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This presentation is a report on an ELL teacher’s mainstream class observations, co-teaching experiences with a local language arts teacher, and surveying with students for a semester. As Short and Echevarria (2016) state, “academic language is a second language for all students” (p. 2) and every student is an academic English learner. This study examines how teachers find the gap between theory and practice by taking on multiple roles in classrooms and providing diverse support (Gottlieb, 2015). This leads to enhanced academic language learning which could meet the academic standards. The implemented project focused on creating an autobiographical book with students themselves as centerpieces. The main purpose of the project with the 7th-grade students was to give a grammar lesson on adjectives and adverbs based on communicative language teaching. Since grammatical competence is one of the core communicative competence with sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence, students need to obtain these four abilities (Canale & Swain, 1980; Savingnon, 1976). Through observations, co-teaching, and surveying, the findings indicate that teachers play multiple roles and provide students with various support using multimodality and active interaction. Specifically, interactive support helps students achieve academic language standards which should expand to all students including English language learners in K-12 education.

Previous studies (Slavin & Cheung, 2005; Purkarthofer & Mossakowski, 2011) have argued that bilingual instruction provides an advantage over English-only instruction in second language (SL) learning and English learners in bilingual condition feel more satisfied with the teaching method. However, there is a discrepancy between language policy and practice. This study investigates which method of the two (bilingual vs. monolingual instruction) is more effective and satisfying ELL students. Experimental research focused on the perspectives of future educators was conducted to answer this question. The participants were selected from graduate and undergraduate students who are enrolled in the college of education at a large public university. The purpose of selecting participants from students majoring in education was for them, as future educators, to experience the different methods of second language instruction and to investigate their opinions about these two teaching methods. The participants were randomly assigned into two different classes and learned Korean vocabulary lesson on definitions and pronunciation. After they were exposed to each different teaching method, the students were tested on what they learned. The first part was on the performance of phonics and the second part of the test measured the performance of vocabulary comprehension. Afterward a survey was conducted to determine their method of preference as they considered applying this experience to their future work teaching English to ELLs. The results indicate that the bilingual method is more effective and the participants under bilingual conditions preferred their method significantly to the monolingual instruction. The monolingual instruction group presented negative perception of using only target language in second language instruction. This study can provide an effective teaching method to future educators and contribute to the development of SL teachers training and SL education.