impede comprehension. As a result, there is a temptation to simplify texts or overly-generalize complicated events in an effort to aid English learners’ comprehension of material. Further, a number of my students are immigrants to the United States, and do not possess the historical and cultural knowledge that their native-speaking peers have learned and been immersed in since early childhood. However, it is these very barriers my students face that make the conscious and careful effort of building background knowledge and teaching the skills for analyzing and interpreting historical documents all the more important.
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