Practical ELD guidance

Articles

• How to Teach Grammar to ELL Students: 15 Practical Activities That Actually Work — Fifteen practical grammar activities that help English learners notice patterns, practice in context, and build real confidence — from a teacher who lives in the ELD classroom.
• How to Teach Verb Tenses to ELLs (Without Drowning Them in Conjugation Charts) — A practical sequence for teaching English verb tenses to multilingual learners — what to teach first, what to skip, and the 12 tenses that actually matter in secondary classrooms.
• The 12 Most Common Grammar Mistakes ELL Students Make (and How to Actually Fix Them) — A field guide to the dozen grammar errors you'll see most often in ELL writing — what causes each one, which L1s predict them, and the specific scaffolds that fix them for good.
• How to Teach Sentence Structure: From Simple to Complex Without Losing Anyone — A teaching sequence for sentence structure that builds from kernel sentences to compound-complex constructions — with practical activities, sample sentences, and a printable progression chart.
• Grammar Games That Actually Work in Secondary Classrooms (and the Ones to Skip) — An honest review of which grammar games actually work in the classroom — what has held up in practice, what teenagers actually engage with, and a curated list of 9 games that pass both tests.
• How to Scaffold Grammar Instruction So Every Student Can Access It — A practical scaffolding framework for grammar instruction — from sentence frames to graphic organizers to color-coded mentor sentences — with examples at three proficiency levels.
• Teaching Grammar Through Writing: How to Build Skill Without Killing the Joy — A framework for embedding grammar instruction inside the writing process — instead of teaching it on the side — so students actually transfer grammar knowledge to their drafts.
• Formative Assessment for Grammar: 8 Fast Checks That Actually Tell You Something — Eight quick formative assessment routines for grammar — each under 5 minutes — that give you actionable data without burning out you or your students.
• Teaching Subject-Verb Agreement to ELLs: Why It's So Hard and What Finally Works — A deep look at why the English third-person -s is one of the last morphemes ELLs acquire, plus a concrete teaching sequence that builds real automaticity.
• Teaching A, An, and The to ELLs: A Decision Tree That Actually Works — Why English articles are notoriously hard for ELLs from article-less L1s, and a decision-tree approach that replaces rule-memorization with usable judgment.
• Teaching Prepositions to ELLs: Why Rules Don't Work and Chunks Do — Why English prepositions resist rule-based teaching, and how a chunking-and-collocation approach finally produces usable preposition knowledge.
• How to Correct Grammar Without Killing Student Confidence — A research-backed approach to error correction that improves student writing without making students afraid to write — including the difference between recasts, elicitations, and clarification requests.
• Grammar Conferencing Strategies: 5-Minute Conferences That Actually Change Writing — A complete framework for running grammar writing conferences in 5 minutes per student — what to say, what not to say, and how to make the time fit a real class period.
• Using Mentor Sentences with ELLs: A 10-Minute Routine That Builds Style and Grammar Together — How to use mentor sentences with English Language Learners to teach grammar, sentence variety, and academic style simultaneously — including 20 mentor sentences ready to use.
• Grammar and Academic Writing in Secondary School: The 7 Structures Students Need Most — The seven grammatical structures that distinguish proficient from advanced academic writing in middle and high school — with examples, mini-lessons, and a quarterly assessment plan.
• Teaching Past Tense Irregular Verbs: A 50-Verb Sequence That Actually Sticks — Why memorizing irregular verb lists fails — and a frequency-based teaching sequence that prioritizes the 50 verbs that produce most of student writing.
• Grammar for Long-Term English Learners: Why Fossilized Errors Stick and How to Break Them — Why long-term English learners often have persistent grammatical errors that resist instruction — and the targeted intervention that finally moves the needle.
• Designing Grammar Units Backward: A UbD Approach That Actually Improves Writing — How to apply Understanding by Design (UbD) to grammar units — starting with the writing outcome and working backward to the daily lessons, with a sample 3-week unit plan.
• Grammar Intervention for High School Students: A Practitioner's Playbook — A practical grammar intervention model for secondary classrooms — diagnostic, dosage, and the patterns to prioritize for students reading below grade level.
• Teaching Newcomers in Secondary Classrooms: The First 30 Days — A practical playbook for secondary teachers welcoming newcomer multilingual learners — survival language, content access, and the routines that build belonging in the first month.
• Best ELD Activities for Teenagers: What Actually Engages Secondary Multilingual Learners — Twelve ELD activities that respect teenage social dynamics, build real language, and run inside a 50-minute class block — with the research and the classroom examples.
• How to Scaffold Writing for Multilingual Learners (Without Doing the Writing for Them) — A 7-layer writing scaffold system for multilingual learners — from sentence frames to mentor texts to revision protocols — with research and concrete classroom examples.
• Why Grammar Worksheets Fail (And What Actually Works Instead) — Grammar worksheets consistently produce minimal transfer to student writing. Here's why — and the practical moves that actually work in real secondary classrooms.
• Beginning of Year ELD Assessment: How to Run One in the First Week — A practical guide to running a beginning of year ELD assessment across grammar, reading, writing, and speaking — and using what you find to plan the first weeks.
• First Week ELD Activities: A Calm 5-Day Plan for Secondary Multilingual Learners — Five calm, purposeful first-week ELD activities for grades 6–12, with low-stakes language routines and free diagnostic and bell-ringer resources.
• Safe Identity Activities for Multilingual Learners (Grades 6–12) — How to run identity activities that build community without forcing disclosure — choice, private thinking, sentence frames, and newcomer access in secondary ELD.
• The Language Map Activity for English Learners: A Classroom Guide — A step-by-step language map activity for multilingual learners — students map their languages onto a body outline as a metaphor they choose, with scaffolds and privacy options.