Kyle Larson

If you’ve worked with multilingual learners or English language learners long enough you’ve probably seen the same pattern over and over again. Students arrive with little to no English and begin growing quickly. Within a year or two many become socially fluent. They joke with friends participate in class and navigate conversations comfortably. Then something happens: growth slows down. Not because students stop learning entirely but because the jump from conversational English to academic...

Every teacher has had that one multilingual learner who, despite every attempt, does not seem to make much progress. You check in during independent work, simplify directions, sit next to them and walk through the task, and in the moment it feels like they understand. They nod, they follow along, they might even complete the assignment. But a few days later, very little has actually stuck. It is easy to call this a motivation issue or a gap in ability. It usually is not. The problem is often...

It is easy to say students cannot read grade-level text. That is often not the real issue. In many secondary classrooms, English language learners are not struggling with difficulty. They are struggling with abstraction. Think about sentences like “Industrialization transformed economic systems,” or “The author develops a central claim,” or “Complex interactions between variables.” These are not just hard. They are compressed. They carry a lot of meaning in very few words, and that meaning is...