Learn about 10 instructional practices for English language learners (ELLs) that research shows to be highly effective. These guidelines emphasize an asset-based approach to teaching ELLs and can be integrated into your regular teaching routines.
In this webcast, Robin Scarcella provides an overview of academic language instruction for English language learners, as well as teaching strategies, activity ideas, and recommended resources.
As you teach content areas to ELLs of diverse backgrounds, you may find that they struggle to grasp the content, and that they approach the content from very different perspectives. Drawing on your students’ background knowledge and experiences can be an effective way to bridge those gaps and make content more accessible. This article offers a number of suggestions to classroom teachers as they find ways to tap into the background knowledge that students bring with them.
This comprehension strategy activates students’ prior knowledge, builds curiosity about a new topic before learning about it, and then checks for understanding after reading.
Reading instruction should help kids to develop metacognition when they’re reading, and involving students in self-evaluation can be an important part of instruction towards that goal.
Texts that are challenging and that represent a wide range of genres and content areas need to play much bigger roles in comprehension instruction. These texts expose students to rich content and vocabulary and can help build knowledge.
Teaching reading comprehension means improving students’ abilities to read other texts on their own with greater understanding. A 2025 report looks at 66 studies to better understand recent trends in reading comprehension instruction.
Comprehension is the reason for reading. If readers can read the words but do not understand or connect to what they are reading, they are not really reading. Good readers are both purposeful and active, and have the skills to absorb what they read, analyze it, make sense of it, and make it their own.
For years, the field of reading education has been engaged in thinking about best practices. Explicit instruction in vocabulary, rereading and using digital textbooks to motivate children’s reading are among some of these updated best practices. Those in the reading community are urged to consider best practices, and how we may promote their uses, with high fidelity in classroom instruction.
Inferential comprehension requires both emotional intelligence and cognitive skills, however instructional comprehension strategies typically underemphasize the emotional contribution. This article documents an intervention used by diverse third grade students which centers on teaching story comprehension through character perspective-taking (i.e., Theory of Mind).
