Academic strategies, sociocultural expectations, and academic norms are taught explicitly. Effective teachers develop students' sense of autonomy through the explicit teaching of strategies that enable them to approach academic tasks successfully. Guidance and modeling can go a long way toward promoting awareness of and facility with this discourse. For example, preferred and accepted ways of talking, writing, and presenting are culture specific. Developing student awareness of differences, modeling by teachers of preferred styles, and study by students themselves of differences and preferred styles are three steps in the development of proficiency and autonomy that need to be included in the education of language minority students.
Tasks are relevant, meaningful, engaging, and varied.
If students do not interact with each other, they do not have opportunities to construct their own understandings and often become disengaged. Because immigrant students are usually well behaved in class, teachers are not always aware that they are bored and are not learning. Good classes for immigrant students not only provide them with access to important ideas and skills, but also engage them in their own constructive development of understandings. Complex and flexible forms of collaboration maximize learners' opportunities to interact while making sense of language and content. Collaborative work needs to provide every student with substantial and equitable opportunities to participate in open exchange and elaborated discussions.