What Does Research Tell Us About Educating Mainstream Teachers to Work With ELLs?

Abstract

This commentary highlights findings from two reviews of research on the preparation and continuing development of regular classroom teachers to teach English language learners. Since both reviews use my “central tasks of teacher learning” framework, the commentary also assesses the framework’s usefulness in highlighting areas where research exists and where it is lacking. Looking across the reviews reveals that the area where most preservice studies cluster has the least number of inservice studies and vice versa.

Key words:

• English language learners (ELLs)
• teacher education
• teacher learning