Academic Languaging: Engaging Multilingual Students in Content Area Learning
About this ebook
For years, the teaching of content-based academic language to multilingual learners has focused on formulas, vocabulary lists, and sentence patterns—often sidelining students’ linguistic and cultural strengths. Gisela Ernst-Slavit and Margo Gottlieb address these challenges by embracing academic languaging, an active, collaborative student-driven process. Academic Languaging offers strategies to integrate language and content learning while fostering student engagement, voice, and agency.
Dedicated chapters on academic languaging for Language Arts, Mathematics, Social Studies, and Science highlight the dimensions of disciplinary language for each subject and provide strategies for moving learning forward with multilingual learners. Additional features include:
- "Stop and Think" prompts to help educators connect new ideas with their instructional settings
- Prompts at the end of each chapter to encourage deeper thinking and application of the material
- Multilingual examples to mirror the varied classroom settings in the U.S. and beyond.
The ultimate resource for educators committed to empowering multilingual learners and fostering meaningful, culturally sustaining education, Academic Languaging ensures multilingual learners comprehend academic content and thrive as confident, autonomous drivers of their own learning.
About the author
Dr. Gisela Ernst-Slavit (PhD University of Florida) is a Professor Emerita at Washington State University with an active program of research. Dr. Ernst-Slavit is a native from Peru who grew up languaging in Spanish, German and English at school. She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of 12 books and over 100 articles and chapters, and she frequently speaks at regional, national, and international conferences on multilingual learner education, with a particular focus on teacher preparation for multilingual youth. Dr. Ernst-Slavit has served as President of the Washington Association for English to Speakers of Other Languages and as an officer in several professional organizations, including the American Educational Research Association, the Council of Anthropology and Education, and TESOL International Association.
Margo Gottlieb, Ph.D., has been a bilingual teacher, coordinator, facilitator, consultant, and mentor across K-20 settings. Having worked with universities, organizations, governments, states, school districts, networks, and schools, Margo has co-constructed linguistic and culturally sustainable curriculum and reconceptualized classroom assessment, policy, and practice. As co-founder and lead developer of WIDA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003, Margo has helped design and contributed to all the editions of WIDA’s English and Spanish language development standards frameworks and their derivative products. She has been appointed to national and state advisory boards, served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and was honored by the TESOL International Association in 2016 for her significant contribution to the field. An avid traveler, Margo has enjoyed keynoting and presenting across the United States, territories, and 25 countries. Having authored, co-authored, or co-edited over 100 publications, including 22 books, Margo′s 3rd edition of Assessing Multilingual Learners: Bridges to Empowerment (2024) and Collaborative Assessment for Multilingual Learners and Teachers: Pathways to Partnerships (with A. Honigsfeld, 2025) are the latest additions to her Corwin compendium. In 2025, Margo was inducted into the Multilingual Education Hall of Fame.
