Supporting Multilingual Learners

Each issue of Action comes with a variety of tools and online resources to support your multilingual learners. Learn more about using each of these tools in your classroom below: 

Vocabulary Slideshows: In these multimedia slideshows, an article’s most important words are pronounced, defined, used in a sentence, and accompanied by an image or video that reinforces its meaning. Share the vocabulary slideshow with multilingual learners before reading an article to prepare them for the words and concepts they will encounter.

Videos With Closed Captioning: To help further engage multilingual learners and orient them in new subject matter, many of our articles come with exciting videos that use visual supports to build curiosity and background knowledge. Explore our video archive here.

Background Builders: Before your students read our Nonfiction Feature stories, encourage them to click through these multimedia slideshows. They pair simple bullets and engaging visuals to introduce multilingual learners to key cross-curricular concepts, important historical or cultural context, and domain-specific vocabulary.

Text-to-Speech Audio: Every story in Action offers read-aloud audio with text-to-speech, available at two different speeds, to support student comprehension and improve fluency and word recognition. You can find this feature in an article’s presentation view.

Multilingual Learners Differentiation Tips: Included in our lesson plans are various tips for making our articles more accessible to your multilingual learners. These may include ideas for fun in-class activities, simple discussion guides, helpful comprehension exercises, and more. 

Questions for Multilingual Learners: To help your multilingual learners engage with Action’s stories, we’ve created question sets in three formats that you can tailor to your students’ proficiency levels:

Yes/no questions allow students to demonstrate their understanding of texts in a simple way. 

Either/or questions enable students to use language from the question to support their answer.

Short-answer questions encourage students to go further by elaborating on simple answers. 

These questions are available at the end of every major lesson plan.

True Teens en Español: Our engaging, high-interest True Teen Stories are ideal for building a variety of important ELA skills, including speaking and listening, sequencing, and identifying text structures. This carefully curated collection of articles—available in English and Spanish—can serve as excellent linguistic support and scaffolding for the Spanish-speaking students in your classroom.

Family Letters: To help encourage reading beyond the classroom, Action provides Family Letters in both English and Spanish that you can send home with your multilingual learners. Click here to learn more about using our Family Letters and the importance of family engagement, especially among striving readers.