The California Department of Education has published a guide with effective practices for educating English-language learners with chapters written by many of the best-known researchers in the field. The flier for the book, Improving Education for English Learners: Research-Based Approaches, describes it as “an anchor publication to assist school districts in the design, implementation, and evaluation of programs for English-learners.”
I’ll try to get my hands on a copy of the book and tell you more about what’s in it, but for now, I’ll just pass along what I’ve learned in the book’s promotional materials.
Diane August and Timothy Shanahan, who edited a report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 2006, have written a chapter for the California-sponsored guide about effective literacy instruction for ELLs. Jana Echevarria and Deborah Short, two of the creators of the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol, used widely across the nation as a professional development model for teaching ELLs, have written a chapter about how to modify instruction for ELLs.
Other prominent ELL scholars whom the California Department of Education invited to write chapters for the book include Kate Kinsella, Claude Goldenberg, Kathryn Lindholm-Leary, and Fred Genesee.