- 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
- 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 2010; Lindholm-Leary and Genesee 2010). Teachers are encouraged to
do the following:
- Make connections between disciplines, such as science and language arts, taught
- 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 home 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 and respectfully 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 in this ELA/ELD Framework.)
Grades 6 to 8 Chapter 6 | 511