The editors of a much-referenced review of research on teaching literacy to English-language learners will be guests for an upcoming Webinar on that topic about three weeks from now, hosted by WestEd. If your school district has cut your travel budget for teachers to attend national conferences about ELLs, this may be the way to go.
Diane August, a senior research scientist for the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics, and Timothy Shanahan, a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, will provide information on the Webinar—scheduled for Oct. 27, 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m., Eastern time—about effective research-based approaches to teaching ELLs reading and writing. They are the editors of Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 2006.
For the Webinar, they’ll be focusing on approaches that they wrote about in a chapter of a more recent publication, a guide released by the California Department of Education this year, Improving Education for English Learners: Research-Based Approaches. On this blog, I’ve featured a chapter from that book about instruction of ELLs in secondary schools.
WestEd has five additional Webinars planned with authors of chapters in the California guide as guests. The live events are scheduled through February.