- Provide a positive learning environment that promotes students’ autonomy in learning.
- Allow students some choice of complementary books and types of reading and writing
activities. - Empower students to make decisions about topic, forms of communication, and selections
of materials.
- Allow students some choice of complementary books and types of reading and writing
- Make literacy experiences more relevant to students’ interests, everyday life, or important
current events (Guthrie, and others 1999).- Look for opportunities to bridge the activities outside and inside the classroom.
- Find out what your students think is relevant and why, and then use that information to
design instruction and learning opportunities that will be more relevant to students. - Consider constructing an integrated approach to instruction that ties a rich conceptual
theme to a real-world application. - Build in certain instructional conditions, such as student goal setting, self-directed
learning, and collaborative learning, to increase reading engagement and conceptual
learning for students (Guthrie, and others, 1999; Guthrie, Wigfield, and VonSecker 2000). - Make connections between disciplines, such as science and language arts, taught through
conceptual themes. - Make connections among strategies for learning, such as searching, comprehending,
interpreting, composing, and teaching content knowledge. - Make connections among classroom activities that support motivation and social and
cognitive development.
Contributing to the motivation and engagement of diverse learners, including ELs, is
the teachers’ and the broader school community’s open recognition that .students’ primary
languages, dialects of English used in the home, and home cultures are valuable resources in
their own right and also to draw on to build proficiency in English and in all school learning (de
Jong and Harper 2011; Lindholm-Leary and Genesee 2010). Teachers are encouraged to do the
following:- Create a welcoming classroom environment that exudes respect for cultural and linguistic
diversity. - Get to know students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds and how individual students
interact with their primary/home language and cultures. - Use the primary language or home dialect of English, as appropriate, to acknowledge
them as valuable assets and to support all learners to fully develop academic English and
engage meaningfully with the core curriculum. - Use texts that accurately reflect students’ cultural, linguistic, and social backgrounds so
that students see themselves in the curriculum. - Continuously expand their understandings of culture and language so as not to
oversimplify approaches to culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy. (For
guidance on implementing culturally and linguistically responsive teaching, see chapters 2
and 9 of this ELA/ELD Framework.)
Grades 4 and 5 Chapter 5 | 397