In addition to diving deeper into understand LTEL students, I also want to use this platform to share some strategies that work really well for all students, including LTELs. As I brainstormed some strategies that I rely on, the intentional use of highlighters came to mind almost immediately.

To be fair, I have been asking students to use highlighters since my student teaching days. A highlighter is a standard school supply that most students have used at some point, but whether they have had specific instruction on using a highlighter is another story. As a new teacher, I thought that students should be using highlighters in some capacity but my instructions were too vague and led to either very little or way too much highlighting. I think most of us have seen kids highlight every single line on a page, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

These days, I feel more confident in my ability to help students navigate what is worth highlighting and what isn’t. And more importantly, in using a small and commonplace writing tool to make learning visible and engaging.

#1: Highlight key words or short phrases.

To hit a nice balance of text that is worth highlighting, I mostly instruct students to look for key words or short phrases that link to the objective of the lesson. Sometimes I have a pre-determined bank of words and sometimes I have a concept that they are linking to. If there is more than one concept or word to track, I will instruct students to use more than one highlighter but I try to not use more than three different colors. This is both for logistics (I mainly have access to yellow, pink, and green highlighters to house in my classroom) and because I find that more than that will lead to confusion about what colors signifies what concept.

What I really like about this strategy for long-term English learners, is that the thinking is embedded in the action of tracking and physically marking the text. LTELs often struggle in creating writing that makes grammatical sense and flows seamlessly from one idea to the next, especially when given a particular higher-order thinking concept to weave in or explore in that writing. The readings we provide for students are the model texts– and by tracking a particular word or phrase, students are noting the use of that word or phrase in a complex sentence or a complex paragraph structure.

But even when the task or reading isn’t very complex, highlighting a key word or phrase is a great starting point to build student confidence about their ability to do the work. Because the task is “small”, the barrier to entry is very low, even for very hesitant learners. At the beginning of the school year, I often follow up my highlighting instruction by asking every student to read aloud one of the sentences they highlighted. This is a way to get them comfortable sharing aloud with a very low-stakes task– and even when students hate speaking aloud, they already have done the first task of highlighting so the leap to participate through verbally sharing out becomes less intimidating.

#2: Highlight as a springboard to annotate.

One of the key skills we introduce students to at the start of 9th grade is writing annotations. While we start off the year mainly writing comments, questions, and connections, we add new skills with each unit while continuing to practice those main three types since they can be used in any content class. Annotating can be difficult for some students, and many of my LTELs try to skip out on this step since it is more open-ended and there is not one particular way to do it. I have found that the more ambiguous the task, the more likely that students will skip it.

Writing annotations, though, is a crucial skill for active reading and content retention. Interacting with the text helps us make connections with material that can otherwise seem unfamiliar, irrelevant, and even confusing. So how does highlighting help?

Going back to strategy #1, if students are honing in on key words or phrases to highlight, they now have room to expand on their highlights with annotations. For most of my lessons, I have guiding questions to help them form their annotations. For example, last unit we focused on internal and external conflicts. Students used one color to highlight words or phrases that showed an internal conflict and another for external conflicts. After highlighting the passage, I posed questions to help them annotate: What is the internal conflict? What emotions is the character feeling? What events have led them to feeling this way? And so on.

For LTEL students, I believe that giving clear questions that can be answered with logical sentence structures are key for useful annotations. Looking back at my list of questions, the answer structure doesn’t require too much re-formatting: The internal conflict is… [Character] feels X because of Y events, which impacted them… Even if students can’t answer all the questions I pose, answering a couple go a long way in processing complex ideas and using key skills in both interpreting text through reading and being able to communicate their interpretations.

#3: Highlight as a way to engage with instructions.

I will go out on a limb to say that most of the reading students do is reading instructions, perhaps even more so than reading texts for their classes. Because reading instructions happens multiple times per class in every academic class, it’s no surprise that students often tune out this crucial step of nearly all school tasks.

