Everyone Is an Academic English Learner: Interactive Support in Mainstream Classrooms

This article is a report on an English language learner (ELL) teacher’s mainstream class observations, coteaching experiences with a local language arts teacher, and surveying with students for a semester. As Short and Echevarria (2016, p. 2) state, “academic language is a second language for all students,” and every student is an academic English learner. This study examines how teachers bridge the gap between theory and practice by taking on multiple roles in classrooms and providing diverse support (Gottlieb, 2015). The implemented project focused on creating an autobiographical book with students themselves as centerpieces. The main purpose was to provide a grammar lesson on adjectives and adverbs based on communicative language teaching. Since grammatical or linguistic competence is one of the four components of core communicative competence, along with sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence, students need to obtain these four abilities (Canale & Swain, 1980; Savignon, 1976). Through observations, coteaching, and surveying, the findings indicate that teachers play multiple roles and provide students with various support using multimodality and active interaction. Specifically, interactive support helps students achieve academic language standards, which should expand to all students, including English language learners in K–12 education