Unpeeling the PEEL Paragraph: Supporting Multilingual Learners

International schools are evolving, welcoming learners from digital nomads to displaced communities and third-culture families. These students bring diverse educational backgrounds—homeschooling, nature schools, or interrupted schooling—which create unique challenges in developing academic literacy. For multilingual learners (MLLs), this often includes difficulty mastering argument writing. It’s time to unpeel the limitations of rigid structures like the PEEL paragraph, used with a process approach to teach writing, and embrace a more dynamic and supportive framework: the Teaching and Learning Cycle (TLC).

The PEEL paragraph and supports (Photo source: Alice Tamang)


The Process Approach. (Photo source: Alice Tamang)

Understanding the Challenge

Emergent Global Learners (EGLs), as I term them, often face disrupted academic trajectories. Many struggle with writing tasks like argumentation due to limited exposure to conventions (Rose, 2015) or missed literacy instruction during critical years—particularly in the aftermath of COVID-19. My experience with traditional approaches like product and process writing highlights the limitations: the product approach is rigid, stifling critical thinking, while the process approach often leaves less-proficient learners behind, leading to plagiarism.

With middle school as a vital stage for academic catch-up, how can educators scaffold learning effectively? Enter the Teaching and Learning Cycle.

What Is the Teaching and Learning Cycle?

Rooted in the Sydney School’s Genre Approach and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the TLC offers a structured framework to teach academic writing. It breaks the process into four clear phases:

1. Building the Field: Setting the stage by developing learners’ background knowledge. This includes activities such as reading, viewing media, discussions, and a focus on key vocabulary. In the ELA class this is what we do every lesson, connecting texts to context, unpacking meaning, understanding characters, and analysing language. 
2. Supported Reading: Close reading of texts which are critical to the learners’ understanding of the topic.
3. Deconstruction: The teacher selects, modifies, or writes a model text similar to the one which teachers’ expect learners to write. Recently, de Oliveira and dos Santos (2025) explore how AI-generated mentor texts can support genre-based pedagogy in L2 writing classrooms by highlighting typical stages and language features.
4. Joint Construction: Learners collaboratively plan and write texts using a gradual release mode of “we do together, you do in groups, you do alone.” 
5. Independent Construction: Learners independently apply their understanding (Rose, 2015; Westerlund, 2024).

This approach doesn’t just teach learners what to write; it helps them understand how and why certain language choices are made. For multilingual learners, this explicit focus on language’s function and purpose can be transformative (Gebhard & Accurso, 2023).

How I Implemented the TLC: An Inspector Calls

Planning With the End in Mind
I designed my summative assessment: learners would write an argument paragraph about characterization and themes, focusing on unpacking complex ideas and applying them to the texts studied (Rose, 2015).

Building the Field
We explored the social-historical context of the plays, read them aloud, and engaged in close-reading and discussions on characters and themes. For the mid-term formative, students used the TS1R translanguaging routine (Huckle, 2022) and Harvard Project Zero’s Circle of Viewpoints (Project Zero, n.d.). They then wrote claims and evidence using the Knowledge, Abilities, and Learning (KAL) chart, shifting from social to academic language. This collaborative activity was supported by feedback and dialogue, reinforcing the dialogic teaching model (Alexander, 2008).

Year 9 English students’ work. (Photo source: Alice Tamang)

Text Deconstruction
I modelled paragraph writing using think-alouds and colour-coded annotations to highlight key language features and functions, a strategy informed by functional grammar principles (Derewianka & Jones, 2016). Together, we created a paragraph-building toolkit to scaffold our understanding. 

Using the KAL table and a verb list, students practiced reasoning:

Year 9 English, learner generated sentence. (Photo source: Alice Tamang)

"This reveals Mrs. Birling believes Sheila cannot understand the expectations of a woman until she gets married herself."

Joint Construction
We jointly constructed a paragraph as a class, then in pairs. I modelled planning using a graphic organizer and referred to the paragraph toolkit and vocabulary tables. I demonstrated how to draw on the formative assessment for claims, evidence, and reasoning.

Year 9 English, teacher modeled planning. (Photo source: Alice Tamang)

Assessing Writing

Writing was assessed using a standard rubric, adapted from PEEL, and assessed for language using the WIDA (2020) Expressive Rubric from the WIDA Grade 6-8 Standards. 

