EDU-EDU8611 - Classroom Writing Strategies for ELL Students

Course Description

This teacher professional development course will help you understand the importance of providing explicit writing support for your English Language Learners (ELLs). This course will teach you how to support students through three different phases of the writing process: before, during, and after writing. You will learn explicit strategies to teach your ELL students to help improve their proficiency, and you will review examples of these ELL strategies in action. You will leave the course able to design and implement comprehensive writing lessons that you can administer to your ELLs. The course also comes with various graphic organizers, student support resources, trackers, and planning documents so that you have everything you need to properly implement the course concepts.

Course Outline

• The importance of supporting writing in ELLs
• Appropriate writing strategies to implement in your classroom to support ELL students through all stages of the writing process
• How to monitor and assess ELL student growth in writing

• About the Before Writing Stage
• Considerations for generating appropriate writing prompts for ELL students
• Vocabulary strategies to support the vocabulary development of your ELLs
• How to use graphic organizers to support your ELL students with the planning process

• About the During Writing Stage
• Strategies such as buddy writing and interactive writing that are great ways to improve the writing fluency and confidence of ELLs
• That exposing students to quality mentor texts and providing them with sentence stems or frames are excellent ways to scaffold the process of writing

• About the After Writing Stage
• That ELL students need specific instruction in how to revise and edit their work
• That self-reflection and peer-revising/editing are two strategies teachers can implement to scaffold their ELL students' post-writing process
• That publishing a writing piece can take on many forms, but should always be a source of pride and celebrated for all students

• How to monitor and assess the progress of your ELLs
• That Can Do Checklists, student reflections, writing conferences, and student portfolios are excellent ways to track student progress
• That progress can be monitored over time with a detailed progress monitoring documentation tool

• How to choose the most appropriate strategies for your students, based on student needs and your instructional goals
• Why it is so important to constantly evaluate your strategy choices

• Using the sample provided, build a writing lesson for your English Language Learners.

• Get ideas on how to implement the concepts into your classroom, find a list of online resources about English Language Learners, and read the research behind supporting writing in English Language Learners.

Learner Outcomes

• Understand ELLs and their typical struggles in writing
• Analyze strategies for the "Before Writing," "During Writing," and "After Writing" stages, including vocabulary strategies, writing prompts, and the use of graphic organizers in the planning process
• Evaluate how to assess and monitor the progress of ELLs in writing, including tools such as Can-Do Checklists, student reflections, writing conferences, and student portfolios
• Design a plan of action using the most appropriate strategies for your students based on student needs and your instructional goals

Notes