Accommodations & linguistic supports

Visual scaffolds are images, photographs, illustrations, diagrams, labeled drawings, infographics, anchor charts, video stills, and other nonlinguistic representations paired with target vocabulary and academic concepts. They give emergent bilingual (EB) students a meaning anchor that does not depend on English print or speech alone, so a learner can attach a new English label to a concept they may already understand in their home language. Because meaning travels through the image rather than only through unfamiliar English words, visuals lower the linguistic load of a task while keeping the cognitive demand and grade-level content intact. They are a temporary support, layered in heavily at the earliest proficiency levels and deliberately faded as a student's English develops.

This support gives emergent bilingual students access to grade-level content through two complementary scaffolds: texts in the student's home or first language (L1) and linguistically adapted versions of the same grade-level English texts (shorter sentences, controlled vocabulary, glossed and defined terms, and added visuals) that keep the same key concepts and standards. The home-language text draws on the literacy and conceptual knowledge the student already holds, so new learning attaches to an existing foundation rather than starting from zero. The adapted English text lowers the linguistic load of the reading while holding the same grade-level ideas and cognitive demand. Both are temporary scaffolds, gradually faded as the student's English proficiency grows, so they bridge toward the unadapted grade-level text rather than replacing it.

Short, simple sentence stems are brief, fill-in-the-blank sentence starters built from high-frequency, concrete vocabulary that give an emergent bilingual student a ready-made grammatical pattern to launch a spoken or written response (for example, "I see a ___" or "I think ___"). They hand the student the syntactic frame so the student can devote attention to communicating meaning and content rather than to assembling an entire English sentence from scratch. They are designed as a temporary scaffold: as proficiency grows, the stems are deliberately shortened, made optional, and eventually removed so the student produces increasingly independent language. Used this way, a stem is an asset-based bridge that lets a student show what they already know and can do in a new language, not a ceiling on what they can say.

Pre-teaching is a planned scaffold in which the teacher introduces a small, carefully selected set of high-leverage words and phrases, both everyday "social" language and discipline-specific "academic" language, before an emergent bilingual student encounters them in the main lesson, text, or task. The goal is to give students an entry point so they begin the lesson already familiar with the language they will need, rather than processing new content and new vocabulary at the same time. It is most powerful when it activates and connects to what students already know, including cognates and concepts they hold in their home language, so it builds on existing linguistic resources. As proficiency grows, the number of pre-taught words shrinks and students increasingly infer meaning from context independently.

This support intentionally pairs or groups an emergent bilingual student with a classmate who shares the same home language so the two can draw on their full linguistic repertoire to make sense of instruction, clarify tasks, rehearse ideas, and confirm understanding. The same-language peer serves as a temporary linguistic and social bridge, letting the student access grade-level content and participate meaningfully while English is still developing. It is a flexible scaffold used "as needed" rather than a fixed placement, and it builds on the student's home-language proficiency and prior knowledge as a learning asset. As English proficiency grows, the same-language pairing is gradually faded and replaced by mixed-language and English-dominant peer configurations.

This support reshapes a grade-level writing task so emergent bilingual (EB) students can compose meaning through more than print alone. Drawing, labeling, and structured language scaffolds (word banks, sentence frames, graphic organizers, bilingual glossaries) are offered alongside the writing so students can show thinking visually while their English print writing develops. Drawing is treated as a legitimate part of the composing process and a meaning-making resource in its own right, not a substitute for writing or a sign of low ability. The scaffolds are temporary supports that hold the same cognitive demand as the original task and are gradually released as students gain control of academic English in writing.

Gestures are intentional hand movements, facial expressions, body postures, and pantomime that the teacher pairs with speech to carry meaning that words alone may not yet convey to an emergent bilingual student. They make spoken and written language comprehensible by attaching a visible, physical referent to vocabulary and concepts, from everyday actions (open, sit, point) to academic ideas (compare, increase, cause and effect, rotate). Used well, gestures invite students to respond physically and eventually to produce the same gestures themselves, building a multimodal memory trace that links sound, image, and movement. This is a temporary scaffold that draws on a resource every learner already brings to the classroom: the body and the human practice of gesturing.

