37.3399, Reviews: Teaching Across Borders: Nesreen El-Baz (2026)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3399. Mon Oct 19 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3399, Reviews: Teaching Across Borders: Nesreen El-Baz (2026)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Daniel Swanson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Valeriia Vyshnevetska <valeriia at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 19-Oct-2026
From: Faiza Panhwar [faiza.panhwar2015 at gmail.com]
Subject: Applied Linguistics, General Linguistics: Nesreen El-Baz (2026)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/37-1940

Title: Teaching Across Borders
Subtitle: Empowering English Learners
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
           http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/
Book URL:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/teaching-across-borders-9798216376040/

Author(s): Nesreen El-Baz

Reviewer: Faiza Panhwar

SUMMARY
“Teaching Across Borders: Empowering English Learners” is a practical
account of teaching English learners (ELs), based mainly on Nesreen
El-Baz’s experiences in Houston, Texas, and ending with her work in
the French school system in Egypt. In the preface, El-Baz explains
that the book offers “not theories, but real tools.” Its main concerns
are equity, belonging, and giving students a voice. The book is
written primarily for classroom teachers, although school leaders and
parents may also find parts of it useful. It is divided into six parts
and twenty-three chapters. Most chapters use personal stories to
introduce teaching ideas and end with a Teacher Tip and a Parent Tip.
A note before Chapter 1 also acknowledges that AI tools were used to a
limited extent for brainstorming, sentence refinement, and organizing
ideas.
Part 1, “Heartfelt Beginnings: The Spark of Teaching” (Chapters 1–5),
begins in Houston in 2006, when El-Baz was preparing to return to work
after spending fourteen years at home. Before that, she had studied
linguistics in Cairo, completed a teaching certificate while living in
Aberdeen, and spent time in Japan and Paris. In Houston, she first
worked as a paraprofessional across two campuses on the same road. One
school served families with low incomes, while the other was in a more
affluent neighborhood (Chapter 4). She later became a part-time middle
school teacher (Chapter 5). Names and belonging are recurring themes
in these early chapters. El-Baz remembers the ESL coordinator who was
the first person in the district to pronounce “Nesreen” correctly
(Chapter 2). She also explains why she asks students how they want to
be addressed, recalling a student introduced as Jennifer who preferred
the name Yingting.
Part 2, “Bridging Cultures and Emotions in the Classroom” (Chapters
6–7), focuses on building relationships with students and their
families. El-Baz attends students’ concerts and sports matches,
explains grading expectations to parents who are unfamiliar with the
American school system, and arranges evenings where parents can learn
about classroom work. Chapter 7 explores culturally responsive
teaching through the story of Sara, a student from Saudi Arabia whose
father felt uncomfortable with some classroom activities. Rather than
dismissing his concerns, El-Baz worked with both Sara and her father
to find a way for Sara to participate while respecting her family’s
values. The father later became a parent representative on the
school’s language proficiency committee.
Part 3, “Teaching Strategies for Language Development” (Chapters
8–15), is the longest and most instructional section of the book. The
chapters are organized around language skills and different types of
writing. In Chapter 8, images are used to introduce vocabulary and
build background knowledge. One example is Norman Rockwell’s painting
“The Problem We All Live With.” The writing chapters guide students
from choosing a manageable topic to writing a complete personal
narrative, using the 6+1 Traits framework (Chapters 9–10). Chapter 11
focuses on descriptive writing through personal objects and student
essays. Listening and speaking activities include news broadcasts,
role-play, and songs (Chapter 12). Reading instruction draws on
picture books, read-alouds, and leveled texts, with *Esperanza Rising*
used as an extended example (Chapters 13–14). Chapter 15 prepares
students for high-stakes reading exams by teaching them to evaluate
sources, break texts into manageable sections, and use a
vocabulary-in-context strategy credited to Mark Pennington.
Part 4, “Empowering English Learners and Teachers for Success”
(Chapters 16–17), returns to individual students and the wider needs
they bring to school. Chapter 16 tells the story of Saul, a quiet
student who is often compared unfavorably with his older brother.
After he plays guitar for the class and receives a certificate of
recognition, he begins to regain confidence. Chapter 17 takes a
broader view of the “whole child.” It includes a visitor’s memory of
being forbidden to speak Spanish after moving to Houston as a boy, an
ESL coordinator’s account of teaching children to brush their teeth at
school, and El-Baz’s discussion of social-emotional learning and
