About the Book

Reasons to Read the Book

This book is about the language and literacy developmental characteristics of children and adolescents with different abilities. Especially, this book is about how to use effective supporting strategies in classroom settings to help all students learn across subject contents. Some of you may be eager to find out what is in it, whereas others would not have touched the book if it were not a course requirement. To those of you who are not so enthusiastic about the topic of language and literacy development and believe that it is seemingly unrelated to the subject area that you are teaching or plan to teach, I would like you to meet Peter, a new math teacher in Herald High School (see Box 0.1). I hope that the challenges he encountered will convince you to give this book a real try.

Box 0.1 Peter's Challenge – Student Diversity

Peter had looked forward to meeting his ninth-grade students in Herald High School since he was offered a teaching position in June. During the summer, he carefully studied the topics in the geometry textbook and prepared detailed lesson plans for the whole year. By the end of August, Peter was certain that he was more than ready to teach geometry! Indeed, Peter had all the reason to be confident; he received his Master's degree from a reputable teacher education program, had successfully completed his student teaching in a local high school, and was well prepared for the ninth-grade geometry content.

On the first day of school in September, Peter was excited. He put on his new outfit and headed for the school. While driving to school, he mentally went over what he had prepared to do in his first geometry class.

When Peter entered his second period geometry class, 23 students eagerly checked him out with their curious eyes. Peter briefly introduced himself and began the class with a quiz to find out how well the students understood basic geometry concepts. While the students were completing the quiz, he noticed that some of them were staring at the quiz and appeared to be struggling. He approached one student and asked whether he needed any help. The young man told him that he did not understand what they were asked to do and he did not understand the problems in the quiz. Peter rephrased the quiz problems several times. However, the student showed no signs of understanding. Several other students in the class were also experiencing the same difficulty. Peter quickly collected the quiz and went on with the lesson he had planned. Thirty minutes into teaching, Peter was surprised to notice that some students seemed to have difficulties understanding what was written in the handouts. He was frustrated that he was not able to get through to his students with what he had planned.

He hurried to find out how his students did on the quiz immediately after his class left the room. To his dismay, half of his students completely missed the problems and gave wrong answers; some could not write coherent sentences. Peter had thought ninth graders should be able to read and write quite well.

When school ended at 2:30 p.m., Peter decided to find out some information about his students. He went to the Guidance Office and checked the students' files. The students in his second period geometry class were from diverse socioeconomic, cultural, linguistic, and developmental backgrounds. Fifteen of them had come to the country within the last three years from non-English speaking countries. Two were identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), one with Attention Deficit Hyper Activity Disorder (ADHD), and two with specific language impairment (SLI). Moreover, they were from a wide range of cultural backgrounds: White American, African American, Chinese, Thai, Tongan, Haitian, Ecuadoran, Mexican, Iranian, and Sudanese.

Even though Peter was informed during his interview that Herald was a culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse school and had students with different disabilities, he had decided to take the job because he wanted to make a difference. However, he was not prepared to encounter challenges of this magnitude on the first day. He was caught by surprise that many of them seemed to have language-related difficulties that were far deeper than understanding geometry concepts. The confidence he felt at the beginning of the day began to fade away.

Peter's experience indicates that teaching in a diverse classroom is particularly complex, multifaceted, and challenging. If you want to be successful in reaching all students in the subject content area, you must be ready to negotiate between teaching a subject and considering the learners' cultural, economic, linguistic, and developmental disparities. You must understand that the students' differences in the above-mentioned aspects often lead to their different abilities in reading, comprehending, and writing in the content area. Because students' language and literacy competence is critical to their academic content learning and social functioning, you must know how their language and literacy are acquired and developed before you can help them learn subject contents.

Peter's challenges are not his alone. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report suggests that one-third of students in the United States failed to achieve the basic levels of reading competence by the fourth grade (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2011) and only 38 percent of high school seniors scored at or above proficiency (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2009). Moreover, the 15-year olds in the United States continue to perform poorly in reading, math, and science in the Program(me) for International Student Assessment (PISA)1 compared with other industrialized nations.

The twenty-first century is characterized by significant cultural and linguistic diversity in schools, which requires teachers to have knowledge of their students' language and literacy development differences and to know how to respond to these differences in instruction. Therefore, ask yourself these questions: “Do I believe all students should benefit from learning?” “Do I want to create a learning environment that allows all students to participate fully and optimize their potentials?” “Do I believe all students can succeed?” “Do I want to be effective in reaching all students?” “Do I want to turn students' challenges into teaching opportunities?” and “Do I want to be more prepared than Peter when I walk into a classroom with diverse learners?” If your answers to these questions are yes, then read on; you are likely to find that the pages that follow will help you become more confident and competent in teaching your content area, whether it is math, science, social studies, or any other subject. In fact, a majority of teachers who have completed a course related to the basic linguistic principles found the information useful for their teaching, regardless of their specialty (Moats, 1994).

Your Turn

• Do you think some of Peter's students did not perform well because of their diversity or because our educational system has failed them? Research the term “deficit model in education” or “cultural deficit model” and discuss how we can explain the academic performances of Peter's students.
• If you were to give Peter some suggestions about the challenges he encountered in his first geometry lesson, what would they be and why?
• Visit a diverse classroom and fill out the demographic information of the students below (add more information if you want). What have you found? What does this demographic information tell you about the challenges of teaching and reaching these students?
  • Grade level
  • Student number
  • Student gender
  • Student ethnicity and race
  • Student cultural origin
  • Student social economic status
  • Student linguistic background
  • Student developmental and cognitive abilities
  • Other (include other information you observe in the classroom/school).

Unique Approaches of the Book

To better prepare you in responding to the challenges in diverse classrooms, this book takes the following unique approaches.

Paying balanced attention to all learners

When addressing language and literacy development, textbooks often tend to pay most attention to describing typical linguistic development characteristics while parenthesizing the characteristics of multilingual children and children with language and literacy learning difficulties. As you have observed in Peter's classroom, students with different language and literacy abilities often learn within the same classroom environment (i.e., the inclusive classroom environment). Therefore, it is unconscionable not to give enough attention to different language learners and not to address their characteristics concurrently. If we are sincere about providing equal opportunity for all students, we must have sound knowledge about their variations in language and literacy development. Thus, this book discusses the variations of language and literacy learners in parallel chapters to help you see the complexity of your students' language and literacy development and find effective ways to reach them based on their different strengths and needs.

Emphasizing language and literacy supporting strategies

This book not only provides you with...