I am reading " English Learners Academic Literacy and Thinking: Learning in the Challenge Zone" by Pauline Gibbons.  I am teaching second language learners and I wanted to read a book about English language learners (ELL).  The "Challenge Zone", come to find out is middle school and it emphasizes students who are having difficulty with learning English and making sense of language all together. This book suggests strategies to raise expectations of teachers and students in the regular and EL classrooms.  ELL students should be in high-challenge classrooms to be successful in their education.
First, students who are cognitively challenged no matter the background, are engaged in their classwork; second, students, no matter what background they come from achieve at higher levels when they are in "an intellectually challenging curriculum; third, "equity gaps" are diminished when they are engaged in their work. From the reading, I am understanding that all students are capable of being successful in academics, but there are factors that determine who will be successful and who will not.
This book focuses mainly on middle school students and how literacy affect their learning success. Literacy is where the students grasp new knowledge by using different strategies.
Discourse plays an important part in our students' learning, discourse is not used in particular but it states that the students' will learn to use language in different social situations.  Students need to develop the spoken and written language of a content to do well in assessments.  We all know that ELLs perform low than their "native-English-speaking peers" and so teachers need to learn to use different strategies to assist ELL students.
Two important elements the author mentions is prior knowledge and scaffolding.  

There are 7 Intellectual Practices:

• Practice 1 - Students engage with the key ideas and concepts of the discipline in ways that reflect how "experts" in the field think and reason
• Practice 2 - Students transform what they  have learned into a different form for use in a new content or for a different audience
• Practice 3 - Students make links between concrete knowledge and abstract theoretical knowledge
• Practice 4 - Students engage in substantive conversation
• Practice 5 - Students make connections between the spoken and written language of the subject and other discipline-related ways of making meaning
• Practice 6 - Students take a critical stance toward knowledge and information
• Practice 7 - Students use metalanguage in the context of learning about other things

Apprenticeship is the most natural way to learn and should be used with ELL students daily. Also "Rich Tasks" will connect the students' learning to the real world.