District flex sessions for ELL teachers will be offering several ways to enhance instruction in their classrooms through the four domains of language acquisition: reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Our first session, Enhancing Writing in the ELL Classroom, focused on the importance of genre study in the classroom and the research based instructional strategies that you can use to highlight language specific traits of each genre.

The first segment of this presentation focused around the purpose of teaching writing in the ELL classroom with the focus on comparing differences between oral language development and written language development.

To see the powerpoint for that section, click here.

Being purposeful, explicit and intentional in writing requires a study of multiple genres. The genres of personal narrative, expository writing, nonfiction research and poetry were discussed and broken up into a three chart focusing on:

   Why is the strategy good for all students?                                                                                  Why is the strategy good for ELL?                                                                  What would your language objectives be?

To see the results of our discussion, click here.

To see the articles that facilitated the conversations, click here.

We finally provided options for the teachers where they could focus on a research-based strategy that would accentuate the teaching of writing with language learning in mind. Their options were:

Shared Writing and Interactive Writing

            To see the powerpoint and resource materials, click here.

Enhancing writing for authentic audiences through the six traits

            To see the powerpoint and resource materials, click here.