Asset-Based Language and Literacy
The Flip-To Guide to Multilingual Learner Excellence in the Core
Second Edition of EL Excellence Every Day
Asset-Based Language and Literacy is the essential guide for K–12 teachers to ensure all students—including multilingual learners (MLs)—thrive with the rigorous content literacy and language demands of school. Building on the proven pedagogy and practical flip-to format of the best-selling first edition, Tonya Ward Singer offers essential updates that help educators center ML assets and deepen collaborative inquiry to ensure MLs belong and thrive in every classroom, every day.
The user-friendly flip-to format and color-coded resources help busy teachers find exactly what they need when they need it. Popular features include:
- Practical strategies for scaffolding language, concepts, and academic literacy in your daily lessons
- Differentiation guides for personalizing instruction to students’ assets and learning priorities
- Effective teaching routines to strengthen student conversations, close reading, and rigorous writing.
- The Six Essentials framework to help teachers, co-teachers, and teams deepen their impact with MLs and all students.
Asset-Based Language and Literacy equips educators with confidence and tools to create high-challenge, high-support learning environments to ensure all students thrive. With a focus on practical research-based strategies, this is your go-to guide for building collective efficacy for every teacher to be an ML teacher!
As an English Language Development (ELD) teacher and professor to rising ELD teachers, I found the updated edition to be extremely helpful and relevant to guiding all staff towards inclusivity when it comes to working with multilingual learners. From starting with the appropriate mindset to ensuring proper scaffolds and strategies are included, this textbook covers a plethora of topics that will be beneficial to anybody who works with Multilingual Learners.
There are lots of books with strategies and lessons, but this book really pushes the rigor and challenge, and it also shows how it can work within the framework of whatever curriculum is being used…I couldn’t help taking notes on ideas I can use now!
Multilingual Learners (MLs) can be found in nearly every classroom, and therefore, there is a need for every teacher to be knowledgeable in strategies that support their academic success. This book emphasizes the fact that all, not just the language acquisition expert, must be a proficient teacher of MLs. The book contains practical, realistic, and useful advice designed to be actionable and directly applicable to teaching. Its "flip-to" organization makes it very helpful for those educators who search for strategies they can quickly apply without reading from cover to cover.
Provides a grounding in language development and needs that teachers will benefit from as they work to serve all the academic and linguistic needs in the classroom.
Overall, this is a very relevant text for all teachers due to the balance it strikes between the importance of recognizing the language assets of Multilingual Learners/English Learners (MLs/ELs), as well as navigating the complex nuances of adjusting language supports and other appropriate scaffolding in the classroom based on the needs of students in the classroom. Tonya Ward Singer comes alongside the reader with an encouraging coaching tone and suggestions for how to grow, no matter how new or experienced you are with serving MLs/ELs and their families.
This book is a much-needed resource to remind us of the critical work we still have to do within many educational arenas. Multilingual Learners are treasured people in our classrooms and communities and as such, now more than ever, must have equitable access to excellence within our schools.
Rooted in deep experience and wisdom, Tonya Ward Singer reminds us that all strategies – whether we ‘use, lose, or adapt’ them – must first be built from a strong foundation of valuing our multilingual students and committing to humble reflection in our practice of serving them.
Written in simple to understand language and with supportive charts and tables.