After analyzing demographic data from the 2000 census, demographer Harold Hodgkinson (2003) found that almost 9 million U.S. children between the ages of 5 and 17 speak a language other than English at home, and a full 2.6 million of them do not speak English well. Hodgkinson estimated that in 2000, almost half a million children under the age of 5 were being raised in homes where no English was spoken at all. At least 125,000 of these children were likely to need special help in preschool and kindergarten in order to learn to speak and read English. If they do not get that help in their early years (and often they do not), it will be up to our elementary school teachers to teach academic content as well as proficiency in English. As many of you already know, this is not an easy task.

English language learners (ELLs) may once have been viewed as “belonging” to English as a second language (ESL) staff, but now, due to changing laws and policies, they are in every classroom in the school, making the job of teaching that much more challenging. Most elementary classroom teachers have not been trained to help students master content standards and language standards, as ELLs must do. Although many of you have probably already turned to colleagues, books, the Internet, and other resources for help, you are still essentially on your own in learning how to help your ELLs succeed.

We have written this book to specifically provide you with strategies and tactics designed to address the needs of ELLs. Using the research from Classroom Instruction That Works (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001)—itself a summary of findings from over 100 studies—we review nine categories of research-based instructional strategies that strongly affect student achievement. We examine these strategies in depth, and also look at the existing research on modifying these strategies for use with ELLs. When no relevant research exists on a given strategy, we rely on the generalizations from the research and the classroom recommendations from Classroom Instruction That Works. To that we add professional wisdom that comes from our experiences as ESL teachers and trainers.

This book has two goals. The first is to provide you, the mainstream classroom teacher, with background knowledge on instructional strategies and practices that have been positively linked to student achievement. The second is to show you how these strategies can be modified to help ELLs acquire content and language skills. We sincerely hope this book will help make the job of reaching and teaching your steadily increasing population of ELLs less difficult and more rewarding.