Abbeville County School District

State Accommodations & Best Practices

The Abbeville County School District Multilingual Program believes that implementing best practices and suitable accommodations, tailored to each student's performance and progress, is crucial for addressing the needs of our multilingual learners at different stages of language acquisition. We are dedicated to assisting classroom teachers in differentiating and scaffolding their instruction to provide comprehensible input, ensuring equitable access to content and the curriculum.

• Best Practices Digital Handbook

  • Activate prior knowledge

  • Allow alternative assignments and assessments*​

  • Check for understanding

  • Give positive reinforcement/can-do attitude

  • Incorporate student culture

  • Pre-teach key vocabulary and key content

  • Provide comprehensible input

  • Provide examples and models of completed projects and papers

  • Provide sentence frames or sentence stems

  • Provide word banks

  • Provide visual cues

  • Teach to all modalities

  • Use graphic organizers

  • Use manipulatives

• Accommodations Digital Handbook

  • Allow alternative response options for assignments and assessments

  • Allow for assignment/assessment retakes or corrections

  • Bilingual dictionary

  • Chunk assignments/assessments into manageable pieces

  • Grading with a rubric based on the student’s level of English proficiency

  • Individual instruction

  • Paired oral and written instructions

  • Permit student errors in spelling and grammar except when explicitly taught and assessed, Acknowledge errors as indications of learning, Allow edits for certain language errors

  • *Pre-teach key vocabulary and key content

  • Provide a copy of notes

  • *Provide sentence frames or sentence stems

  • *Provide word banks

  • Small group instruction

  • Teacher use of simplified language

  • Use of instructional tools such as highlighter, calculator, etc.

  • Use varied print and audio texts, such as recorded books, graphic novels, etc.

  • *Visual cues

• Multilingual Learner Instructional Accommodation and Modification Examples

• Individualized Language Acquisition: 

• The ILAP is a legally binding document with the same importance as an IEP or a 504 plan. The Supreme Court case Lau v. Nichols (1974) and subsequent legislation from the Equal Education Opportunity Act (1974) obligate school districts to provide MLs with meaningful and equal access to the curriculum. ILAPs contain pertinent information about each ML and the specific accommodations to meet their needs. All teachers who serve the students must follow the specifications outlined in the ILAP. 

• MLs with an English proficiency level of ‘1.0-6.0’ or ‘A1-A3,’ whether served or waived, must have an ILAP on file reviewed and signed by each teacher serving the student. If an ML does not need accommodations to succeed in their classes, either an ILAP or other form of documentation must be signed by all teachers to acknowledge the student is an ML, but no accommodations are needed at the time. 

• The plan will address the students’ accommodations in all classes to ensure their success and continued English language development. The ILAP should be created in conjunction with the MLPT, which includes members directly involved with the student’s education (e.g., MLPS/teacher, parent/guardian, general education teacher, guidance counselor, administrator, and the student). 

• ILAPs can be accessed through ELLevation