The Essential Guide for Educating Beginning English Learners
Put all English learners on the path to success--right from the start!
As more beginning ELs enroll in schools every year, educators need a realistic framework for addressing the varied needs of this growing population. In this practical resource, the authors provide templates, tools, and vignettes illustrating real-world challenges to help teachers and administrators:
- Learn strategies for teaching beginning level ELs across the curriculum
- Create a welcoming environment for students and families
- Reach out to students from both literacy and non-literacy-oriented homes
- Design programs that meet the needs of beginning ELs and students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE)
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Dr. Debbie Zacarian, founder of Zacarian & Associates, provides professional development, strategic planning, and technical assistance for K-16 educators of culturally and linguistically diverse populations. She has served as an expert consultant for school districts, universities, associations, and organizations including the Massachusetts Parent Information Resource Center and Federation for Children with Special Needs.
Debbie has worked with numerous state and local education agencies and written the language assistance programming policies for many rural, suburban, and urban districts. Debbie served on the faculty of University of Massachusetts-Amherst where she co-wrote and was the co-principal investigator of a National Professional Development grant initiative supporting the professional preparation of educators of multilingual learners. Debbie also designed and taught courses for pre- and in-service administrators and teachers on culturally responsive teaching and supervision practices, multilingual development, and ethnographic research. In addition, she served as a program director at the Collaborative for Educational Services where she provided professional development for thousands of educators of multilingual students and partnered with Fitchburg State University in co-writing and enacting a National Professional Development initiative that supported STEM education. Debbie also directed the Amherst Public Schools bilingual and English learner programming where she and the district received state and national honors.
The author of more than 100 publications, her most recent professional books include: Beyond Crises: Overcoming Linguistic and Cultural Inequities in Communities. Schools and Classrooms; Responsive Schooling for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students; Teaching to Empower: taking action to foster student agency, self-confidence, and collaboration; and Teaching to Strengths: Supporting Students living with Trauma, Violence and Chronic Stress.
"This book provides a wonderful look at the complexities of providing newcomers with a welcoming school environment and appropriate instruction. The book clearly reveals that the needs of these students requires more than 'just good teaching.'"-- (05/17/2012)
"This book will be of great interest to all educators of English learners because we all have beginners who arrive at any time during the school year, in our various schools and districts. The authors skillfully use scenarios to connect the theory to the practice and helps create a framework in which to plan for programming as well as classroom instruction."-- (05/17/2012)
"Debbie Zacarian and Judie Haynes joined forces again and created a much needed, comprehensive text in The Essential Guide for Educating Beginning English Learners. Students who are new to the English language and often new to the United States and the US school system frequently encounter complex challenges, so their teachers need to be prepared and ready to help. This book will serve as an indispensable resource for teachers to tackle this task, and to do so with knowledge, skills, confidence, and advocacy for new English Learners!"-- (06/13/2012)
"At a time when the U.S. is experiencing record number of English learners, many of whom enter the country not only as beginners in English language, but with a wide range of other needs as well, this carefully researched, practical guide will serve as the primary support for both teachers and administrators seeking to do a more comprehensive job of responding to what is arguably their most vulnerable student population. Zacarian and Haynes provide a close examination of the diversity within the group of beginner ELs, who are often lumped together based on language proficiency alone."-- (07/16/2012)
"The Essential Guide for Educating Beginning English Learners is a direct, concise and straight-forward volume for practitioners serving newly arrived English Language Learners. It captures the assets and resources beginning ELLs bring into the classroom and focuses on effective educational responses for each group of beginning English learners, built around a solid understanding of key learner characteristics, including literacy levels, cultural characteristics and other important learner factors that may come into play such as poverty and/or trauma experienced. The authors have created a useful working guide, supported by plenty of helpful examples and tools, which schools can use to facilitate Professional Development Communities, following a structured book study process."-- (07/16/2012)
