English Language Learner Resource Guide Part II: School-Wide Professional Development for Academic Language Instruction

In April 2012, the North Central Comprehensive Center (NCCC) at McREL released a report titled English Language Learner Resource Guide: Top Ten Instructional Tips for Schools with a Low Incidence of ELLs. The guide was produced as a result of several requests from regional Title III directors for assistance in identifying the most effective strategies for serving English language learners and offered a user-friendly overview of effective strategies that could be implemented in any classroom fairly quickly. Following the first guide's release, Title III directors in the NCCC region began receiving calls about developing ELL programs and/or using limited ELL resources to serve ELL students. Title III directors wanted a resource for schools that were calling to ask, "How do I serve three schools with one ESL teacher?" or "How do we serve a sudden influx of 50 or more ELL students?" This report picks up where the last one left off by expanding on the notion that "it's not just lowincidence or highprevalence schools that need to expand their current repertoire of language required for discussing content in the language arts, math, science, social studies, and other curricular areas - it's all schools" (Hill and Hoak, 2012). This premise requires an approach that addresses language development as a need for all students, not only ELLs. In some cases, the students in need of language development might be native English speakers who are conversationally proficient in English but do not have the proficiency in academic English they need to comprehend what they read, write well, and do well on tests. Often, these students will be part of Title I programs because they come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. These students may reveal themselves with consistently low reading and writing scores, and, like their ELL counterparts, need instruction in academic language. In some cases, they may have been tested for Special Education services because of consistently low literacy scores but do not qualify because there is not an existing disability.