For English Learners and other struggling students, understanding and using academic language is absolutely critical to literacy development and school achievement, but it takes careful planning to help these students develop mastery. Ruth Swinney and Patricia Velasco's teacher-friendly guide explains how to weave together content and language goals when planning lesson units, as well as offering strategies for moving students from social to academic language and creating a curriculum of talk in the classroom. In addition, Swinney and Velasco provide detailed sample unit plans in all content areas to demonstrate how these strategies can be employed while simultaneously meeting curriculum demands. Using specific structures of balanced literacy including read along, shared reading, and shared writing, these unit plans also include a self-assessment guide for teachers to use as they scaffold the content to increase comprehension and student achievement
