Interdisciplinary teaching in elementary schools: educating English Language Learner (ELL) students with multidimensional practices

School accountability has funnelled educational practices into a path where teaching practices are heavily centred in Language Arts instruction. Focusing learning almost exclusively in the aforesaid area develops a one-dimensional process that could hold back certain students from a well-balanced education. This article presents a model of interdisciplinary teaching, building cognitive bridges between subject areas, implemented during the 2006-2007 school year with 29 English Language Learners (ELL) 4th grade students from an elementary school located in Southern California. The goal was to increase students' language proficiency and their academic performance by creating multidimensional practices that emphasised the idea that a subject area (i.e., Mathematics) is an open body of knowledge fed by other disciplines (i.e., Science, Social Studies). The outcomes of this project suggest that students exposed to interdisciplinary methodologies not only build language as a multidimensional tool but they also increase their academic performance.