Extensive modeling is a scaffold in which the teacher repeatedly demonstrates a task, strategy, or language behavior, with clear and concrete examples, before asking students to attempt it. The teacher makes invisible thinking visible by thinking aloud, showing both finished and in-progress examples, and walking through each step more than once, often pairing the demonstration with gestures, visuals, realia, and home-language bridges. It operationalizes the "I do" phase of the gradual release of responsibility, supplying the comprehensible input emergent bilinguals use to map new academic language and procedures onto knowledge they already hold. As students take up the model, the demonstrations are gradually shortened and faded so learners carry the task on their own.

Graphic organizers are visual frameworks (Venn diagrams, T-charts, story maps, concept webs, sequence chains, KWL charts, flowcharts, and comparison matrices) that make the structure of ideas and the relationships among them visible on the page. For emergent bilingual (EB) students, they reduce the language load of a task by letting students show what they know through spatial arrangement, color, icons, and short text rather than through extended prose alone. They function as temporary scaffolds that draw on students' existing conceptual knowledge and home language, and that teachers gradually shift toward student-generated structures as students develop the academic English to organize ideas independently.

Manipulatives are physical, movable objects (base-ten blocks, counters, fraction tiles, algebra tiles, letter or syllable cards, magnetic words, pattern blocks, models, and three-dimensional realia) that emergent bilingual students touch, group, build, and rearrange while reasoning about academic content. They lower the language demand of a task by letting students show and construct understanding through action before they have to encode that understanding in English. In second-language acquisition terms, manipulatives make grade-level content more comprehensible by adding a concrete, context-embedded layer to cognitively demanding work, so students can engage with rigorous concepts while their English is still developing. They function as a temporary scaffold that is faded as students gain the language to reason verbally and symbolically.

Cognates are words that share similar spelling, meaning, and often pronunciation across two languages because of a shared linguistic origin (for example, English "family" and Spanish "familia," or "celebrate" and "celebrar"). This support treats the student's home language as a knowledge base by explicitly drawing attention to these shared words, so learners can map new English vocabulary onto words they already own. An estimated 30 to 40 percent of common English words have a Spanish cognate, and the overlap is even denser in academic and content-area vocabulary, which makes cognate awareness a high-leverage scaffold. It is a temporary instructional bridge: students are taught how to notice and use cognates and gradually internalize the strategy so they apply it independently.

This is a temporary instructional scaffold in which the teacher explicitly models and gives students guided, low-pressure practice in saying high-utility social and academic words and phrases aloud. The focus is on intelligibility and confident participation, not on changing a student's accent or sounding "native." Teachers preview the sounds, syllable stress, and word boundaries of key terms (often using the student's home language as a comparison point through cognates and shared sounds) so emergent bilinguals can use the words to take part in conversation, content discussion, and oral assessment. As students build phonological confidence and oral fluency in English, the explicit modeling is gradually faded.

Slower, simplified speech is a teacher-talk scaffold in which the educator delivers spoken input at a moderate, deliberate pace (not unnaturally slow), articulates word boundaries clearly, pauses at meaningful phrase boundaries, and frames ideas in shorter, high-frequency sentence structures so that oral input becomes comprehensible to students who are still building automaticity in English listening. It is a form of "modified input" that makes academic and social English processable while the student draws on the rich listening and oral resources they already command in their home language. Critically, it preserves grade-level meaning and natural intonation; it does not water down content, raise volume, or use exaggerated, infantilizing speech. It is a temporary support that is deliberately faded as the student's processing speed and English proficiency grow.

