Three Districts Test Model Common-Core Unit for ELLs Seventh and
8th grade English-learners in selected urban schools will soon
dive into some of the most celebrated speeches in U.S. history.
They'll dissect, for example, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg
Address, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," and Robert
F. Kennedy's "On the Death of Martin Luther King." Though their
English-language skills are still developing, the students will
read the original texts, not watered-down versions. This brand-
new English/language arts unit on the use of persuasion was
designed to show how reading complex, informational texts and
writing arguments—a key requirement in the new common-core
standards—can be used with English-learners to deepen their
learning of content and concepts as well as language. Called
"Persuasion Across Time and Space," the five-lesson unit is the
first major classroom resource produced by the Understanding
Language team, a group of English-language-learner experts led
by Kenji Hakuta, an education