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Getting newcomer English learners off the sidelines: Strategies for increasing
learner engagement while developing language and literacy

Article  in  TESOL Journal · January 2022

DOI: 10.1002/tesj.647

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DOI: 10.1002/tesj.647

C L A S S RO O M E X P L O R AT I O N S

Getting newcomer English learners off the

sidelines: Strategies for increasing learner
engagement while developing language and
literacy

Lisa Auslander
City University of New York Graduate Center

Correspondence
Lisa Auslander, City University of New York Graduate Center.
Email: lauslander@gc.cuny.edu

1  |   I N T RO DU CT ION
Newcomer immigrant students with interrupted schooling are cited as lacking academic skills,
but often have a wealth of experience that they can bring to classroom discussions (Lindahl, 2015).
Specifically, students with interrupted/inconsistent formal education (SIFE) are a subgroup
of newcomer English learners (ELs) who are recent immigrants or refugees entering the U.S.
school system with limited academic preparation who often require specialized support. They
come from heterogeneous backgrounds and contexts outside the Western U.S. schooling para-
digm (DeCapua & Marshall, 2011) and may have been subject to migration, war, or placement in
refugee camps, among other life challenges (Custodio & O'Laughlin, 2017). In order to increase
newcomer and SIFE engagement, students need to be thoughtfully integrated into classroom
learning practices.
Bridges to Academic Success is a university-­based project that develops curriculum and pro-
fessional learning for English as a new language (ENL) and content-­area teachers in second-
ary U.S classrooms. A key anchor principle of the project's work is the importance of home
language in instruction and the role it plays in student language learning and development
(García & Kleyn, 2016; Fu, Hadjionnou, & Zhou, 2019). In addition, it integrates a construc-
tivist, cooperative approach that leverages the prior knowledge of students in order to create
more inclusive classrooms with increased student engagement (Cummins, 2011; Mvududu &
Thiel-­Burgess, 2012). Below are examples of how partner teachers increase student learning in
newcomer classrooms.

© 2022 TESOL International Association

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https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.647
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2   |   L E V E R AG IN G L1 AS A R E SOURCE TO LEARN L2:

US I N G O R A L LAN G UAG E AS A BRIDGE TO WRITING

There is much evidence to support the use of home language in making meaning and as a transi-
tion to learning a new language (García, Ibarra Johnson, & Seltzer, 2016). In the video provided
online with this article, a pair of students are featured in an ENL classroom writing center. One
student initiated discussion with her writing partner as they negotiated comprehension of the
task in their Spanish home language (9:11). The two students discussed what they were required
to do, their understanding of vocabulary, and sentence structure. Once they had discussed the
prompt and examples in more depth, the students were able to write their responses in English
and, throughout the lesson, construct meaning in the new language.

3   |   ST R AT EG IE S FOR CON N ECTING C LASSROOM

CO N T E NT TO ST U DE N T PR IOR KNOWLEDGE

Drawing on essential questions that are broad and allow for meaning making can also make con-
versations of high interest and inclusive. This helps students interact with each other in mean-
ingful ways about topics of interest that also spark critical thinking (Bonyadi & Zeinalpur, 2014).
In the Bridges SIFE English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum, the students grapple with ques-
tions about power and identity: How are people the same and different? What is power and
how do people use it? One way to integrate newcomers into group discussions is to use themes
and essential questions to leverage students' prior knowledge and experience. For example, in a

F I G U R E 1   A small group creates a collaborative poster after talking about the essential question
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content-­area teacher's classroom, we observed her use the essential question, “Why is voting im-
portant in a democracy?” This was an entry point to her history lesson on women's right to vote
and served as a way to get students engaged in discussion as well as introduce a theme to the unit.
Including the diverse experiences of students in oral discussion can serve to validate student life
experience in a culturally sustaining, democratic classroom environment (Paris, 2012). For exam-
ple, a student in a Bridges content-­area classroom had experience working in a marketplace and
was able to draw upon this during a discussion about trade. Another student, during a lesson on
water scarcity, mentioned that he frequently faced unclean or scarce water in his village back home.
Drawing on student experience and allowing for different levels of talk is key since students learning
a new language will learn receptively first and then produce language later (Lee & Muncie, 2006).
Figure 1 shows an example of how structured discussion using the Bridges curriculum enabled this
student to create a collaborative writing poster with a small group. As a result, he was able to first
develop a short paragraph, and then a short essay on the topic of water as a resource.
As observed in Figure 1, collaborative posters can be a productive way for students to demon-
strate leadership in working with a group, apply artistic skills, discuss ideas in the home language

F I G U R E 2   A student from the collaborative group writes a short essay based on the essential question
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and present ways that ideas connect visually. This activity also served as a scaffold to content-­area
sentence and paragraph writing, as we see in Figure 2.
We can see the growth this student made from his unit writing sample based on the unit
pre-­assessment in Figure  3. Using a Bridges-­adapted version of the 6+1 writing traits rubric
(Culham, 2003), the teacher assessed this student's growth in writing over a period of approxi-
mately three to four months.
Three independent raters scored student samples using the adapted rubric. As we see in
Table  1, this student showed growth in each trait scored including ideas, organization, word
choice, and sentence structure.

4  |  C RE AT IN G M OR E IN CLU SIVE CLASSROOMS

In addition to developing confidence in their language and literacy skills, the newcomer learners
I interviewed in Bridges classrooms felt very positive about working in collaborative partnerships
and small groups (Auslander, 2019). Students described collaboration as one of their lifelines,
because it allowed them to be part of a larger community of learners, to feel a sense of belonging,
and to encourage a willingness to take risks. The examples described here are only entry points

F I G U R E 3   The student's pre-­assessment writing sample before unit collaborative work

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T A B L E 1   Student writing sample scores on pre-­and post-­assessments

Writing trait Unit 3 writing pre-­assessment score Unit 3 writing post-­assessment score
Ideas 3 4
Organization 2 4
Word choice 3 4
Sentence structure 3 4

for increasing newcomer classroom participation while developing these skills. There are many
ways to provide students with opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding,
and communicate that language learners' contributions are valued within all classrooms. All
students benefit when newcomers are included in classroom discussion because other students
learn more about the perspectives and experiences of their multilingual classmates.

5  |  T H E AUT H OR

Lisa Auslander is the principal investigator and senior project director for Bridges to Academic
Success, a university project. She is a former teacher, coach, and administrator who worked in
New York City for over 15  years. She is adjunct Assistant professor at Hunter College in the
Department of Educational Leadership.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to the Bridges team, our partner teachers, and the New York State Education
Department Office of World Languages and Bilingual Education for providing the opportunity to
work with schools across the state.

ORCID
Lisa Auslander  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1900-9326

REFERENCES
Auslander, L. (2019). Creating responsive classroom communities: A cross-­case study of schools serving students with
interrupted schooling. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bonyadi, A., & Zeinalpur, S. (2014). Perceptions of students towards self-­selected and teacher-­assigned top-
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How to cite this article: Auslander, L. (2022). Getting newcomer English learners off
the sidelines: Strategies for increasing learner engagement while developing language and
literacy. TESOL Journal, 00e1–­6. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.647

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