1. Tonya Ward Singer’s EL Excellence Every Day: The Flip-To Guide for Differentiating Academic Literacy
This book has some of the best teaching tools in language and literacy. Just flip to that strategy you want to learn or that literacy goal you want to reach for a wealth of ready-to-use resources to actively engage learners, build academic language, and strategically support literacy instruction.
2. Diane Staehr Fenner and Sydney Snyder’s Unlocking English Learners’ Potential: Strategies for Making Content Accessible
If you’re looking for a single resource to help your ELs meet the same challenging content standards as their English proficient peers, just dip into this toolbox of strategies, examples, templates, and activities from EL authorities Fenner and Snyder. It even supports teachers across all experience levels.
3. Margo Gottlieb and Mariana Castro’s Language Power: Key Uses for Accessing Content
This is a K–8 teacher’s playbook on the critical role academic language plays in content learning and student achievement. Gottlieb and Castro distill the complexities of language learning to four key uses, offering concrete pathways for students to probe the interplay between language and content, then demonstrate knowledge and understanding.
4. Andrea Honigsfeld and Maria Dove’s Collaborating for English Learners: A Foundational Guide to Integrated Practices, Second Edition
When EL specialists and general ed teachers pool their expertise, your ELs’ language development and content mastery will improve exponentially. This starter guide offers new insight into what exemplary teacher collaboration looks like, which frameworks to establish, and how integrated approaches to ELD benefit all stakeholders.
5. Jeff Zwiers and Sara Hamerla’s K-3 Guide to Academic Conversations: Practices, Scaffolds, and Activities
A professional resource for building your primary students’ content mastery, oral language, and interpersonal communication at the same time, with a multitude of tools for building key conversation skills such as active listening, taking turns, posing ideas, clarifying, supporting with examples, and arguing.
