Making Social Studies Meaningful for ELL Students: Content and Pedagogy in Mainstream Secondary School Classrooms Michelle Yvonne Szpara Iftikhar Ahmad Long Island University, C.W. Post Campus Abstract Content-area instruction for English language learners (ELL) represents a growing area of instructional need in high schools across the United States. This article focuses on the challenges and successes in developing an effective instructional environment for teaching secondary-level social studies curriculum to a sheltered population of ELLs. In the present study, grant funding was provided for a school- university partnership to support content-area teachers’ efforts to increase ELL students’ comprehension skills. The authors of this paper propose a multi-tiered approach to meeting the needs of English language learners in the mainstream social studies classroom – providing social and cultural supports during the process of acculturation, providing explicit instruction in academic strategies necessary for successful comprehension of in-depth content, and making social studies curriculum more accessible through a range of strategies for reducing cognitive load without reducing content. Introduction Content-area instruction for learners of English as a second language represents a growing area of instructional need across the United States (August, 2002; Ruiz-de- Velasco, Fix, & Clewell, 2000). Previously, teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) was largely focused in metropolitan regions with high concentrations of immigrant populations. Increasingly, the need for TESOL instruction has become evident in suburban and rural regions as well (National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs, 2005). This article focuses on the challenges in developing an effective instructional environment for teaching secondary-level social studies curriculum to a sheltered population of students who speak English as a second language, in a suburban New York high school. Indeed, social studies instruction for English-language learner (ELL) students presents a second, uniquely embedded challenge – not only are the ELL students learning a new language and culture while in the classroom, they must learn a different interpretation of historical events, develop a different conception of government, and learn a different philosophy of citizenship.