What is ALA?

Academic Literacy for All (ALA) is a five-year cooperative professional development project between the University of New Mexico’s College of Education, the Albuquerque Public Schools, and the Los Lunas Schools. It is funded by the Office of English Language Acquisition in the US Department of Education.

Academic Literacy for All works with secondary teachers in the core disciplines of language arts, social studies, science, and mathematics to help them facilitate the language and literacy development of their English Language Learners as they teach content area curricula. This comprehensive professional development program helps them develop effective instructional strategies, including writing to learn, scaffolding, group work, use of native language, critical analysis of text, inquiry, and social interaction.

The ALA unit is designed to help English Language Learners, and all students, increase their conceptual thinking and understanding of content while improving their speaking, reading, and writing in English. (In the ALA Project the term “ELL” is used to designate any student whose native language is other than English or who was raised in a household in which there was a dominant presence of a second language.)

 The ALA project achieves its goals through five interrelated initiatives:

1. A graduate seminar for ALA Teacher Educators
2. A summer Institute for ALA Teacher Educators and UNM Faculty
3. Curriculum development in the UNM Teacher Education Program.
4. On-site professional development in participating schools, led by ALA’s Teacher Educators.
5. Ongoing program assessment.