Rationale
I teach English language development (ELD) classes in the middle and high school to MLL students. These classes are intended to support MLL students in achieving advanced English language proficiency on the annual state ACCESS test, which measures English proficiency across academic content areas. Students must achieve a composite score of 4.7 to exit the MLL program and no longer receive language development support. Therefore, the focus of my class is the teaching of academic language, including vocabulary and grammar features, that students apply across content areas in the language domains of listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
This unit will specifically target the academic language of social studies and English language arts to support newcomer MLL students in achieving advanced English proficiency. Newcomer MLL students are those who have recently immigrated to the United States and have limited English proficiency. While many of these students possess deep funds of knowledge and skills relevant to their academic success, they often lack the cultural, linguistic, and historical background knowledge necessary to fully participate in English-only, grade-level content area classes without specialized support. Thus, this curriculum unit is intentionally cross-curricular and aims to teach skills, content and language that students can apply in their content area classes while simultaneously advancing towards academic English proficiency. For example, in English language arts, students are often required to identify the theme of a text and to support their claim about the theme with relevant evidence and reasoning. Additionally, the social studies curriculum requires students to observe, interpret, and contextualize the historical significance of primary and secondary source images, documents, and objects as they relate to a particular historical event. Therefore, the goal of this unit is two-fold: to support students in advancing their English language proficiency and to scaffold their skills and content knowledge to successfully participate and learn in their content area classes.
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