Teaching English Learners: Language, Literacy, and Equity for English Learners

I'd like to close just thinking about that English learners need opportunities. They need opportunities to read texts, but they have to have had those foundational skills, the foundational skills of phonological awareness and phonics. They must build their fluency while we're always working on vocabulary and comprehension. You must be a language teacher. Bring in those cross-linguistic connections. You can do this. You are a teacher. It's up to you to do this work. And just because you don't know, you don't know that home language, it's okay. You can know something about its structure and its connections because you're going to be teaching English and you're going to be teaching English language and English literacy skills in everything that you do. Every teacher is a language teacher. Whether I teach language arts, whether I teach science, whether I teach math, you're a language teacher. You're a literacy teacher. And the only way to get to those high levels of content knowledge is to be a good reader. And as we think about our future, we will depend on these children. We will depend on our youth. They're our future leaders, and they're smart. They just need you to teach them in the way that they learn. And you must use their language, they're home language as an advantage. It's an asset. I'm bilingual and biliterate, and I get to do this talk today because of that asset.