Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners: The SIOP Model (3rd Edition) (SIOP Series)

Any teacher with struggling students (ELLs or not) can benefit from this book. It gives explicit instructions that are so useful!

The book is a response by American educators to an increasingly diverse student population, at the primary and secondary school levels. This diversity is reflected in no small part by the many students for whom English is a second language.

The pedagogy described here is called the SIOP Model. It tries to teach students how to master academic English (ie. formal written English). But also to do this while learning a more informal spoken English. Both skills are necessary. Whereas perhaps traditionally only the former was emphasised, since it was assumed that students already had English as their primary language.

Without going into the details of SIOP, it seems characterised by an intensive interweaving of different modalities of teaching. Like having students learn written text [of course]. But also tying this into rich graphics. So that visual and written forms reinforce each other in the student's mind. Also, students are encouraged to use deductive skills to analyse a body of text, as independently of the teacher as possible.