Language learning is complex. Many factors impact how well language learners will acquire communication skills and how quickly they will reach different ranges of performance. These factors include where one learns language, whether in an instructional setting or immersed in the language or culture; how one learns, whether through explicit instruction about the language or through authentic experiences using the language; when one learns, as the age and cognitive
development of language learners impact the speed of reaching each range of performance; and finally, why one is learning a language, whether motivated by extrinsic factors such as grades and requirements or intrinsic factors such as the language learner’s heritage or intended uses of the language.

NCTE and its constituent groups have developed position statements on a variety of education issues vital to the teaching and learning of English language arts.

Contemporary nonfiction for young people plays a crucial role in the reading and writing lives of K–12 students. It is a rich and compelling genre that supports students’ development as critically, visually, and informationally literate 21st-century thinkers and creators. The purpose of this position statement is to propose a paradigm shift for teaching and learning with nonfiction literature in K–12 education.

This article provides guidelines for teaching students skills to successfully present in front of the class including addressing stage fright, effective voice, gestures, and posture, and a downloadable and editable grading rubric.

This toolbox highlights thinking routines developed across a number of research projects at PZ. A thinking routine is a set of questions or a brief sequence of steps used to scaffold and support student thinking. PZ researchers designed thinking routines to deepen students’ thinking and to help make that thinking “visible.” Thinking routines help to reveal students’ thinking to the teacher and also help students themselves to notice and name particular “thinking moves,” making those moves more available and useful to them in other contexts.

This past week Queen Elizabeth II passed and Google Arts and Culture in collaboration with the Royal Collections has built a retrospective of pictures, artwork, tours, magazine covers, and more about her life. It is a great collection for current event discussions or for Social Studies classrooms to explore.

Chapters 4 and 5 specially address the terms and how understanding the terms can improve writing instruction.

This resource is a collection of ideas for classroom arrangement, management systems, and classroom libraries.

FreeReading is an open source instructional program that helps educators teach early literacy. Because it is open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. FreeReading contains Reading Connect Text Activities, a page of sequential and supplemental activities that helps teachers teach students to decode their first sentences in print.

Students learn how to research and develop a topic for a student choice project.

In this Google Applied Digital Skills lesson, students will learn how to respond to questions in Google Classroom.

An excerpt from the online open access source Writing and Critical Thinking Through Literature, this chapter explores how to conduct a literary analysis of creative nonfiction.

In this Voices from the Middle article, Kristen Robbins draws on her middle-school teaching experiences to share with teachers some strategies for responding to student writing throughout the writing process rather than waiting until the end to give grades to student writing products.

In this Writers Who Care blog post, Kara Douma shares how a K-W-L strategy for student learning can be deepened by thinking of how to activate meaningful reflection. Teachers may find this resource useful as they consider how to deepen reflective practices in their own classrooms.