Stanford’s Understanding Language has produced a free five-lesson unit plan for English Language Learners on persuasive writing called Persuasion Across Time and Space: Analyzing and Producing Persuasive Texts.

I only quickly reviewed it, and it seems to have some nice materials and activities. They say it’s for an intermediate ELL level middle school class. It seems fairly high level in terms of the language and intellectual requirements, so I’d suggest it would work well if you had a class composed entirely of high intermediates. If you had a wide range of language levels, though, I’d question how realistic it would be to realistically differentiate the lesson elements language-wise.

That’s one of the reasons our school uses, as do many others, units from The Write Institute — they’re engaging and easier to differentiate in the kind of ELL classes that I think you’ll find in many schools, ones that have a wide-range of language levels.

That said, though, I’ll still certainly including and adapting part of the Understanding Language unit into my lessons.

Thanks to Common Core and ELLs, the blog sponsored by Colorin Colorado, for the information.

I’m adding this info to The Best Resources For Learning About Common Core Standards & English Language Learners.