Between 1990 and 2010, the English language learner (ELL) population in U.S. schools grew by 80 percent. While the highest concentration of English language learners, now more commonly referred to as emergent bilinguals (EBLs) remains in the traditional immigrant destination states of California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey, in all 50 states there are growing numbers of emergent bilinguals. Interest in these learners has encouraged research and publications, but most of this research has centered on the students themselves and the politics surrounding their education. Publications featuring the research of teacher educators preparing teachers to work with EBLs in schools are much needed. Teacher educators must know how to help inservice teachers provide effective instruction to the increasing number of linguistically diverse students in the schools.

Teacher educators need to be able to not only teach preservice teachers how to teach language arts, math, social studies, or science, but also to teach the language their students need to talk, read, and write about these subjects. Despite this need, there is a lack of research on how best to prepare preservice teachers to teach emergent bilinguals. In this book, teacher educators from institutions across the U.S. report their research with preservice teachers in large cities, suburban communities, and rural border areas. In each chapter, the authors explain what they have learned as they have conducted research on education for preservice teachers who will teach emergent bilinguals in mainstream, bilingual, and ESL.

Plain and simple: until our English learners have equitable access to the curriculum, they'll continue to struggle with subject area content. And if you're relying on add-on's to fit in from your language arts basal or a supplementary program, Mary Soto, David Freeman, and Yvonne Freeman are here to equip you with much more effective, efficient, and engaging strategies for helping your English learners read and write at grade level. One assurance right from the start: Mary, David, and Yvonne are not suggesting you reinvent your curriculum. Instead, Equitable Access for English Learners, Grades K-6, focuses on how to fortify foundational practices already in place. First, you'll learn more about the Equitable Access Approach, then it's time to dive into the book's four units of study. Drawing on each unit's many strategies, you'll discover how to apply them to any unit in your own language arts curriculum and start differentiating: How to draft and implement language objectives to help English learners meet academic content standards How to make instructional input comprehensible, including translanguaging strategies that draw on your students' first languages when you don't know how to speak them How to utilize the characteristics of text to support readers, along with a rubric for determining a text's cultural relevance How to build students' academic content knowledge and develop academic language proficiency Each unit addresses a commonly taught topic in today's language arts programs and comes with ready-to-go review and preview activities, key strategies, grade-level adaptations, reflection exercises, and printable online resources. Taken as a whole, they constitute an all-new approach for providing that equitable and excellent access our English learners so rightfully deserve. "When you adopt our Equitable Access Approach, your students will not only thrive, they'll also find your language arts curriculum much more meaningful and engaging." -Mary Soto, David E. Freeman, and Yvonne S. Freeman