Connecting Content and Language
for English Language Learners
By Eugenia Mora-Flores
Presented by: Nelda Calderon
Celia Martinez
Christopher O. Park
Chapter 3
 Academic Language
 “Language shapes the way we think, and determines
what we can think about.”
 Benjamin Lee Whorf
Jim Cummins
 The difference between students’ conversational
proficiency and academic language proficiency.
 Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS)
-Language needed to engage in social
conversations.
 Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALPS)
-Understand concrete and abstract language
and express their thinking across the
curriculum.
Vocabulary
 Involves developing high-frequency vocabulary that
students can use across the domains to develop an
expressive and receptive vocabulary.
 Goal is to help students not only understand words,
but also make them part of their own personal
lexicon.
Functions and Forms of Language
 The purpose for using language is a language
function.
 Students need opportunities to use language for a
variety of purposes.
 ELD instruction involves explicit teacher modeling of
selected language functions and opportunities for
students to practice functions of language.
 Functions of language are directly connected to
language forms.
Academic Language Development
 Students encounter language challenges daily.
 Content instruction should provide rich opportunities
for ELL’s to make connections and draw upon
personal experiences to support their learning.
 Instruction should be applicable and exciting.
Language Input
 Being able to understand the language to access
content. (Language Input)
 Being able to express their thinking orally and in
writing. (Language output)
 Content needs to be brought to life for ELL’s.
 Krashen noted that ELL’s need comprehensible input
for language acquisition to occur.
Specially Designed Academic
Instruction in English
 Support teachers in their efforts to make contentarea instruction comprehensible for ELL’s.
 Teachers might find it difficult to teach if they do not
have the content vocabulary or prior knowledge to
make meaning.
Anticipation Guides
 Generate prior knowledge, set a purpose for reading,
and build curiosity.
 Series of statements that relate to theme, concept, or
big idea from a selected reading passage.
 Inferential statements, asking students to share their
opinions on each statement.
 Agree or disagree and speak with their partner/s.
Classroom Connection
 After completing Anticipation Guide activity students
do an extension by narrowing down a particular skill
such as vocabulary.
 For example students compare one character with
another in a different story.
Carousel
 Generate prior knowledge or check for
understanding.
 Small groups, peers serve as a scaffold in language
and content for one another.
Jigsaw
 Reading strategy that helps students reach deeper
levels of comprehension for a small segment of text.
 Develops interdependence since students are
responsible to a larger group.
 Develops confidence in struggling readers who need
the process only a small portion of the text at hand.
Multimedia Presentations
 Generate prior knowledge through varied sources of
information or to present one’s learning.
 Written and visual media.
 Lack of prior knowledge inhibits reading
comprehension, multimedia can provide students
with background knowledge, as well as show
students different ways in which people share
information.
Academic Language Output
 ELD Strategies provide students with an opportunity
to develop academic language.
 Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English
(SDAIE) use strategies to help content become
comprehensible to students and allows them to make
meaning of the information.
 Integrating strategies can result in making content
comprehensible as well as helping students develop
academic language.
Facilitating Thinking
 Whether we ask students to engage in critical
thinking, creative thinking, convergent thinking,
divergent thinking, inductive thinking, or deductive
thinking, our role is to guide the thinking process.
Classroom Connection
 Students need to infer, engage in creative thinking,
and move beyond the text to generate an answer.
 Teachers need to be mindful of questioning.
 Students need to become knowledgeable, critical,
creative thinkers if they want to succeed in the 21st
century.