Strategies for emergent bilingual students

Explicit lessons on grammar, vocabulary, and language features.

Using bilingual text and classroom labels to connect home language and English.

Planned opportunities for students to use all their languages to support learning.

Consistent structures that reduce anxiety and support transitions.

Small-group structures with shared goals and accountability.

Intentional grouping for peer-supported learning.

Categorizing words or concepts to identify relationships.

Exploring cultural perspectives, practices, and texts.

Activities designed for different learning strengths and preferences.

Quick formative checks to gauge comprehension during instruction.

Cutting apart and rearranging written sentences to understand structure.

Using physical objects to model concepts and vocabulary.

Using real objects to support understanding and vocabulary.

Activities that include family language and knowledge in learning.

Intentionally sequencing strategies across a lesson or unit.

Planning that includes both content and language objectives.

Tiered supports adjusted for language proficiency.

Focused small-group or one-on-one instruction.

Pairing movement with language to build meaning.

Using familiar language patterns with slight variations.

Pairing content goals with explicit language goals for each lesson.

Teaching students cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies.

Presentations that use text, visuals, audio, and video.

Interactive games requiring students to use language to accomplish tasks.

Teacher demonstration with clear, structured language.

Students read, talk with a partner, then share with the class.

Students summarize group work to the class.

Students act out texts to internalize vocabulary and meaning.

Structured talk routines that develop academic discourse.

Charts documenting what students know, want to know, and learn.

Multidisciplinary projects that apply content and language together.

Questions at varying complexity levels for differentiation.

Pre-lesson visuals or structures that activate prior knowledge and preview key concepts.

Multiple readings of a complex text to understand structure, vocabulary, and meaning.

Identifying connecting words that reveal relationships between ideas.

Students make sense of a text together through discussion and questioning.

Analyzing a small section of text to understand meaning deeply.

Self-selected reading to build fluency, vocabulary, and motivation.

Rereading the same text to build fluency.

Small-group reading at students' instructional level with teacher support.

Pre-reading activities that activate knowledge and preview texts.

Students dictate experiences that become co-created texts for reading.

Brief introduction and review of key concepts to reinforce learning.

Using visuals, gestures, modeling, and clear speech to make input understandable.

Classroom stations where students work independently or collaboratively.

Short summaries capturing the main idea of a passage.

Selecting digital tools that match learners' language proficiency and accessibility needs.

Visual tools that organize information and relationships between ideas.

Using images, diagrams, and visuals to support understanding.

Students compare features of concepts or words using charts to identify patterns.

Filling in missing words in a text using context clues.

Using words that look or sound similar across languages to infer meaning.

Students gather new words from texts and categorize or analyze them.

Using gestures or movement to learn verbs.

Using new vocabulary in role-plays or dialogues.

Students move, sort, and connect words on a visually rich word wall.

Students maintain bilingual glossaries with definitions and examples.

Sentence frames, models, organizers, and structured writing tasks.

Structured sentence beginnings that support academic language use.

Teacher and students jointly compose text with shared responsibility.