Teaching English learners (ELs) requires a bit of finesse and a lot of differentiation. We tend to think of English learners as one homogenous group, but in reality one EL is not like the other. English learners are an incredibly diverse group and have wide-ranging needs in the classroom. All students with the “English learner” label are similar in that they are all in the process of acquiring academic English skills. However, that’s where the similarities end. Even though al

Some of us were born to be biliterate. The road was paved for us since birth with some mix of: expectation from our family to maintain/add a language other than English (I’ll call this a LOTE from here on out, because we educators love acronyms), opportunities to travel or interact with speakers of LOTEs, and programs that valued multilingualism and fostered LOTE learning in our schools or communities. Others of us had to bust out a metaphorical machete and hack our own path