Kevin, a student with ADHD.
Part 5, “Advanced Tools for Classroom Innovation” (Chapters 18–21),
looks at professional learning and classroom organization. El-Baz
discusses the ideas and training that influenced her work, including
the SIOP model, Bloom’s Taxonomy, Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal
Development, a talk by Stephen Krashen, and a gifted-education
workshop that encouraged her to give students rubrics instead of model
projects (Chapter 18). Chapter 19 introduces educational tools such as
ESL ReadingSmart, Quizlet, Seesaw, and Nearpod, along with routines
like asking students to place iPads face down when they are not using
them. Chapter 20 describes co-teaching with an English language arts
colleague. Chapter 21 explains how El-Baz used a color-coded
spreadsheet to track students’ progress across assessments, including
TELPAS.
Part 6, “Conclusion and Resources” (Chapters 22–23), begins with a
message from a former student years after leaving El-Baz’s class and
mentions her selection as a finalist for a Houston teacher-of-the-year
award. The narrative then moves to Egypt, where she teaches students
in the Baccalauréat track and becomes known as “Madame Nesreen.” The
book closes with three lesson plans, each based on a named teaching
model. The nondirective model is used with a second grader who is
strong in mathematics but rarely speaks in class. The
inductive-thinking lesson teaches sixth graders about sentence types,
while the inquiry lesson uses real food to teach food groups.
EVALUATION
The preface sets out a clear and modest aim: to offer practical
classroom strategies while promoting equity, belonging, and student
voice. For classroom teachers, the book largely achieves that aim.
Many of its suggestions are concrete enough to use in the near future.
For instance, Chapter 9 shows students how to narrow a topic by first
spreading their arms wide and then bringing them closer together.
Chapter 19 suggests a simple routine of turning iPads face down when
they are not in use. Chapter 21 describes how a newcomer’s row
remained shaded in a spreadsheet even after she met the exit criteria,
alerting future teachers that she might still need cultural and
language support. School leaders and parents receive less detailed
guidance. The Parent Tips are encouraging but brief, and the book has
relatively little to say directly to administrators beyond the
importance of supporting teachers.
Chapter 8 is one of the strongest examples of El-Baz’s approach.
Across three days, students move from observing images to producing
their own language. They first describe Rockwell’s painting and a
photograph by Bourke-White showing a breadline during the Great
Depression. They then learn vocabulary using picture cards, practise
the present progressive with a sentence such as “They are waiting in
line,” and write using sentence frames and bilingual dictionaries. A
co-teacher provides historical context in simple English. The lesson
gives beginner-level English learners a way to engage with challenging
subjects, including school segregation and economic hardship, without
simplifying the subject matter itself. The steps are clearly
explained, so teachers can see how the activity might work in their
own classrooms.
The lesson plans in Chapter 23 are among the book’s most useful
resources because they can be adapted for different settings. Each
plan is based on a named model and is written in a friendly, practical
style. In the nondirective lesson, a teacher speaks privately with a
quiet second grader who is good at mathematics but rarely contributes
in class. The activity requires no handouts or technology, just a calm
moment and a thoughtful conversation. In the inductive-thinking
lesson, sixth graders examine examples and work out punctuation
patterns and the four sentence types instead of being given the rules
first. The inquiry lesson begins with real food placed on a table. All
three activities reflect the book’s belief that students learn by
observing, handling materials, and talking through their ideas. The
first plan, however, comes close to counseling. Teachers who do not
have relevant training may want to discuss its boundaries with
colleagues before using it.
The book’s greatest strength is the way it connects personal stories
with classroom practice. Because the language-development strategies
come after chapters about names, families, and trust, they feel
connected to a broader approach to teaching rather than like a
collection of isolated tips. El-Baz is also open about the
difficulties involved. For example, Chapter 20 describes the
misunderstandings and negotiations that shaped her early experience of
co-teaching, including uncertainty about who should lead and who
should provide support. Readers familiar with Cummins and Early’s
(2011) work may recognize similarities to the idea of identity texts:
writing that draws on students’ own experiences and can be shared with
a real audience. The examples in Chapter 11, including a backpack
signed by a football player and a pen linking a student to his
grandfather and Egyptian history, illustrate how personal objects can
give students meaningful material to write about. Although El-Baz does
