Writing Support for English Language Learners

This teacher professional development course will teach you about English Language Learner (ELL) proficiency and how you can support it throughout various content areas. You will learn six strategies to support your students: buddy writing, daily writing, interactive writing, using mentor texts, sentence stems, and vocabulary development. You will also learn how to evaluate your ELL's progress over time.

The course comes with many tools, resources, and templates ready to be used in your classroom as you work to teach writing to ELLs and implement the writing plan you developed throughout this course.

Syllabus

1. ELL Proficiency Levels
   1. About the struggle ELL students have in different content areas, and how writing plays a role in all content areas.
   2. Six simple strategies that can support the writing skills of ELLs across all content areas.
   3. How to best monitor the progress of your ELLs.
2. Support Strategies
   1. Strategies such as buddy writing, daily writing, and interactive writing are great ways to improve writing fluency and confidence of ELLs.
   2. How exposing students to quality mentor texts and providing them with sentence stems or frames are excellent ways to scaffold the process of writing.
   3. That vocabulary development is a critical part of literacy development for ELLs.
3. Monitoring Progress
   1. The importance of monitoring the progress of your ELLs.
   2. Three strategies for monitoring progress.
4. Putting it All Together
   1. Using the sample provided, build your writing support plan for your ELLs for an upcoming lesson.
5. Applying What you Have Learned
   1. Get ideas on how to implement the concepts into your classroom, find a list of online resources that feature additional ELL support ideas, and read the research behind effective methods for supporting your ELLs.