Building on What We Know: Best Practices for Engaging Emergent Bilinguals in Learning

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to describe best practices for engaging emergent bilingual students in learning. As more educators across the state of Georgia are working with emergent bilingual students, we have identified several strategies and structures that are recognized as being effective for all students and highlight ways to modify those classroom practices to benefit students who are learning English as an additional language. We describe ways to make language visible (anchor charts, word walls, sentence frames, and sentence stems), as well as effective practices for readers’ workshop. We also recognize that family engagement is critical to student success and provide strategies to enhance school-family connections among culturally and linguistically diverse students and their families. Keywordsteaching strategies, emergent bilinguals, readers’ workshop, family engagement