The team of English-language learner experts assembled by Stanford University education professor Kenji Hakuta to create resources for teaching the common-core standards to ELLs launched its Understanding Language website today.
The Understanding Language initiative has multiple aims: to help teachers and administrators fully appreciate the central role of language in the more-rigorous new standards that have been adopted by all but four states and to provide resources to educators to make sure that they are equipped to deliver the type of instruction that ELLs will need to fully access the more-demanding content.
Professor Hakuta and his colleagues launched the site with the publication of 13 papers that examine a variety of issues related to language and literacy in the content areas of the common-core standards, as well as the Next Generation Science Standards. Short videos with authors of the papers are also presented.
There’s a lot here to spend time poring over, and, in the project’s next phase, the team will publish practical guides for educators to draw on. Those guides will offer “exemplars” of language-rich practices in the content areas.