Strategies to Help ELLs Develop Skills for Academic Writing

Writing is a critical skill that English learners (ELs) need to be successful in the high school classroom, in college, and in the workplace to prepare them to investigate, analyze, make inferences, support claims, and problem solve in the real world. ELs often struggle with writing for many reasons that are unique to learning a language, including lack of literacy in their native language, limited English vocabulary, incomplete understanding of word and sentence structure, and lack of motivation; they have not  yet  mastered the skills to be proficient writers. They are further challenged by the intellectual reasoning and communicative and contextual challenges all writers experience (Olson, Scarcella, & Matuchniak, 2016).