This book provides educators with foundational knowledge on how students’ native languages influence their learning of English language and literacy. Linguistically diverse students increasingly populate current classrooms, and it is important for educators to have general linguistic and cross-linguistic knowledge to provide students with equitable access to the language and content of school. By discussing English language learners’ (ELLs) primary language norms, positive and negative transfer, and culturally sustaining resources, this book helps educators understand how to support ELLs’ use of their primary language as an asset when engaging in English language and literacy learning experiences.

This popular text, now in its third edition, "unpackages" the various dimensions of literacy – linguistic (the nature of language, oral-written language relationships, language variation); cognitive (constructive nature of perception, the reading process, understanding written discourse, the writing process); sociocultural (literacy as social practices, authority of written discourse); and developmental (constructing the written language system) – and at the same time accounts for the interrelationships among them. Distinguished by its examination of literacy from a multidimensional and interdisciplinary perspective, it provides a strong conceptual foundation upon which literacy curriculum and instruction in school settings can be grounded.

Following two major reports by the OECD, this important new book considers issues such as the history of literacy in ICT, the Internet, and implications for policy and practice - invaluable for teachers, student teachers, academics and researchers.

This comprehensive handbook offers a beautifully balanced view of the emerging field of multicultural school psychology. The opening section provides an historical overview of how the field has developed, and succeeding sections discuss multicultural issues related to consultation, instructional interventions, alternative assessment, academic assessment, vocational assessment, culturally sensitive counseling models, and working with families and special populations. Theory, research, and practice are integrated throughout. Key features of this exciting new book include: Interdisciplinary Perspective - Many chapters are written by authors from different disciplines, all of whom have multicultural expertise. The last chapter provides summarizing commentaries written by leaders in different disciplines. Scientist-Practitioner Focus - Evidence-based interventions for culturally and linguistically diverse students are provided for major competency areas such as consultation, counseling, and special programs (e.g., bilingual and multicultural education). Assessment Focus - Multicultural and bilingual assessment issues are discussed in the chapters covering language, cognitive, personality, behavioral, neuropsychological, vocational, acculturational, and academic assessment. Special Populations Focus - The needs of special populations such as culturally different parents, gifted and talented children, preschool children, migrant families, and children with low and high incidence learning disabilities are discussed in section VI. This book is appropriate for graduate courses and seminars dealing with multicultural school psychology. It is also a useful reference for researchers and practicing school psychologists and the libraries serving them.

This volume challenges traditional approaches to foreign language education and proposes to redefine them in our age of international migration and globalization. Foreign language classrooms are no longer populated by monolingual students, but increasingly by multilingual students with highly diverse language backgrounds. This necessitates a new understanding of foreign language learning and teaching. The volume brings together an international group of researchers of high caliber who specialize in third language acquisition, teaching English as an additional language, and multilingual education. In addition to topical overview articles on the multilingual policies pursued in Europe, Africa, North America, and Asia, as well as several contributions dealing with theoretical issues regarding multilingualism and plurilingualism, the volume also offers cutting edge case studies from multilingual acquisition research and foreign language classroom practice. Throughout the volume, multilingualism is interpreted as a valuable resource that can facilitate language education provided it is harnessed in appropriate conditions.

The Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy Through the Communicative and Visual Arts, Volume II brings together state-of-the-art research and practice on the evolving view of literacy as encompassing not only reading, writing, speaking, and listening, but also the multiple ways through which learners gain access to knowledge and skills. It forefronts as central to literacy education the visual, communicative, and performative arts, and the extent to which all of the technologies that have vastly expanded the meanings and uses of literacy originate and evolve through the skills and interests of the young. A project of the International Reading Association, published and distributed by Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Visit http://www.reading.org for more information about Internationl Reading Associationbooks, membership, and other services.

This volume offers fresh perspectives on a controversial issue in applied linguistics and language teaching by focusing on the use of the first language in communicative or immersion-type classrooms. It includes new work by both new and established scholars in educational scholarship, second language acquisition, and sociolinguistics, as well as in a variety of languages, countries, and educational contexts. Through its focus at the intersection of theory, practice, curriculum and policy, the book demands a reconceptualization of code-switching as something that both proficient and aspiring bilinguals do naturally, and as a practice that is inherently linked with bilingual code-switching.

Teaching the Dimensions of Literacy provides both the conceptual knowledge to support teachers' instructional decisions in the reading/literacy classroom and a multitude of instructional strategy lessons for classroom use with both monolingual and bilingual students. It proposes that teachers need to help children become code breakers (the linguistic dimension), meaning makers (the cognitive dimension), text users and critics (the sociocultural dimension), and scientists (the developmental dimension). Acknowledging and addressing all four dimensions, this text links literacy theory, literacy research, and literacy practice in a useable way. Covering both reading and writing, it features clear, concise, and useable reading and writing strategy lessons and ways to modify them for different types of students. Changes in the Second Edition: Entirely reorganized, the text is more user friendly, builds a stronger link between theory and practice, and makes it is easier for teachers to locate appropriate strategy lessons to use with their students. Academic literacy is addressed more fully.

This book systematically examines how learning to read occurs in diverse languages, and in so doing, explores how literacy is learned in a second language by learners who have achieved at least basic reading skills in their first language. As a consequence of rapid globalization, such learners are a large and growing segment of the school population worldwide, and an increasing number of schools are challenged by learners from a wide variety of languages, and with distinct prior literacy experiences. To succeed academically these learners must develop second-language literacy skills, yet little is known about the ways in which they learn to read in their first languages, and even less about how the specific nature and level of their first-language literacy affects second-language reading development. This volume provides detailed descriptions of five typologically diverse languages and their writing systems, and offers comparisons of learning-to-read experiences in these languages. Specifically, it addresses the requisite competencies in learning to read in each of the languages, how language and writing system properties affect the way children learn to read, and the extent and ways in which literacy learning experience in one language can play a role in subsequent reading development in another. Both common and distinct aspects of literacy learning experiences across languages are identified, thus establishing a basis for determining which skills are available for transfer in second-language reading development. Learning to Read Across Languages is intended for researchers and advanced students in the areas of second-language learning, psycholinguistics, literacy, bilingualism, and cross-linguistic issues in language processing.