How the ELL Brain Learns

by David A. Sousa

Raise your ELL success quotient and watch student achievement soar!

How the ELL Brain Learns combines current research on how the brain learns language with strategies for teaching English language learners. Award-winning author and brain research expert David A. Sousa describes the linguistic reorganization needed to acquire another language after the age of 5 years. He supplements this knowledge with immediately applicable tools, including:

A self-assessment pretest for gauging your understanding of how the brain learns languages
Brain-compatible strategies for teaching both English learners across content areas 
An entire chapter about how to detect English language learning problems

Genres: Teaching, Professional Development, Education

289 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 4, 2010

Reviews

[Jennifer DuBose]

Absolutely fascinating. I don’t know if this book was good for making me a better teacher of English learners or convincing me that any children I birth MUST be bilingual.

This is a great resource for anyone with ELL students. It makes brain science digestible for ordinary people. The authors explain in a non complicated way how the brain learns language and what are the best ways to accommodate that during instruction.

[Stephanie]

Awkwardly written and strangely organized. Many of Sousa's suggestions are too thin on the ground to be useful.

[Angela Leopold]

This book is good for any elementary teacher to read, especially if you have ELL Learners in your classroom. It helped me understand how the brain works- especially in regards to processing vocabulary, information, etc. There are great activities that an ESL teacher can do. More than anything, it encouraged me to push my students academically and to be their advocate with Gen Ed teachers, who just be educated on how they learn.

[Stacey]

I like how Sousa arranges and writes his books. They are part science, part theory and part methodology. They are incredibly interesting to read and very easy to use. At the end of each chapter he gives lesson plans on how to use the theory.