The ENL Team is devoted to offering resources for educators serving culturally and linguistically diverse students in Catholic schools.
Sign up to receive monthly 15 on the 15th emails
2-Minute Tips
Join us this school year for 2-Minute Tips, the latest installment of the ENL Team's 15 on the 15th resource series. Enjoy a two-minute video treat that will transform your classroom and tweak your technique.
May 2021: Celebrating the Contributions of Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities
In May, we celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. This is a wonderful opportunity to set aside intentional instructional time to honor the ways in which the AAPI community has enriched America's history. In this month's 2-Minute Tip, Dr. Katy Lichon offers three suggestions to help you elevate these communities and celebrate AAPI heritage in your classrooms throughout the calendar year.
Resource referenced in the video: Classroom Community Cultural Inventory
April 2021: Translanguaging: Transforming Classroom Communication
Multilingual students often draw upon more than one language within the same sentence, even creating new words by combining the features of multiple languages. In this month's 2-Minute Tip, Dr. Katy Lichon looks at how educators can leverage this process, known as translanguaging, to foster classroom spaces where students can use the full extent of their knowledge to make meaning.
Article referenced in the video: A Pedagogy of Translanguaging
March 2021: Stories of Strength
For language learners, we know that both language AND culture are incredible sources of strength and are critical to their identities. Helping students recognize and draw upon these invaluable resources, however, is not always easy. In this month's 2-Minute Tip, Itzxul Moreno shares one of her most beloved read-aloud texts—Salsa Stories—which can help guide the practice of family interviews to help students recognize and reflect on the stories of strength in their own lives.
Stories of Strength Resource Guide
February 2021: Celebrating Black History Month with English Learners
One of the core practices of our ENL Hernandez Fellows is cultivating culturally relevant and sustaining classrooms all year long. In February, however, we pay special attention to the history and genius of Black Americans, who have shaped, enriched, and guided our communities and nation for centuries. Today's 2-Minute Tip offers three ideas to celebrate Black History Month in ways that will resonate in immigrant and multilingual communities.
Additional Resources:
- Learning Connections: Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange
- Sena Library link to Niña Bonita read aloud on Youtube
- Niña Bonita English Translation
- Me Llamo Celia read aloud in Spanish with a drummer from the Oregon Symphony
- My Name is Celia read aloud in English by AHEV Library
- Links to Celia on Sesame Street
January 2021: Nurturing Classroom Communities that are Inclusive and Celebratory of Students' Identities
As we begin this second half of the school year, it's important to take the time to re-center your students—and any new students—to the classroom community, even if that community happens to be virtual at this time.As educators, we want to nurture a classroom culture that is inclusive and celebratory of ALL students' identities, and especially those whose identities may be traditionally and historically underrepresented. In today's 2-Minute Tip, Itzxul Moreno provides a few ideas for activities that can help students feel seen and valued in your classroom community.
December 2020: ENL Christmas Blessings
We want to remind you how important it is to honor your need for quiet restoration. This year of all years, teachers need to refill their wellspring. And so, this 2-Minute Tip is our gentle prayer for you and for all teachers in this holy season of rebirth.
Wishing you Advent joy and Christmas blessings from the ENL program!
November 2020: Supporting English Learners through Collaborative Virtual Spaces
It can be challenging to elicit the participation of each of your students in a virtual setting, and it can be especially challenging to ensure that your English learners’ voices are heard. This month's tip takes a closer look at collaborative virtual spaces as a way to provide your ELs a clear space to practice written language, a designated opportunity to share thoughts and ideas, and a visually and linguistically rich environment that can be supported by language scaffolds.
Happy pinning and collaborating!
October 2020: Facilitating Group Interaction and Active Listening in a Virtual Setting
Engaging students in this environment can be challenging, but as educators, it is so important that we create opportunities for participation and oral language production, especially for our English learners.
In this month's video, Clare Roach demonstrates another simple yet effective strategy using the computer's webcam to facilitate group interaction and encourage active listening.
September 2020: Supporting ELs in a Virtual Setting
Virtual learning has been adjustment for all of us, and it can be especially challenging for English learners. With so many teachers still teaching in either a virtual or a hybrid setting, we decided to focus our 2-Minute Tips this year on instructional techniques that help support the language development of English learners in a virtual setting.
In this month's video, watch Clare Roach demonstrate a simple but highly effective technique, using no more than the computer's webcam, that ensures everyone in the class gets the opportunity to share.
May 2020: Taking a Vocabulary Field Trip
This month, we invite you to examine a simple strategy you can integrate into your instructional day to help build the vocabularies of all the students in your classroom, and especially, of course, your English learners.
We call this strategy, "taking a vocabulary field trip."
April 2020: Ensuring eLearning Doesn't Leave English Learners Behind
In this current reality, many educators are rightfully concerned about how to help their English learners through these next few weeks and months of remote learning.
Watch this month's 2-Minute Tip to find out how our ENL team plans to help you navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by eLearning and ensure that English learners don't get left behind.
Check out our series of eLearning blog posts at ace.nd.edu/enl-elearning.
March 2020: The Importance of Building Oracy
Imagine a scenario that you might see in a 5th grade classroom . . .
Friends, please turn to your neighbor and talk about the layers of the Earth that we have been covering in science.
Immediately, you can just see the students chatting away, sharing knowledge, and reinforcing learning right?
But, upon closer examination, you begin to hear a lack of academic vocabulary being used or you begin to see your emergent bilingual students unengaged in this oracy activity.
How might we structure this activity in a way that promotes strong oracy skills? Find out in this month's 2-Minute Tip!
