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“It’s Just Really Relevant to Them”: One School District’s Efforts to Teach English Learning Arts Credit-Bearing Newcomer English for Speakers of Other Languages Courses

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Teaching English Language Arts to English Language Learners

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Abstract

This chapter explores the efforts of one school district to design and teach credit-bearing newcomer curricula that aligned with Common Core English language arts (ELA) Standards so that newcomer English language learners (ELLs) would have the opportunity to graduate from high school in four years. This curriculum enrolls ELLs in an ELA course sequence that scaffolds students into the expectations of the mainstream ELA curriculum. The findings from this study inform the kinds of decisions that other schools and districts must make to provide the strongest possible foundation for growing numbers of secondary newcomers. This study also has implications for structuring ELA teacher education in ways that help ELA teachers to support the growing numbers of ELLs in their content-area courses.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Megan Madigan Peercy

  2. Prince George’s County Public Schools, Upper Marlboro, MD, USA

    Maria Joie Austria

Authors
  1. Megan Madigan Peercy
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  2. Maria Joie Austria
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, USA

    Luciana de Oliveira

  2. Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

    Melanie Shoffner

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© 2016 The Author(s)

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Peercy, M.M., Austria, M.J. (2016). “It’s Just Really Relevant to Them”: One School District’s Efforts to Teach English Learning Arts Credit-Bearing Newcomer English for Speakers of Other Languages Courses. In: de Oliveira, L., Shoffner, M. (eds) Teaching English Language Arts to English Language Learners. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59858-5_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59858-5_11

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-59857-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-59858-5

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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