As we enter National Bilingual/Multilingual Learner Advocacy Month this April, we take stock of how Speak Agent currently supports ELs and MLs and what work remains to be done.
Instructional Strategies and Supports
Effective Strategies
Speak Agent addresses the root cause of the achievement gap—the language barrier. This article discusses how our programs integrate English Learner (EL) and Multilingual Learner (ML) strategies with math and science learning and why it’s effective.
Embedded Learning Supports
Our Learning Supports page provides concrete examples of how Speak Agent embeds supports for listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing, and representing throughout the platform. While these communication modes apply to all learners, the article calls out where English and Multilingual Learners may particularly benefit.
WIDA Alignment
Speak Agent’s programs are WIDA-correlated. This article explores the connection between the WIDA ELD Standards Framework and the approach that Speak Agent uses with its Math + Language and Science + Language programs for content and language integration.
Work Still to Be Done
Speaking
If you’ve followed Speak Agent closely for the past few years, you’ve probably noticed that we have integrated a speaking component into many of our learning activities. We will continue to expand this. But we are also working to redesign our series of My Voice activities. These activities currently allow for a variety of student voice recordings, ranging from verbal repetition to open-ended responses.
- We plan to add syllable data to enhance the verbal practice. Breaking down each vocabulary term into syllables will help students develop phonemic awareness and pronunciation skills. This will mutually reinforce the Scrambled Words activity.
- We plan to integrate visual aids, hint, and/or other scaffolds with the open-ended questions.
- For teachers, we also plan to add text transcriptions of student voice recordings in order to make it easier to reference and search these recordings.
Representing
We are still in the early stages of integrating our Drawing Board module with the other visually oriented activities. This will afford more representation opportunities of particular benefit to ELs and MLs.
Writing
We all know how important academic writing is. Yet it can be a particular challenge for English and Multilingual Learners in the math and science content areas.
- Many students complain about having to write in math or science: “This is not English class.” It takes extra effort and creativity to make writing activities engaging in these content areas.
- Many students have trouble generating their own writing ideas or find the writing tasks overwhelming. They therefore may resort to AI solutions like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude in a way that is counterproductive.
- Some students have trouble incorporating the content-based academic vocabulary into their writing.
Our objective for 2026 is to design a new activity that bridges from simple gap-filling to writing full explanations. Restating the question may be a part of that bridge, in order to help students get started writing. We hope to transform math and science writing into an engaging puzzle to be solved, with a focus on math modeling, reasoning, and the scientific method, rather than on general English language development.
We always love hearing from educators about how we can improve the Speak Agent platform and programs in support of all learners. Please feel free to share your feature ideas, wishlist, or feedback by contacting our team!
