Keynote A: Going Beyond Translation ~ 9:00 – 10:15 AM
Being a newcomer in an academic setting, adjusting to a new culture, and acquiring a new language are no small feat! This session explores ways to respond to the newcomer experience that honour students’ home languages, multiple literacies, rich funds of knowledge and identities without turning to translation as the primary approach. After exploring when and how to maximize the impact of translating for newcomers, a framework for multidimensional scaffolding will be introduced and illustrated from K-12 classrooms.
Keynote B: Content Area Language and Literacy Strategies ~ 10:30 – 11:45 AM
This session will redefine ELLs as ALLs (academic language learners) and provide ready-to-use strategies that will foster academic language and disciplinary literacy development among all students— English learners and English-proficient alike. While the session will address the challenges that K-12 educators face when they have English learners in their classrooms, the unique angle the presenter will take is exploring the content-specific language and literacy learning opportunities that all students will benefit from. These cross-cutting strategies will help unpack academic language across the core content areas at the word-, sentence-, and text-levels and will promote both oracy and literacy among all students.
Keynote C: Collaborative Instructional Practices ~ 12:30 – 1:30 PM
In this session, research-based practical examples will demonstrate how teachers can collaborate to provide English learners with both content and language support in inclusive, high-rigor classrooms. Andrea will explore models and approaches to promote equity-driven instruction, enabling English learners to succeed alongside their peers. Key themes include creating flexible collaborative structures for integrating language and content to ensure academic language development in every lesson, co-planning to establish consistency and continuity, engaging in collaborative assessment practices to monitor and respond to student learning, and enhancing cross-functional collaboration between and among content teachers, ELL specialists, other special area educators, and instructional leaders.
Relevant Publications
Growing Language and Literacy books:
https://www.heinemann.com/products/e09917.aspx
https://www.heinemann.com/products/e17081.aspx
Co-Planning: Five Essential Practices to Integrate Curriculum and Instruction for English Learners
https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/co-planning/book267839
Collaborative Assessment for Multilingual Learners and Teachers: Pathways to Partnerships
Nine Dimensions of Scaffolding for Multilingual Learners
https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/nine-dimensions-of-scaffolding-for-multilingual-learners/book287022
Andrea Honigsfeld, EdD, is professor in the School of Education and Human Services at Molloy College, Rockville Centre, New York, where she teaches graduate courses related to cultural and linguistic diversity and TESOL methodology. Before entering the field of teacher education, she was an English-as-a-foreign-language teacher in Hungary (secondary and adult) and an English-as-a-second-language teacher in New York City (elementary and adult). She also taught Hungarian at New York University. She was the recipient of a doctoral fellowship at St. John’s University, New York, where she conducted research on individualized instruction. She has published extensively on working with multilingual learners and collaborative instructional practices. She received a Fulbright Award to lecture in Iceland in the fall of 2002. Over the past 20 years, she has been presenting at conferences across the United States, Great Britain, China, Denmark, Japan, Thailand, Sweden, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates. She frequently offers professional learning opportunities, primarily focusing on effective content and language integration strategies and collaborative practices for ELD and bilingual/dual language specialists and general-education teachers. She coauthored over 60 articles and chapters and coauthored or coedited over 30 books, 11 of which are US national bestsellers.
