This hands-on guide shows elementary school teachers how to create multilingual classroom communities that support every learner's success in reading, writing, and general literacy development. The author provides a practical overview of key ideas and techniques and describes specific literacy activities that lead to vocabulary and oral English proficiency. Instructional chapters will help teachers create a language-rich classroom environment, scaffold reading and writing tasks to match students' needs, and use students' language backgrounds as a bridge to literacy learning in English. As with all titles in "The Practitioner's Bookshelf Series," this resource includes many user-friendly features such as bulleted summaries and checklists as well as photographs of linguistically diverse classrooms modeling the types of instructional interactions described in the book. Encouraging collaboration and a deeper understanding of best practices for ELL instruction, this book covers: (1) How to build on the diverse linguistic resources that students bring to school; (2) The connections between oral language and literacy development; (3) How reading and writing skills develop for second language learners; (4) Assessment of language and literacy learning; (5) Planning literacy curriculum for classrooms with diverse language learners; and (6) How to collaborate with other professionals to coordinate effective instruction. [Foreword by Alison Bailey.]