This workshop is designed to support K-12 educators with the creation of language-inclusive classrooms which honour the diverse home languages spoken by our students as well as acknowledge their lived experiences. Leveraging a student’s first language is a powerful tool for supporting language acquisition in a target language. As educators, we need to be cognizant of possible traumas our students have lived through and aware of how to best support their learning. A question many educators wonder is how to be proactive while still maintaining high standards for academic learning and acquisition of the English language. The workshop will aim to answer this question by focusing on:
- Structuring the classroom and learning in ways that foster community and include home languages.
- Introducing specific, actionable language acquisition strategies to support multilingual learners while also being helpful to all learners in the class.
- Discussing trauma-informed practices and how they connect to today’s classrooms.
Teachers will leave the workshop with a toolkit of ideas and strategies for fostering an inclusive language community that encourages and reinforces learning in English.
Presenter Bios
Fanny Lee 
Fanny Lee is the ELL Helping Teacher for the Burnaby School District. She has over 33 years of experience supporting multilingual students as a classroom teacher, ELL teacher, and district support teacher. She is an experienced presenter, Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) trainer affiliated with the Centre for Applied Linguistics, and mentor to early career teachers.
Kiran Abraham
Kiran Abraham is an ELL and Social Studies teacher for the Burnaby School District with over 13 years of experience as both a classroom and ELL teacher. She has been a district ELL consultant and has extensive experience in providing professional development workshops and supporting ELL and classroom teachers. In addition, she is an SIOP trainer and regularly collaborates with district ELL consultants from around British Columbia to share current research, teaching practices, and ideas.