Linguistically modified text is a scaffold in which the teacher adjusts the language of a grade-level reading, not its core concepts, so an emergent bilingual (EB) student can engage the same rigorous content as peers while continuing to develop English. Modification falls on a continuum: "simplification" trims sentence length and replaces low-frequency vocabulary, while the research-preferred "elaboration" keeps natural, native-like language but adds redundancy, definitions, synonyms, signal words, and context clues. The grade-level concepts, key academic vocabulary, and learning objective stay intact; only the linguistic load unrelated to the objective is reduced. Like all scaffolds, it is temporary by design and is faded as the student's English proficiency grows.

Oral translation of words and phrases is a linguistic scaffold in which the teacher, a bilingual peer, a paraprofessional, or a translation tool provides a brief spoken rendering of key terms, instructions, or short phrases in the student's home language at the moment of need. It works alongside English input rather than replacing it, giving emergent bilingual students a quick bridge from what they already know in their home language to new English content. The aim is to keep cognitively demanding content accessible while the student builds English, so the translation is targeted (key vocabulary and directions) rather than a full word-for-word interpretation of the lesson. As students gain English, the support is faded and reserved for newly introduced, low-frequency academic terms.

A bilingual dictionary or glossary gives emergent bilingual (EB) students reference materials in both their home language and English so they can confirm the meaning of unfamiliar academic terms while they continue building English vocabulary. It can be a published bilingual dictionary, a teacher- or student-built unit glossary that pairs key terms in the home language and English (ideally with visuals, student-friendly definitions, and cognate links), or a digital tool. Used as a planned, temporary scaffold, it draws on the conceptual knowledge students already hold in their home language and bridges it to English, then is gradually faded as English proficiency grows. The asterisk in the name signals that, on Texas state assessments, dictionary use is a regulated designated support: it is allowed only when the student meets TEA eligibility criteria, the support is documented by the LPAC (or 504/ARD committee), the student routinely uses it in instruction, and any furnished dictionary meets the current STAAR Dictionary Policy.

Side-by-side (dual-language) materials present the same content in English and the student's home language at the same time, either in parallel columns on one page, on facing pages, or as a paired English text plus a home-language glossary, summary, or audio. The goal is to let emergent bilingual (EB) students draw on the academic knowledge and literacy they already hold in their home language while they build the corresponding English. It is a temporary linguistic scaffold offered alongside English instruction, not a replacement for it, and the amount of home-language support is gradually reduced as students gain English proficiency.

This support pairs academic vocabulary and abstract content concepts with carefully chosen images, diagrams, labeled visuals, charts, graphic organizers, realia, and short multimedia, so that meaning is carried by more than the English text alone. The visual works as a temporary context-embedding scaffold: it lowers the linguistic load of a cognitively demanding task without lowering the academic rigor of the concept itself. As students move up the ELPS proficiency levels, visuals shift from concrete, single-word labeling toward abstract, relational graphics such as timelines, cause-effect maps, and process diagrams, and they are gradually released as students can hold and explain the concept through academic English itself.

Adapted grade-level texts are reworked versions of the same reading materials the whole class uses, rewritten to make dense academic language more comprehensible while keeping the full conceptual rigor, key vocabulary, and learning objectives intact. Common adaptations include breaking long, syntactically complex sentences into shorter ones, adding margin glosses or in-line definitions, inserting headings and graphic organizers, layering in visuals, and highlighting cognates, all while preserving the original ideas and the same paragraph structure. This is a temporary scaffold, not a permanent track or a watered-down substitute. It draws on the linguistic and conceptual knowledge emergent bilinguals already hold so they can access challenging content now, and it is deliberately faded as the student's English proficiency grows. The goal is access to rigor, never reduction of it.

Sentence stems (also called sentence starters, and when more fully framed, sentence frames) are partial sentences the teacher provides as a starting point for an oral or written response, such as "I predict that ____ because ____." They are temporary syntactic scaffolds that supply academic discourse structure so emergent bilinguals can put their existing ideas and content knowledge into target-language form without carrying the full linguistic load alone. Stems make the language functions of a discipline (predicting, comparing, justifying, summarizing) visible and reusable, and they are meant to be gradually faded and removed as students internalize the structures and grow in proficiency.

