ENGLISH ACROSS THE CURRICULUM: THE VIEW FROM THE UNITED STATES

English language skills, especially reading and writing, are no longer only developed in the ESL classroom. The trend around the world is toward integrating English literacy instruction with content areas, whether this instruction is called Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), Content Based Instruction (CBI), or the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA). In the United States, both the standards of the World Class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA) consortium, which created the assessment tools widely used to determine the proficiency levels of non-native speakers of English, and the Common Core Standards (CSS) adopted under the Obama administration emphasize the need for the development of academic literacy, not just in the Language Arts class, but in content areas such as social studies, science, and math classes. This paper describes some of the features of academic and professional writing, and proposes some strategies to help students learn to comprehend these texts.