Key Findings from the Research

• Stronger scores in discourse: All learners were able to structure their paragraphs with the appropriate language features of Claim-Evidence-Reasoning-Summary.
• Improved Writing Confidence: Learners expressed greater confidence in making claims and supporting them with evidence.
• Stronger Sentence Structures: Using tools like the KAL table, students constructed sentences with greater coherence and clarity, using appropriate evaluative/relating verbs such as “highlights, demonstrates, implies.”
• Valuable Collaborative Learning: Joint writing tasks enhanced drafts by fostering peer collaboration.
• Improved WIDA Scores: Every learner showed an improvement in their WIDA scores for writing, with marked improvement in the discourse domain.

However, areas for growth include expanding theme related vocabulary and diversifying sentence types, underscoring the need for ongoing strategy refinement (Graham et al., 2020).

Why It Matters
The TLC does more than improve writing; it creates equitable learning environments. By explicitly scaffolding both content and language, it ensures multilingual learners aren’t left behind in classrooms designed for monolingual peers. Similarly, monolingual peers' writing improves, as they develop metacognition of how and why they make their writing choices. This is particularly critical in international schools, where learners’ needs and backgrounds vary widely (Relyea et al., 2024). 

Reflections from my classes were positive:

The gradual release of the TLC, along with visible thinking routines and translanguaging meant that learners were socially constructing their knowledge at all stages from planning to writing their paragraphs. I used questions and prompts to help learners dig deeper into their content knowledge, consider their language choices. One learner in Year 9 declared at the beginning of the cycle, “I hate PEEL essays, I don’t know what I’m writing.” By the end of the cycle, she was confidently planning and writing independently and reflected to me in class how before she just “kept writing” whereas now, she writes thoughtfully, with intention. I can confidently say that my learners’ Zone of Actual Development has shifted from I can’t plan and write an analytical paragraph with appropriate language features to I can with appropriate scaffolding from my teacher.  

Looking Ahead

To maximize the TLC’s impact, my next steps are to:

• Explore additional genres, such as narratives and informational texts.
• Embed quick scaffolding workshops into daily lessons.
• Expand Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary instruction of words and phrases connected to the themes of the play/novel/poem being studied.

Frameworks like the TLC are essential tools for supporting academic success and fostering deeper language understanding, benefiting all learners regardless of linguistic background.

References

• Alexander, R. (2008). Towards dialogic teaching: Rethinking classroom talk.
• Brown, D. W. (2015). The impact of writing instruction on the development of second language writing skills. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1082330.pdf
• de Oliveira, L. C., & dos Santos, A. E. (2025). Using AI-text generated mentor texts for genre-based pedagogy in second language writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 67, 101184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2025.101184
• Derewianka, B., & Jones, P. (2016). Teaching language in context.
• Gebhard, M., & Accurso, K. (2023). Pursuing a multilingual equity agenda. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003162575-1
• Graham, S., Kiuhara, S. A., & MacKay, M. (2020). The effects of writing on learning in science, social studies, and mathematics: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 90(2), 179-226. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654320914744
• Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. (2014). Halliday's introduction to functional grammar (4th ed.).
• Huckle, J. (2022). Translanguaging routines for multilingual learners. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365565224_Routines_for_Translanguaging_and_Multilingual_Thinking_Enabling_Pedagogical_Translanguaging_in_all_Classrooms
• Project Zero. (n.d.). Thinking routines toolbox: Circle of Viewpoints. Harvard Graduate School of Education.
• Relyea, J., Kim, J., Rich, P., & Fitzgerald, J. (2024). Effects of Tier 1 Content Literacy Intervention on Early-Grade English Learners’ Reading and Writing. Journal of Educational Psychology, 116, 1172-1195. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000882
• Rose, D. (2015). New developments in genre-based literacy pedagogy. https://doi.org/10.355355349/New_developments_in_genre-based_literacy_pedagogy
• VicTESOL. (n.d.). The teaching and learning cycle. https://victesol.vic.edu.au/teaching-and-learning-cycle-project/the-teaching-and-learning-cycle/
• Westerlund, R. (2024). Teaching writing in the content areas: Research and practice. Colorín Colorado. https://www.colorincolorado.org/article/teaching-writing-content-areas-research-practice