It’s time to re-think how we approach support for multilingual learners in the ELA classroom.
The question is not whether a curriculum supports multilingual learners. Almost every curriculum claims to. This is the baseline.
The question we need to ask — the question that needs to drive curriculum design — is where those supports live, whether they are built into the shared lesson every student experiences, or assembled alongside it for the students who are assumed to need extra access.
This distinction seems technical and trivial, but the implications for how students experience and engage with language and literacy content are significant.
Two Models, One Classroom
When language supports are supplemental — a separate scaffold document, a pull-out activity, a different curricular track — students receive a potentially harmful message: our core curriculum is only designed for some students, and everyone else requires something separate to access it. It’s a clear divide foundational to the design of the curriculum.
That message isn’t intentional. On the contrary, the intention of such design is to make the core curriculum more accessible to multilingual learners.
But what if language support was part of the core curriculum?
The alternative is embedded design: language supports, vocabulary instruction, comprehension scaffolds, and language development opportunities that are foundational to the core curriculum, not as modifications for some students, but as features of the curriculum that supports everyone. In this model, there is no modified version of the lesson. There is one lesson designed with the full range of learners in mind.
This is just as much a pedagogical argument as it is an equity argument.
Research on multilingual learner achievement consistently identifies the quality of core instruction as the most significant factor in student outcomes — more significant, in many studies, than the quantity or type of supplemental intervention [1]. When multilingual learners have access to rigorous, coherent, well-scaffolded Tier 1 instruction, the need for add-on supports decreases.
This isn’t to say that extra support and instructional strategies beyond a core curriculum are completely unnecessary, but rather, when Tier 1 instruction is designed without multilingual learners in mind, no amount of supplemental support fully compensates for what they missed in the core classroom experience.
What “Embedded” Actually Means
The word “embedded” is a buzzword in curriculum marketing, and it’s worth being specific about what it actually requires in practice.
Embedded language support is not a sidebar that restates the lesson objective in simpler terms. It is not a vocabulary list appended to a unit that teachers are encouraged to use “as needed.” It is not a set of sentence frames distributed to some students as a separate handout before a discussion.
Embedded support means that the language work is foundational to the instructional moves themselves: vocabulary instruction happens in the context of the text students are already reading, comprehension support appears at the moment of difficulty rather than before or after the lesson, language objectives are tied to the specific demands of the specific text, and differentiation guidance tells teachers exactly how to adjust instruction for students at different proficiency levels without splitting the class into wholly separate experiences.
But what does this look like?
In this IBD lesson on the poem “jury duty” by Evie Shockley, the language instruction does not appear as a separate activity. As students read the poem aloud together, comprehension support appears in the lesson margin tied to specific lines — prompting teachers to ask students to paraphrase each stanza, and providing vocabulary definitions for unfamiliar terms at the exact moment those words appear in the text. Students encounter the vocabulary in the context of a complex, meaningful poem, not on a flash card. The definition serves their engagement with the poem. The poem, in turn, makes the vocabulary worth knowing.
That same unit’s discussion lesson on Twelve Angry Men and “jury duty” includes a dedicated language objective (“Expand noun phrases by embedding prepositional phrases”) embedded directly within the lesson sequence. Students learn what expanded noun phrases are and why academic writers use them, practice identifying them in the texts they have already read, and then apply that language knowledge in a structured discussion.
The language instruction does not interrupt the intellectual work. It is part of the intellectual work.
The Design Implication
One of the most important aspects of embedded language design is that it benefits every student in the room, not just those formally designated as multilingual learners.
The vocabulary instruction that helps an English learner access “condemner” in a complex legal poem also helps any student who has not encountered that word in reading. The sentence-level language work that teaches a multilingual learner to construct an expanded noun phrase also teaches any student who has not explicitly been taught how academic English differs from conversational English. The annotation routines that support comprehension for students still developing English proficiency also build reading habits that support all students engaging with complex texts.
But building language support into curriculum rather than layering it on afterward is harder than it sounds. It requires that language objectives be identified at the unit level and sequenced across lessons. It requires that vocabulary instruction be tied to the specific texts students are reading, not drawn from a general word list. It requires that differentiation guidance be written into the lesson itself, telling teachers how to adjust support without creating a separate instructional track. And it requires that assessment tools — rubrics, observation protocols, discussion guides — be designed with the full range of learners in mind from the start.
That integration is what makes embedded support structurally different from supplemental support. It is not a feature added to the curriculum. It is a design principle that shapes how the curriculum is built from the start.
What This Means for Districts
For district leaders evaluating ELA curriculum, particularly those serving schools with significant multilingual learner populations, the relevant question is not “does this curriculum include support for ELLs?” Nearly every curriculum will answer yes. The more useful questions are:
- Where do the language supports appear? Are they integrated into the lessons teachers and students use together, or compiled in a separate document that teachers must locate, adapt, and assemble?
- Who benefits from the support? Is it designed for a subset of students, or does it serve every student engaging with complex academic language?
- Does the support connect to the text? Is vocabulary instruction tied to the specific language of the specific texts students are reading, or is it generic and out of context?
- Is differentiation built into the teacher’s guide? Does the curriculum tell teachers how to adjust instruction within the shared lesson, or does it require teachers to design separate experiences for students at different levels?
When supports are foundational to a curriculum, the design says that every student is already included. The lesson does not need to be modified for some students to access it.
It was designed for all of them from the start.
1: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ920369.pdf
This is the sixth post in The Connected Learning Project, a blog series from Inquiry by Design. Connected learning isn’t just a framework we write about — it’s the design principle behind everything we build. Inquiry by Design is a print-first English Language Arts (ELA) and Spanish Language Arts (SLA) curriculum for grades 6–12, built so reading, writing, language, and discussion work together in every lesson. We serve 40+ districts and nearly 500,000 students nationwide.