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Some school districts are trying to figure out how to apply Response to Intervention, an approach for providing help to struggling students that's gotten lots of attention in the field of special education, to English-language learners. The Center for Research on the Educational Achievement and Teaching of English-Language Learners, or CREATE, has published a brief summarizing the latest research on RTI for ELLs.

I previewed this brief in an earlier blog post featuring the work of Jana Echevarria, a special education professor at California State University who is examining how RTI can be used with ELLs. Now that the brief has been published, I can share it with you on this blog.

CREATE has also published a research brief on how to use sheltered English-instruction techniques in science classes for middle school students. The brief explores how to apply the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol, or SIOP, a popular approach for tailoring instruction to ELLs, especially to science lessons.

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Jesuit Refugee Services/USA has designed a free curriculum to teach high school students about refugee and migration issues. The lessons are intended to help students explore issues such as why people are forcibly displaced from their homes and how the United States and the world as a whole have responded, or haven't responded, to refugees.

Frankly, this is the first curriculum on refugee and migration issues that's ever come across my desk. The recommended books and reports accompanying the curriculum could provide opportunities for both teachers and students to learn more about displaced people, many of whom are in our schools here in the United States.

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Pamela Spycher, who directs WestEd's English-learners and language arts project, will be giving a Webinar on Aug. 20 about how to teach academic language to English-language learners in grades K-8. It's scheduled to take place from 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern Time. You can sign up here.

If you miss the Aug. 20 event, you can later pull up the Webinar from WestEd's archives.

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As teachers think about returning to the their classrooms for another school year, they may want to consider whether they are providing a welcoming environment for English-language learners. Scholastic and Colorin colorado each have practical ideas for how to help ELLs feel comfortable in the classroom. (Hat tip to Examiner.com.)

Among the tips for teachers are to learn students' names (it can take concentration to learn some ELLs' names if they are from a culture different from one's own), create classroom library collections in students' native languages, and post a visual daily schedule.

The tip sheets aren't new, but they haven't gone out of date.

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The National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition is churning out Webinars about English-language learners these days. I've already promoted one about testing little kids in English-language proficiency, scheduled for this coming Monday, June 15, 2 p.m., Eastern time. Sign up here.

A couple of others are planned as well for this month:

June 16, 2 p.m., Eastern time. "Participation and Performance of English-Learners in the National Assessment of Educational Progress." Register here.

June 18, 2 p.m., Eastern time. "Making Tests Fair for English-Language Learners." Sign up here.

Update: Here's one more:

June 19, 2 p.m., Eastern time. "Academic Language in Secondary-Level Standards and Classrooms." Sign up here.

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Would you like to see California's home-language survey for identifying students who speak a language other than English? How about Arizona's waiver form for parents who want to request that their children be removed from "sheltered English immersion?" Anyone want to read New Jersey's bilingual education code?

I found each of these documents with a few quick searches using a database of the Language Portal, run by the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, which is an arm of the Migration Policy Institute.

According to a promotional e-mail I just got for Language Portal, the Web site has more than 1,000 resources for teachers or administrators who work with ELLs or their parents. It has school district plans for such students and sample translated report cards and parent-notification forms.

In my searches, I typed in the name of a state and selected the keyword of "English-language learner." I requested "all" documents in English.

I wasn't able to pull up any documents from Illinois with that search, and I pulled up only one for Texas. A message on the site says the database is dependent on the availability of documents from states. I'll have to see in the coming weeks how consistently I can pull up documents that I need for reporting. But it seems that at least for some states, it will be easier to use Language Portal rather than stepping out into the big wide world of the Internet to find them.

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WestEd has published a guidebook, "Making Mathematics Accessible to English Learners," designed for teachers who don't have much training in how to teach math to English-language learners. The promotion for the book says it contains rubrics for helping teachers identify language skills at different proficiency levels, as well as sample lesson "scenarios."

Two years ago, WestEd published a guidebook for teaching science to ELLs.

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Ann Harris, an elementary school librarian in Texas, posts a request in the comment section of my last blog entry: what resources are available to help school librarians find Spanish-language or bilingual books for children? After all, she writes, "I cannot talk students into a book that does not look interesting, no matter the quality."

She's found one good source, Isabel Schon's International San Diego Library site, but would like to know of more blogs or web sites that have reviews of Spanish-language books for children and youths.

Can anyone help her out? I'm curious, too, to know what advice is available, so offer your ideas here in the comment section.

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Over at my other blog, Curriculum Matters, I've written about Word Generation: Middle School Literacy Development Using Academic English, a new Web tool with resources for teaching "academic language." That is the words, abstract phrases, and grammatical structures students need to know to understand school subjects. Before I browsed the resources in this tool, frankly, I didn't really realize that it's so important to explicitly teach academic English to all students, not just ELLs.

Word Generation seems to have some rich resources that can help educators to crack the mystery of how they can support students to learn the language of school effectively. The sample videos from actual classrooms are particularly captivating.

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The federal government isn't the only entity trying to support educators in implementing instruction for English-language learners that is aligned with English-proficiency standards. Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc., or TESOL, has joined the effort as well by releasing a book, Paper to Practice: Using the TESOL English Language Proficiency Standards in the PreK-12 Classrooms.

In fact, states have developed their own English-proficiency standards, many of which don't look exactly like the TESOL standards. But I presume both officials in the federal government and members of TESOL figure the same general principles for implementation apply to whatever set of English-proficiency standards a state uses, or they wouldn't have bothered to publish national guides on the subject.

Nineteen states have adopted the same English-language-proficiency standards in that they are members of the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment consortium, and as members they use the same standards and assessment, Access for ELLs.

Virginia, which is a member of WIDA, has developed its own resources to help educators to use those standards in the classrooms. The state has produced a set of videos in which teachers talk about lessons they've taught to convey specific standards. I was a little disappointed to find the videos don't capture actual classroom scenes, but they still present lots of practical ideas.

It seems that people in the field pretty much accept standards-based instruction for ELLs as an improvement over the ad hoc approach of not too many years ago, when many school districts didn't have a curriculum for ELLs and teachers selected their own materials and decided what skills to stress.

Is there anyone out there who feels that it's a mistake for the field to move in this standards-based direction?

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