The ABCs of Teaching English Learners

THE ABCs OF TEACHING ENGLISH LEARNERS
26 Enduring, High-Impact, Low-Prep Frameworks and Practices

Your curriculum changes every few years. Your terminology changes every few years. Your caseload changes every September. One thing stays fixed: the small set of ideas holding up real language instruction, year after year, room after room.

This book hands you twenty-six of those ideas, one for every letter, built from over twenty years in the classroom. No filler. No trend-chasing. Twenty-six durable, teacher-tested frameworks ready to use this week, plus a set of further resources and a simple image marking every topic.

THE PROBLEM EVERY ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHER KNOWS

Formal training rarely hands you a working pedagogy. New mandates arrive before old ones settle, and the "why" behind a curriculum gets left for you to work out alone, mid-lesson, under pressure. This book gives you the foundation your training skipped.

WHAT'S INSIDE

Twenty-six chapters, A to Z, each built around one durable idea:

• Affective Filter: lower the barrier between your students and the language they're learning
• Cognitive Load Theory: teach in ways your students' working memory holds onto
• Elkonin Boxes: a five-minute routine building phonemic awareness fast
• Newcomers: a plan for the first weeks, when everything feels unfamiliar
• Oral Language: routines for Reader's Theater, scaffolding, and transitions
• Zone of Proximal Development: a working definition, not a theory-class throwback

Twenty more chapters cover vocabulary, testing, motivation, routines, and questioning.

Each chapter follows the same structure: what the idea means, why the idea matters, what the idea looks like in practice, a Starter Set of ready-to-use routines, and a reflection question.

A REAL EXAMPLE FROM THE BOOK

Take Elkonin Boxes. Students who struggle to read and spell need a way to see how words work. Draw a row of boxes on the board, one box per sound, and hand students chips to slide into place as they stretch a word apart: c-a-t becomes three boxes, three sounds, three moves. Sixty seconds a day builds a habit students carry into independent writing, checking spelling before committing a word to the page. No printing budget. No new program. One routine, repeated daily.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

• English language specialists pulling small groups down the hall
• General education teachers with one multilingual learner in a class of thirty
• New teachers looking for a foundation their training program skipped
• Veteran teachers sharpening a practice built over years of trial and error

WHAT MAKES THIS DIFFERENT

No new curriculum. No new training day. No expensive kit to order and store. Each idea rests on what you and your students already carry into the room. All teaching is language teaching, and good language teaching lifts every student in the room.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Senno is a teacher and writer specializing in language and literacy instruction for English learners. Over twenty years, he has taught students of every age, background, and proficiency level, in the United States and abroad, and now teaches in New York City. He writes the Substack Read, Write, Howl.

Scroll up and grab your copy today. Twenty-six ideas. One classroom. A foundation built to last.