As a new teacher, I spent hours creating task cards and instructions that laid out every step and gave as much information as possible. I bolded, italicized, underlined… I had different fonts. And all my hard work often went unnoticed by students that had to be verbally reminded of the instructions every few minutes as it became clear that my ways of making instruction steps stand out was… well, forgettable.

I can’t say that highlighting will automatically make students pay total attention and that you’ll never answer a question you’ve already answered again, but I can say that highlighting instructions increases attention at least partially because they physically have to follow along with what you are reading and/or noting.

In my current practice, I almost always show the task card or instructions for tasks on the document camera and have students follow along with me. I’ll ask them to highlight key parts of the instructions, such as the resources, due dates, and key steps. I also routinely annotate instructions to add tips or reminders– and sometimes to correct mistakes I’ve made or clarify ambiguous instructions (because, again, ambiguity is a great reason to opt out…). I spend very little time now zhooshing up task cards and I spend a lot more time going over them in class to allow students time to highlight and annotate.

#4: Use highlighting as a formative assessment.

This is my new favorite way of using highlighters. I almost can’t believe that I went years without using highlighters in this magical and simple way. Here is how I have made it work:

After students write a response (a paragraph, an essay, an answer to a question, etc.), ask them to highlight for a particular skill or concept before turning their papers in. Early in the year, after teaching students about MLA citation rules, I instructed students to properly-cited evidence in their responses and to highlight the citation. This was such a quick and easy way to see 1) who knew what a citation was, and 2) what I needed to re-teach. I was able to target my instruction and feedback for this very specific skill quite easily because the students had marked their work in a way that helped me.

Over the course of the year, I have asked the students to highlight more complex concepts or ideas. Some of these include highlight internal or external conflicts, their inferences, and specific literary devices. All of these have been great ways to check their understanding of these concepts in isolation and really hone in on particular ways to address common mistakes or misunderstandings.

I can see this strategy working well in all classrooms outside of English! We all have specific skills or content that we can literally ask the students to highlight in order to expedite our feedback and improve our instruction.

#5: Getting highlighters is a great “transition” activity.

In previous years, I tried keeping caddies for supplies for each group of desks. At the start of the year, I would put a new supply of pencils, pens, erasers, post-it notes, and, of course, highlighters. I thought that by having the supply caddies in close proximity, I would be able to keep the students more engaged and less time would be lost when they needed to get ready for a task.

The reality was different. Supplies ran out faster than I expected, with some students accidentally (or maybe purposefully) taking some out of the room. Some used the caddies to put their gum wrappers or other bits of trash. Some found the caddies too tempting to ignore and were distracted by digging for items or putting items back or trying to make “baskets” or any number of games that I certainly had not meant to facilitate. I am sure that caddies can work really well and that part of the reason they became cumbersome instead of helpful for me came down to routine setting. I did not set a routine for using the caddies and materials which led to the inevitable headache of dealing with what I had hoped to be a valuable resource and, ironically, a time-saver.

What has worked a lot better for me is keeping a big box of highlighters of different colors on a side counter. In my AVID class, I do offer students highlighters to keep and take with them but for my classes at large, the bin of highlighters has worked out really well. Aside from being able to be more open-ended with my instructions (for example, take out 2 different color highlighters), I now have a great transition activity that works for us in a few ways.

When I ask students to get highlighters, this allows them to 1) stretch and get a little “break” from sitting, and 2) prime and get ready for a focused activity. Though I started using this routine a couple of years ago, I was more intentional about it this year. I made sure to have a good variety of highlighter colors and placed the bin next to the pencil sharpener, staplers, and our “turn-in tray” (the trays they used to turn in their work). By placing it next to these items, the transition time can be used to both turn something in and get a highlighter. Having these items all in the same location has actually saved me time. And though I had considered that students might linger, I have found that by giving them a minute to get ready, I also get a minute to get ready for the next step. I move into the next part of the lesson more intentionally and with a clearer mindset.

I can’t help but make a bad pun to end this post. Using highlighters can truly serve to highlight both key skills and transition activities.