Sheltered Instruction

Sheltered instruction is an approach for teaching academic content to English language learners in a way that keeps the content accessible while still building the students' language skills, pioneered by Stephen Krashen in the early 1980s as a way of integrating second language acquisition techniques into the teaching of ordinary school subjects rather than treating language and content as separate. It is also known as Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English, or SDAIE, a name that reflects its aim of shielding English language learners from the full linguistic difficulty of mainstream teaching that would otherwise be too complex for them to follow. Its practices include visual aids, simplified language, gestures and context clues to support comprehension; explicit statement of lesson objectives with step by step explanation; paired and group work to build language through interaction; incorporation of students' own backgrounds and experience into the material; and differentiated methods adjusted to a class's range of proficiency levels and learning styles.