ELL families and schools

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To get started with this essay, I would first search for scholarly references in each of the required sub-areas you must discuss in the assignment instructions. There are four of them - I would search the Internet, using any engine you prefer (I like google, but alta vista, yahoo, dogpile and others you might prefer will also work - even bing!). When I conduct searches like this I look for scholarly resources - sites that have .edu, .gov, .org in the web addresses. Those are usually the best ones, if you can find them, but .com and .htm or .html sites can be good sources, you just have to be more careful with those, since .com sites are selling something and might not be completely honest, and the other two are personal web pages where people can post anything they like, true or not. That does not mean those sites are always bad ones, but it does not mean they are always good ones, either. The ONE place you must NEVER cite is Wikipedia. You can read it if you like, and sometimes you can get good ideas from it on where to look for what you want, but because anyone can edit Wikipedia, many colleges and universities actively forbid its use.

For the first part, the sociocultural influences on ELLs,I picked the following sites:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2077563/influences_on_esl_students_at_school.html

http://edr.sagepub.com/content/38/5/382.full

There were many other choices that you might choose to use instead of one of these two.

For the second part, bilingualism and home language use, I picked out the following sites for you to choose from, or you can choose to add some others you like better:

http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/rennie01.html

http://www.brainy-child.com/article/bilingual.shtml

For part three, parental and community resources for English acquisition in your area, you can search yourself for resources in your actual geographic area, or make use of the resources on the Web noted here, which are usable anywhere there is an internet-enabled computer. I picked these:

http://www.aecf.org/upload/PublicationFiles/l.pdf

http://performancepyramid.muohio.edu/English-Language-Learners/Parent-Resources.html

The last sub-area, how you and your school can improve home and school partnerships with ELL families, netted the following sites I picked from the hits returned from the search - you can, again, pick others you like better instead of these:

http://www.parenting-ed.org/parent-involvement-links.asp - a portal site

http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=E253FFCDD9580ABEE90C65AB71C30E99.inst3_3a?docId=5007987102

Once you have chosen the resources you'd like to use, you need to read through them and look for some good information that you think you'd like to use, and pick out some quotes that caught your eye as being especially good that you might want to include in your eventual paper. Once all that is done (whew!) you are ready to start writing.

If you are not familiar with APA formatting, there are some excellent sites on the Web that can answer most general questions. One I like to use, when I've put my APA manual where I can't find it, is this one: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/. If you will be majoring in education or the Humanities, you might want to go ahead and buy ...