Pre-teaching academic vocabulary is a front-loading scaffold in which the teacher introduces a small, carefully chosen set of high-utility academic words, and the concepts behind them, before students engage with a lesson, text, or task. The goal is to give emergent bilingual students an entry point so they meet new content already holding some of the language they need to make meaning, rather than processing new words and new ideas at the same time. Effective pre-teaching pairs each term with a student-friendly definition, a visual or concrete referent, and, when available, a cognate or home-language anchor that connects the new word to what students already know. It is a temporary support that is gradually released as students build the independent word-learning strategies and academic register that let them encounter new vocabulary on their own.

Peer interaction is a planned, structured scaffold in which emergent bilingual students work in pairs or small groups to talk, reason, and produce language together around academic content. Rather than treating talk as incidental, the teacher engineers purposeful interaction (partner talk, structured discussion protocols, collaborative tasks, jigsaws) so students hear comprehensible academic language from peers and produce their own. The interaction is the learning event: as students negotiate meaning and "language" their way through a problem together, they refine both content understanding and their developing English. The support draws on students' full linguistic repertoires, including their home language, and is gradually faded from heavily structured turn-taking toward independent, sophisticated collaboration as proficiency grows.

Adapted writing tasks with scaffolding keep the same grade-level content and cognitive demand of a writing assignment while adding temporary, structured supports that let emergent bilingual (EB) students show what they know and stretch into more sophisticated academic writing. Scaffolds may include modeled and jointly constructed texts, sentence and paragraph frames, word and phrase banks, graphic organizers, annotated mentor (exemplar) texts, checklists or rubrics in student-friendly language, and invited use of the home language for planning and drafting. The defining feature is that the supports are deliberately faded as students gain proficiency, so the goal is independent grade-level writing, not a permanently easier task. This is a support for accessing rigorous writing, not a reduction of expectations.

This support pairs a deliberate, meaning-bearing body movement (a hand sign, an iconic motion, a short sequence of actions) with a target academic word, phrase, or concept so that students encode the idea through both language and the body at the same time. The teacher models a gesture, students perform it as they say or hear the term, and the movement becomes a retrieval cue students can call up during recall, discussion, and assessment. The approach draws on Total Physical Response and embodied-cognition research. Gestures that clearly depict the concept (for example, hands spreading apart for "expand") are a reliable default, and the research evidence indicates that even less obviously iconic gestures can aid memory as long as the gesture is consistent, is not easily confused with other gestures in use, and the number of target terms stays small. Gestures are a scaffold layered onto rich, comprehensible content, and they are gradually faded as the academic language stabilizes in students' independent production.

Modeling is an instructional scaffold in which the teacher demonstrates both the process and the product of a task before emergent bilingual (EB) students attempt it. The teacher shows rather than only tells, making the academic language and the thinking visible through worked examples, think-alouds, gestures, annotated exemplars, and step-by-step demonstrations. Because EB students can often comprehend a demonstrated task before they can produce the language to describe it, modeling lowers the language demand of understanding what to do while keeping cognitive and grade-level expectations high. It is a temporary support that is gradually released as students internalize the routine and the language.

A targeted oral-language scaffold in which the teacher explicitly models, segments, and gives students structured practice with the spoken form of high-utility academic and content vocabulary (for example, photosynthesis, denominator, hypothesis, simile). It treats the spoken form of a word as one component a learner needs in order to fully know it, alongside the word's meaning and use (Nation, 2001), and it draws on students' existing phonological knowledge in their home language, including cognate sound patterns, as a resource for noticing and producing the new term. The goal is intelligibility and confident participation in academic talk, not accent reduction; a student's accent is a normal feature of bilingual speech and is never treated as a deficit to correct (Derwing & Munro, 2005).