February 2020: Gradual Release of Responsibility Model
How do we build the confidence and independence of all students in our classroom, and especially our English learners, for whom the language load of a lesson is often far greater.
The highly adaptable and repetitive practice of gradual release of responsibility slowly and intentionally transfers the cognitive workload of a lesson from the teacher to the students. In this month's video, learn why this model is particularly beneficial for English learners and how you might incorporate it into your classroom!
January 2020: Supporting Social Relationships for English Learners
In our classrooms, we are taking intentional daily steps to develop the academic language of our students, but we also need to facilitate an equally important language set: social language!
Today we are going to discuss practical ways to help English learners build friendships and strengthen their social language skills.
December 2019: Editing the Writing of English Learners
Writing is both a complex linguistic task and great practice for English learners. Editing the writing of ELs so as to promote the most growth, however, can be challenging.
In this month's 2-Minute Tip, Clare Roach offers a few strategies and things to keep in mind when editing the writing samples of English learners in your classroom.
November 2019: Bringing Language Portraits to Life
This month's topic is intended to help you bring the language portraits of your students’ home language to life.
A home-language survey is a simple tool that can frame your knowledge gathering around the language backgrounds of your students, but it should leave educators wanting to ask more rich, more layered, and more nuanced questions.
So, let’s open our art kit and unpack three questions that can move home language environment from the background to the foreground.
October 2019: Celebrating Multilingualism
Being multilingual is a tremendous gift, but unfortunately, many of the English learners in our classrooms don’t feel this way. How might we change this so that students recognize and embrace their ability to speak another language for the gift that it is?
In this episode, Jenny Dees discusses the many benefits of multilingualism and provides five helpful tips for how we might better celebrate multilingualism in our classrooms.
September 2019: The Value of Name Stories
As you work to establish a learning community that is welcoming of all students, it is important to consider the role of names as cultural anchors in your students’ lives.
In this episode, Itzxul Moreno shares more about why this matters and how you can model a name story activity in your own classroom using a read-aloud.
June 2019: Intermediate Language Fluency
Students in the fourth stage of language acquisition, the intermediate stage, have made immense progress. They are speaking at length, comprehending longer passages, and writing complex sentences with very few grammatical errors. They have so much to be proud of. All of this progress often makes it easy for teachers to mistakenly assume that these students no longer need linguistic supports, but we know that this is far from true. In this month's video, we explore concrete ways in which teachers can continue to push students linguistically and support further growth.
May 2019: Addressing the Third Stage of Language Acquisition
In our previous two segments we've shared strategies for the first and second stages of language acquisition. Today we bridge to the third stage in this process: speech emergence. In this stage, students’ academic and social English is really beginning to surface, specifically, their productive language, or the ability to read and write.
How can we support students in this stage of speech emergence?
Learn how an explicit focus on the function and form of language can really help learners in this third stage of language acquisition thrive in your classroom.
April 2019: Supporting Early Production Stage Learners
The second stage of language acquisition—the Early Production Stage—can be an exciting time, both for students and educators. After having been immersed in English for anywhere from six months to a year, English learners in this stage are beginning to find their voice. They may string together two to three words and even use common phrases, but they are not yet speaking in full sentences.
Children in this stage of early production are taking really big risks to begin using English in the classroom. In this month's 2-Minute Tip, learn how we, as educators, might take some big risks ourselves and change up our teaching styles so as to best support students in this stage of language acquisition.
March 2019: Supporting Pre-Productive Stage Learners
In this month's 2-Minute Tip, learn how you can strategically modify your learning environments to support students in the Pre-Productive stage of language acquisition, allowing them to listen, observe, make meaning, and show you what they are understanding.
February 2019: Group Work
Collaborative group work is an excellent way to strengthen oral language and to assist students in clarifying and organizing their thoughts. In this month's 2-Minute Tip, ENL Coordinator Jenny Dees offers three strategies for incorporating group work into your lesson plans, demonstrating how these simple practices can be particularly beneficial to English language learners.
Watch to learn how you can use these effective strategies to enrich the conversations that your students have in your classroom!
January 2019: Sentence Frames
In January's 2-Minute Tip, ENL Coordinator Clare Roach, explores the use of sentence stems and frames.
Watch to learn more about how this strategy can be used to scaffold instruction, reinforce sentence structure, and build writing stamina for English learners and every student in your classroom!
December 2018: Word Walls
In December's 2-minute tip, ENL Director Katy Lichon walks you through multiple examples of word walls. Watch to learn more about how to maximize your classroom real estate and student language acquisition by making the four walls of your classroom come alive with academic vocabulary.
November 2018: Tiered Vocabulary
In November's tip, ENL Coordinator Jennifer Dees demonstrates how to go beyond the bolded words on behalf of our English learners. Learn more about identifying tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 vocabulary words in your lessons and how this practice can expand access to content for your learners.
October 2018: Making Language Connections
October’s tip shows how you can shift from teaching words in isolation to helping your students be language detectives by recognizing systems in language and the relationship between words.
Dr. Katy Lichon shows you how to provide more "bang for your buck" for your students when it comes to language instruction.
September 2018: Total Physical Response
Vocabulary is the building block of ideas and messages. It's important that we teach vocabulary, and teach it well. The tip for September is an invitation to reimagine your vocabulary acquisition exercises with a strategy called Total Physical Response.
The English Oral Language Assessment is a formative assessment designed to help educators identify English language acquisition in Grades PreK-8. The assessment contains two sections: one that measures receptive language skills and one that measures expressive language skills. The EOLA was developed through a grant from the Sieben Foundation, which enables the assessment tool to be very cost-effective for Catholic schools. Digital files for use with the assessment are made available at 
