English Language Learner Support, Honigsfeld, Fall 2025

Course Number:	EDX 5710 S25
Instructor:	Andrea Honigsfeld, Ed.D.
Location:	Online with Zoom meetings from 3:30-4:45 on the following dates: Session 1: October 20; Session 2: November 3; Session 3: November 10; Session 4: November 17; Session 5: December 1.
Dates and Times:	Oct 20 - Dec 05, 2025
Credits:	3 Graduate Credits
Tuition:	$1,195

Course Description

How do English learners develop their language and literacy skills? How do we ensure that, as educators, we take an asset-based approach to the language acquisition process and support students' progress through the five stages of language development? This course is designed to guide all K-12 educators in recognizing that language and literacy development is a fluid, dynamic process that both evolves authentically for multilingual learners and needs to be purposefully and consistently scaffolded. Participants will explore the characteristics of each proficiency level and determine how to support students at each stage in this 7-week course through a rich selection of authentic illustrations. Additionally, participants will be invited to apply the strategies presented in the course to their own classrooms. Participants will leave with plentiful strategies and resources, and inspiration to fully embrace the talents and gifts multilingual learners bring to their classrooms.

Audience: K-12 Educators (All subjects) with an earned Bachelor's Degree

Course Goals & Objectives

Course Goals: This course aims to introduce general education teachers and all interested educators to the essentials of second language acquisition and to help them understand how students new to English develop language and literacy skills. It will highlight key strategies connected to each of the five stages of language acquisition based on the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) framework:

Starting: Being exposed to English with no or very limited language production
Emerging: Demonstrating receptive and emerging productive language skills
Developing: Employing basic oral and written language skills with predictable error patterns
Expanding: Employing more advanced oral and written language skills with fewer errors
Bridging: Approximating native language proficiency

Participants will be given ample opportunities to apply what they have learned to their own unique contexts.

Course Objectives:

Describe the characteristics of multilingual learners at each of the 5 levels of language acquisition
Identify and evaluate key language and literacy strategies that best support students on each level
Apply language and literacy development practices to own instructional contexts