Provide Sentence Frames or Sentence Stems

Best practices are intended to support multilingual learners (MLs) in all classes, no matter their proficiency level. These strategies are expected to be used by all teachers within lessons, assignments, and assessments to support MLs and all learners. Best practices are strategies that educators can quickly implement within daily instruction, activities, and classroom assessments.

An accommodation changes how information and concepts are presented or practiced ensuring that each student has the opportunities and support needed to learn. Accommodations do not reduce the learning expectations and should be chosen based on the student’s individual needs and not applied arbitrarily to all MLs. Accommodations are not to be viewed as an advantage to the student; accommodations provide access to the content for the student.

Accommodations:

Provide access to grade-level curriculum;
Alter the environment, not the curriculum;
Do not change the learning outcomes;
Happen in the content-area classroom; and
Should not impact grading, though how learning is assessed may change.

*Provide Sentence Frames or Stems is also a best practice.

Description

Giving students sentence frames or starters promotes a higher academic level of speaking and writing. This also helps with students of a lower language proficiency focus on content since the sentence structure is given. This best practice teaches sentence structure to all levels as well as requires students to use more complex language. For higher level language proficiency students, this pushes students to use academic language rather than conversational.

Teachers can implement sentence frames or sentence stems in a whole group setting. However, with lower language proficiency students, teachers can write the sentence frame(s) on the paper to help the student express their ideas more quickly. Writing sentence frames for students should be scaffolded as their command of writing increases.

Examples:

The _________ is round.
__________ have cells.
The _________ are different.
The __________ helped the _________ during the war.
However, _________ is not the same as _________ because_____________________________________.

	Teacher	Student
	The teacher writes sentence frame or starter on the board. Tells students to use the frame provided.	The student uses and refers to the model as they complete the task.

	Teacher	Student
	"What is something you like? Use this sentence frame I have written for you." "What was the effect of the French and Indian War? Use this sentence frame to share in your groups." "How did you solve that division problem? Use the sentence frames to write your reasoning."	"I like (student inserts response)." "One of the effects of the French and Indian War was (student inserts answer). This is important because (student inserts answer)." "First I (student inserts response) because (student inserts response). Then, I (student inserts response) and was able to (student inserts response)."

Recommended Domain(s)	Recommended Level(s)
Speaking, Writing	All levels* *accommodation is adjusted for levels 4-6