Long-Term Success for Experienced Multilinguals

by Tan Huynh, Beth Skelton

Overview

Affirm the linguistic, cultural, and experiential assets that multilinguals bring into the classroom.

Now is the time to push past the limits of the long-term English learner (LTEL) label and embrace a new way of honoring secondary multilinguals’ valuable life experiences and academic potential. By focusing on experienced multilinguals’ strengths and what teachers can do, you’ll discover new avenues for teaching the academic language skills required for them to process content lessons and clearly communicate discipline-specific ideas.

This concise guide presents an easy-to-implement cross-curricular instructional framework specifically designed for secondary content teachers. Practical, research-based, and classroom-tested this book includes:

• Four essential actions that foster the conditions for experienced multilinguals to reach the highest grade-level content and language proficiency
• Specific strategies with “try it out” prompts to encourage implementation
• Templates and anchor charts for structuring lessons
• Vignettes and stories from both the student and teacher perspective

There is nothing lacking with experienced multilinguals. All they need are the right conditions to unlock their potential—so they can express themselves as the mathematicians, scientists, historians, writers, and artists they know themselves to be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781071891278
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Publication date:	05/25/2023
Pages:	264
Sales rank:	127,924
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Tan Huynh (he/him) (tankhuynh.com) is a career international school teacher, consultant, and author specializing in secondary multilinguals and teacher collaboration. Coming to America as a refugee at the age of 5, Tan vividly remembers the difficulties of acquiring a new language and integrating in American culture while nurturing his Asian roots. This experience is the main engine that drives his work today. At school, he spends most of his time collaborating with teachers and in content-area classes to make content accessible. The rest of the time is spent teaching English language and literacy skills. Outside of school, Tan often presents internationally to schools and districts to support their work with multilingual students. Tan also hosts a blog, online courses, and a podcast about teaching multilinguals. With whatever time is left, Tan likes to work out, play badminton, and get lost in nature with his dog child. You can collaborate with Tan at [e-mail] and @Tan KHuynh on Twitter.

Beth Skelton (she/her) (www.bethskelton.com) is an independent consultant focused on creating equitable educational experiences for multilingual learners. She has been working in the field for over three decades teaching elementary, middle, high school and adult language learners in urban, suburban, rural, and international settings. As a university exchange student to Germany, Beth experienced firsthand the challenges that experienced multilinguals face when studying new content in their non-heritage language. She could communicate with peers, but still needed additional scaffolds to successfully write formal papers, read academic texts, and comprehend dense lectures. This influential experience still informs her work with students, teachers, schools, and districts around the world. Through workshops, coaching, and consulting, she advocates for all multilingual learners, especially those who have years of experience. Beth also enjoys hiking, skiing, yoga, playing marimba, gardening, and spending time with her family. You can connect with Beth by email at [e-mail] or on Twitter at @easkelton.

Table of Contents

Foreword by James Cummins
Chapter One: An Affirming Shift
Chapter 2: Instructional Framework for Experienced Multilinguals
Chapter 3: Starting with Summative Assessments
Chapter 4: Writing Integrated Objectives
Chapter 5: Establishing Comprehensible Input
Chapter 6: Structuring Discipline-Specific Output
Chapter 7: Collaborating for Long-Term Success

Editorial Reviews

Long-term Success for Experienced Multilinguals is a treasure of strategies designed to address inequities in ESL education, yet as a bonus, these strategies are ideal for struggling students as well. These strategies can be combined in numerous ways for a variety of lesson plans that can easily be changed as the students’ skill levels increase so that all students can be successful.

Toni Ramey

The book is full of so many valuable resources and plans for how to improve teaching and learning. I wish all teachers I work with would read it and implement the strategies.

Erika Chapman

I think that this may be the only practical guide written to truly help the teacher of Experienced Multilinguals and provide resources that support and help Experienced Multilinguals progress and flourish. The authors guide teachers through planning, through collaborating, through revising lessons, and through resources.

Patricia Payne

"Absolutely LOVE and APPRECIATE this book - it offers such practical guidance and thought-provoking mic-drop moments from the authors. Skelton and Huynh help us to flip the script when serving experienced multilingual students. The graphics by Jen Giffen capture big moments of the text that we can take away to our colleagues and teammates. The content of the book is very digestible, and there are so many great graphics that accompany the message. "

Carly Spina

Every student has a right to see themselves as capable, independent learners. This text provides teachers with practical strategies, scaffolds, and structures to create perfect conditions for experienced multilinguals' long-term success.

Renee Nealon

From the first few sentences, readers can see that the authors know our students and their needs. They understand characteristics of today’s students, their strengths, and what they truly struggle with. The vignettes could be my students, my schools and my teachers. The authors understand how schools are structured and provide realistic next steps for teachers to put recent impactful language development research into effective practice.

Jessica Martinez

Tan Huynh and Beth Skelton have created a resource that will increase academic success for experienced multilingual students, certainly a must-have for all educators. The importance and relevancy of the book is incredibly timely and desperately needed in the field of education. The book is very practical and reflects the reality of language services for ML students as well as a realistic lens of the professional learning needs of general education teachers today as well as leadership. The “From the field” are incredibly realistic and should assist teachers to move away from a negative mindset towards ML students.

Alice Collins

This is a visually inviting book with strengths-based approaches for enhancing the success of experienced multilingual learners! Targeted for middle and secondary content area teachers in the U.S. and international schools, the authors’ metaphorical instructional framework is easily relatable and applicable across contexts. Filled with instructional strategies and examples designed to boost experienced multilingual learners’ access to grade-level content, this book is a convincing testament of how teachers can adopt an asset-based mindset toward experienced multilinguals.

Margo Gottlieb

Long Term Success for Experienced Multilinguals will make a great addition to schools’ professional development libraries. Considering the growth in student population that now fall under the category of LTEL, the book makes a great case for changing to an asset-based name and definition, while explaining clearly how to implement a new framework for instruction and assessment planning. The ideas presented in the framework are clear and structured in an easy way to follow and implement.

Altagracia H. Delgado

I love the term experienced multilinguals as it honors the spirit of what students can do with their assets and talents that were not given opportunities to flourish. This term would alert teachers that experienced multilinguals need new challenges, social emotional attention, and a change from the 'traditional language and literacy' approaches that have not worked for them and other multilinguals.

Dr. Margarita Calderon