Tomorrow afternoon, two prominent language-acquisition scholars will be my guests in an edweek.org webinar that will focus on helping educators prepare for teaching the Common Core State Standards to English-language learners.
Kenji Hakuta, a Stanford University education professor, and George C. Bunch, an associate education professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will present on how the new English/language arts and literacy standards can be fully accessed by all English-learners, regardless of their proficiency levels.
The presentation will include details from a middle school English/language arts unit that Bunch and others ELL experts created and piloted in three districts this spring. The unit was designed to show how reading complex, informational texts, and writing arguments—a key requirement in the common core&mdash&can be used with ELLs to deepen their learning of content as well as language.
Hakuta and Bunch are part of the Understanding Language initiative at Stanford University, a group of ELL experts who are developing an array of open-source resources on the common core and English-learners for educators. Hakuta co-chairs the initiative; Bunch is the chair of the English/language arts and literacy work group.
Register for the free, hour-long webinar on the edweek.org site. The presentation will start promptly at 3 p.m. Eastern.