not use the term “identity texts,” the idea fits comfortably with the
activities she describes.
The main limitation is the book’s weak connection to published
research. It does not include a reference list or full citations.
Several chapters use phrases such as “research shows,” sometimes
followed by specific statistics, but do not provide enough information
for readers to locate the original studies. For example, Chapter 15
attributes to a 2016 Stanford History Education Group study the
finding that 82 percent of middle school students struggled to
distinguish sponsored content from news. Chapter 17 states that the
Education Endowment Foundation found social-emotional interventions
produced about four months of academic progress. The organizations are
named, but the reports are not identified. This may be understandable
in a practitioner-focused book, but it becomes more important when
Chapter 23 describes its lesson plans as “research-based.” The plans
name teaching models without directing readers to sources where they
can explore those models in greater depth.
The book also presents some educational frameworks unevenly. In
Chapter 6, El-Baz discusses visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners
and treats learning styles as a reason to adapt teaching. However,
Pashler et al. (2008) concluded that evidence does not support
matching instruction to students’ supposed learning styles. Many of
the activities in the book—such as using charts, discussion, and
hands-on materials—remain useful as multimodal teaching, regardless of
whether learning styles are accepted as a valid concept. The concern
is that inexperienced readers may accept the explanation without
questioning it. Chapter 18 credits Chomsky’s theory of universal
grammar with helping El-Baz move beyond rote memorization, but it does
not explain clearly how a theory of innate linguistic structure
translates into classroom practice. By contrast, the chapter’s account
of Krashen’s emphasis on comprehensible and meaningful input is clear
and connects naturally with many of the strategies in Part 3, even
though the link to Krashen (1982) is not made explicit.
Evidence for the effectiveness of the strategies is mostly anecdotal.
The book reports that Saul’s grades improved after he received his
certificate and that Thu greeted El-Baz with “I saw you yesterday”
after a school concert (Chapter 6). These stories are engaging and
believable, but they describe individual experiences selected by the
author. They cannot establish which teaching practices caused a change
or whether the same results would occur for other students. The book
also leaves open the question of how realistic some practices are for
teachers with limited time. Attending concerts, organizing parent
evenings, and maintaining individual progress spreadsheets all require
considerable effort. It is not clear how easily teachers with larger
classes or heavier workloads could sustain them.
Two chapters show the limitations of the book’s approach particularly
clearly. Chapter 15 combines teaching students to question online
sources with preparing them for high-stakes exams, but it does not
fully explain how these two aims connect. The exams themselves are not
named, making it difficult for readers to judge whether the strategies
match the demands of a particular test. Even so, the vocabulary
routine is explained clearly through the example of the word
“adversity.” Chapter 19, meanwhile, lists several commercial tools,
including ESL ReadingSmart, Quizlet, Seesaw, Nearpod, BrainPOP, and
Shadow Puppet. Such product-specific advice can quickly become
outdated. The more lasting point is that technology is most useful
when it supports feedback and individual learning, as when progress
charts help teachers decide what to discuss during one-to-one
conferences.
Some of the book’s ideas connect productively with wider educational
frameworks. Its use of visuals, real objects, background knowledge,
and think-pair-share activities closely resembles components of the
SIOP model (Echevarría, Vogt, & Short, 2017), which is introduced in
Chapter 18. Teacher educators could therefore use the book’s stories
as practical cases for discussing that framework. El-Baz’s approach to
culturally responsive teaching also reflects ideas associated with Gay
(2018) and Ladson-Billings (1995). Her work with Sara’s family and the
“Culture Corner” show a clear commitment to students’ academic success
and cultural competence. The book gives less attention to
sociopolitical consciousness, however. In Chapter 17, the story about
Spanish being prohibited in a Houston school raises important
questions about language policy and power, but the discussion mainly
presents it as evidence of progress. Home languages appear in several
useful ways, including bilingual dictionaries in Chapter 8, advice in
Chapter 13 for parents to discuss stories in the language they prefer,
and recordings in Seesaw in Chapter 19. Still, the book does not offer
a broader framework for understanding these practices. Work on
translanguaging, such as García and Wei (2014), could help explain why
students’ home languages are valuable learning resources.
