Preparing Preservice Teachers for English Language Learners

Preparing teachers for an ever-changing world in education is an ongoing task. In second language teacher education in the United States, the four arenas in which we work—bilingual education, English as a second language (ESL), immersion education, and foreign languages—present a dizzying array of settings, practices, and challenges. Until recently, the majority of our professional development efforts focused on the needs of preservice and inservice second language teachers. As a result of changing demographics, we now face the task of moving beyond preparing second language teachers to preparing all teachers to address the language needs of their learners. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the evolution of a course designed to address this new teacher audience—a small course tailored to introduce preservice classroom teachers to language-sensitive instructional practices for English language learners in the Kindergarten through 12th grade (K–12) context. At the University of Minnesota, preservice teacher education is at the postbaccalaureate level and involves full-time study over a 15-month period. Teachers are prepared in specific content cohorts: elementary education and separate content areas (e.g., English literature and language arts, math, social studies) at the secondary level. ¹ Second-language education is K–12 for those individuals planning to teach a foreign language and/or ESL (for a description of this preservice program, see Bigelow and Tedick, chap. 17, this volume).