Supporting Teachers of English Learners by Leveraging Students' Linguistic Strengths

In this paper, we seek to inform policy regarding the professional development of teachers of students who are learning English. To do this, we employ a framework that considers the pedagogical knowledge, practical teaching skills, and dispositions recommended by PD researchers and ELL teacher educators. We then present an approach that incorporates recommended teacher practices, dispositions, and types of knowledge that we call TRANSLATE, or Teaching Reading And New Strategic Language Approaches to English learners. We argue that translating carefully selected portions of grade-level appropriate text has the potential to improve the English reading comprehension of ELLs. We illustrate this approach by highlighting how one of our research team's instructors was able to incorporate ELL students' linguistic expertise into their guided reading of a text so that they could engage in the kinds of metacognitive and metalinguistic behavior known to foster reading comprehension.