Chapters 16 and 17 are valuable because they recognize that students’
needs cannot be understood through language proficiency alone. Saul’s
loss of confidence and Kevin’s ADHD remind readers that English
learners, like other students, bring a wide range of personal, social,
and learning needs to school. These chapters develop the book’s
emphasis on the “whole child” more fully than many language-teaching
manuals do.
Overall, the book is more consistent across its six parts than from
one chapter to the next. The broad progression—from personal
experiences, to classroom strategies, to professional tools—is easy to
follow. The Teacher Tips and Parent Tips give the chapters a familiar
structure, although they sometimes repeat points already made. Chapter
17 brings together language policy, social-emotional learning, ADHD,
and the needs of the whole child without fully explaining how these
themes relate. The chapters in Part 5 can also feel like separate
essays, while the final lesson plans are not clearly linked back to
the language-development strategies in Part 3. In addition, terms
specific to the Texas education system, such as TELPAS and the
language proficiency committee, are not explained. Readers outside the
United States may therefore need extra context.
The book is likely to be most useful for early-career K–12 teachers of
English learners and English language arts in American public schools.
Teacher educators may also appreciate its first-person classroom
examples. It is less suitable for readers looking for a research-based
overview of second-language acquisition, and teachers working in EFL
settings where students share a first language will need to adapt some
of the approaches.
The practices described in the book also suggest several directions
for further research. Classroom studies could examine whether using
images to teach vocabulary and providing structured support for
narrative writing improve outcomes for newly arrived students.
Research on home-language use could explore whether parents follow
suggestions such as discussing stories in the language they prefer,
and what effects this may have. El-Baz’s experience across several
national education systems could also support comparative research
into how teachers adapt their practice to different contexts. Chapter
18 offers another possible line of inquiry by showing how one teacher
draws on workshops, talks, and established frameworks when developing
her approach to teaching. Finally, researchers could examine whether
asking students how they wish to be named affects their sense of
belonging and their participation in class.
In the end, “Teaching Across Borders: Empowering English Learners” is
a sincere, accessible account of classroom experience. Its strongest
contribution is the practical detail it offers and its reminder that
language teaching depends on relationships, identity, and trust as
well as instructional technique. A clearer connection to the research
behind its claims would make the book more valuable to teachers and
researchers alike.
REFERENCES
Cummins, Jim & Margaret Early (eds.). 2011. Identity texts: The
collaborative creation of power in multilingual schools. Stoke on
Trent: Trentham Books.
Echevarría, Jana, MaryEllen Vogt & Deborah J. Short. 2017. Making
content comprehensible for English learners: The SIOP model. 5th edn.
Boston: Pearson.
García, Ofelia & Li Wei. 2014. Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism
and education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gay, Geneva. 2018. Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research,
and practice. 3rd edn. New York: Teachers College Press.
Krashen, Stephen D. 1982. Principles and practice in second language
acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon.
Ladson-Billings, Gloria. 1995. Toward a theory of culturally relevant
pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal 32(3). 465–491.
Pashler, Harold, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer & Robert Bjork. 2008.
Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the
Public Interest 9(3). 105–119.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Faiza Panhwar is a research student currently pursuing a Master’s
degree in Linguistics at Xidian University, China. Her research
interests include multimodal metaphor, corpus linguistics, and
cognitive linguistics, alongside a broader interest in language,
communication, and academic writing. She also has several years of
experience teaching English and an interest in language research,
academic writing, and communication.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List, a U.S. 501(c)(3) not for profit organization:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Australian Linguistics Society https://als.asn.au/Home

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Brill https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

MDPI Languages https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Peter Lang AG http://www.peterlang.com

SIL International Publications http://www.sil.org/resources/publications

University of Toronto Press https://utppublishing.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3399
----------------------------------------------------------