Building Academic Language for Multi-lingual Learners Through the Visual Arts

This paper focuses on the challenges facing educators as they strive to accommodate new refugee students who are arriving in all countries around the globe. Since these students will be schooled in the language of their adopted countries, solutions are needed to effectively instruct these learners in meaningful language acquisition strategies as well as content knowledge material. The arts can be used as a vehicle of instruction to support communication with students from different language backgrounds. The arts have been proven to be an effective segue for educators to engage students while teaching a new language as they continue their learning journey in the content areas through the focus on academic language.