many teachers of CSELs speak Chinese. With a growing
population of CSELs in American elementary schools
(U.S. Census Bureau, 2010), it is pivotal for teachers to
gain knowledge and strategies for helping this group of
ELs. Furthermore, Common Core State Standards calls
for teaching children to read a wide range of texts with
complex text structures. If CSELs cannot develop a solid
foundation in the English language, they would be more
likely to experience difficult in reading and writing across
the curriculum. In this article, I will begin with a
presentation of the linguistic differences between
English and Chinese and discuss possible areas of
linguistic difficulty for CSELs. Because the Chinese
language has more than several hundreds of dialects
with their linguistic variations, in this article, I will focus
on Mandarin, the most widely spoken dialect. Then, I will
share two specific instructional strategies for addressing
some California English Language Development
Standards and some general strategies for teaching
CSELs.