Quick Tip for English Language Development Teachers

• Download Quick Tip for English Language Development Teachers

Secondary ELD Teachers, check out this week’s ELD Quick Tip! This week you’ll learn a writing strategy that you can use in any ELD class; you’ll also learn about vocabulary lists that Vista recently released for Get Ready.

Strategy to Try: ABC Writing

This writing strategy gives students a framework for writing about texts. Give students the following framework when they are responding to a text:

• Answer the question
• Back it up with a quotation
• Make a Comment or Connection

Give students a frame with sentence starters to help them plan their response. Here’s an example.

• Question: What is the most interesting thing you learned about Mexico from the text?
• Answer: _________ is the most interesting thing about Mexico.

Back it up:

• The author says that ___________ OR
• The author says, “_______________.”
• This means ____________.

Comment:

• This is interesting because _________________.
• This reminds me of ________________.

Examples:

• Get Ready: Start by teaching students in ELD 1 to restate a question in an answer by giving short sentence frames (for example, to answer the question “What is your favorite color?” students should write, “My favorite color is ______.” As students get in this habit, you can add in the back it up and comment portions of this strategy.
• Bridges: Use the questions after the “Bridges to Language Arts” passages as your writing prompts.
• Engage: Use the questions after the “Engage with Language Arts” reading passages as your writing prompts.

Get Ready Vocabulary Lists

Vista has recently released vocabulary lists for all of the units in Get Ready. To access the lists, click the links below:

• Get Ready 6-8 
• Get Ready 9-12 

Bonus! Vista also released a blog post about how to incorporate games to teach vocabulary. 

• Vista Blog Post