Linguistic simplification means the teacher temporarily reduces the linguistic load of a text the student has not encountered before, so its key ideas become accessible while the student is still building English. The teacher keeps the grade-level concepts and core academic vocabulary intact but adjusts the language that carries them: shorter sentences, high-frequency synonyms for low-frequency words, explicit connectors, and one idea per sentence. It is an access scaffold for unfamiliar input, not a permanent rewrite or a watering-down of content, and it works best when paired with elaboration (adding clarifying definitions, examples, and redundancy) rather than only stripping language away. As the student's proficiency grows, the scaffold is faded so the student engages the original, more complex academic text.

This support provides a brief spoken translation, in the student's home language, of new or unfamiliar vocabulary as it comes up in instruction. A teacher, bilingual paraprofessional, peer, or language-matched partner says the home-language equivalent of a key word so the student can map the new English form onto a concept they already hold. It is a bridging scaffold that draws on the student's existing first-language knowledge to make English input understandable, and it is gradually faded as the student builds an English label for concepts they already understand. It works best when paired with a visual, gesture, or example so meaning is anchored in more than one channel.

Grade-level texts means giving emergent bilingual (EB) students the same rigorous, grade-appropriate reading materials their peers use, rather than routinely substituting simplified or below-grade texts. It is best understood not as a single accommodation but as the destination of a scaffolding continuum: educators "amplify, not simplify" the text by surrounding it with temporary supports (visuals, glossed vocabulary, partner reading, first-language resources) that are progressively faded as English proficiency grows. The text stays at grade level; what changes over time is the amount of scaffolding the student needs to access it. By the High Intermediate and Advanced levels, most EBs read grade-level texts with the same supports available to all students.

Complex sentence stems are academic sentence starters and partial frames that prompt students to express higher-order thinking, such as analyzing, evaluating, hypothesizing, and synthesizing, in extended academic discourse. Unlike basic fill-in-the-blank frames, these stems open with academic connectors and cue more complex grammar (subordination, conditional reasoning, hedged stance), then leave the bulk of the idea for the student to generate. They serve as a temporary linguistic bridge that lets emergent bilinguals make their thinking visible in academic English while they are still building the English forms to package it. The support is intentionally lightweight, and responsibility for producing the structures is gradually handed over to the student.

This support introduces a small, carefully selected set of specialized or uncommon academic terms before students meet them in a text, lecture, lab, or task, so that an unfamiliar word does not block access to grade-level content. The focus is on low-frequency words that carry disciplinary meaning, including discipline-specific Tier 3 terms (for example, photosynthesis, denominator, federalism) and abstract general-academic Tier 2 words that rarely occur in casual talk (for example, analyze, derive, infer). Pre-teaching front-loads meaning, pronunciation, morphology, and connections to what students already know, including cognates and concepts named in the home language, so students build background knowledge before the lesson rather than decoding new words and new content at the same time.

Assigning emergent bilingual students the same grade-level writing assignments their English-proficient peers complete, with the same content expectations, genres, and rubrics. This is best understood not as adding a scaffold but as the planned fading of scaffolds: the point on the writing-proficiency continuum where a student writes to grade-level standards with little or no linguistic support, drawing on their full bilingual repertoire. The cognitive demand and academic content stay constant; what changes is the gradual release of linguistic supports such as sentence frames, bilingual glossaries, and structured outlines as the student's English writing develops the academic register the task requires.

A targeted scaffold in which the teacher temporarily reduces the construct-irrelevant language load of only the most linguistically dense academic texts, so emergent bilingual students can reach the same grade-level concepts as their peers. The teacher trims unfamiliar idioms, low-frequency non-content vocabulary, long embedded clauses, passive constructions, and ambiguous pronoun reference, while deliberately preserving the disciplinary content, the key academic vocabulary, and the cognitive rigor of the task. It is a precision tool, not a blanket rewrite: the goal is to amplify access to challenging ideas, never to lower the content. As proficiency grows, the support is faded so students engage increasingly with unmodified, authentic grade-level text.