NCEL | Teacher Education Digest

Teacher Education Digest: Effective Literacy Instruction for English/Emerging Bilingual Learners

Practical, research-grounded guidance to prepare teachers to deliver assets-based literacy instruction for English Learners/Emerging Bilinguals (EL/EBs). Authored by Magaly Lavadenz, Ph.D., Ester de Jong, Ed.D., and Patricia Venegas-Weber, Ph.D.

The NCEL Teacher Education Digest synthesizes what works in teacher preparation for EL/EB literacy: from coursework that builds bilingual/second-language pedagogies to clinical experiences that turn knowledge into classroom practice. It centers an assets-based approach—leveraging students’ linguistic and cultural strengths to accelerate language and literacy development.

What’s inside:

• Promising practices in teacher preparation that build knowledge, skills, and dispositions for teaching EL/EBs (e.g., language portraits, critical linguistic autobiographies, and community-based case studies).
• Lesson-planning guidance that pairs content and language objectives and makes cross-linguistic connections explicit.
• Field/clinical scenarios (K–2) showing micro-teaching, small-group phonemic awareness, and idiom instruction aligned with ELD.
• Bilingual/dual-language teaching example using dialogic reading and Spanish decodables to connect reading and writing.
• Implications for policy: licensure, ongoing professional development, and district–university partnerships that sustain teacher expertise.

Published by: National Committee for Effective Literacy (NCEL) & Californians Together.

Publication date: October 27, 2025

The NCEL Teacher Education Digest comes as a 28 page, perfect (PUR) bound, full color, 8.5″x11″ print booklet. A free PDF download is available here, along with our other resources.