Understanding Language and Literacy Development

Diverse Learners in the Classroom

Xiao-lei Wang

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118885901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

Understanding Language and Literacy Development: Diverse Learners in the Classroom offers effective supporting strategies to address the cultural and linguistic diversity of students in contemporary classrooms.

• Discusses learners with different linguistic abilities—infancy, early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence—by suggesting effective ways to reach them based on their strengths and needs
• Emphasizes language and literacy supporting strategies in a variety of everyday classroom settings
• Includes activities and questions to motivate readers to think and develop their own perspectives on language and literacy development
• Considers a variety of different language acquisition experiences, including monolingual, multilingual, and language impairment
• Discusses different types of literacies, including digital and hypertext
• Connects language and literacy development to identity and motivation to contextualize learning styles for pre-service teachers
• Supported by a companion website that includes additional resources such as PowerPoint presentations by chapter and a summary of relevant information from the Common Core K–12 English Language Arts Standards

Part I
Introduction

Part I includes two chapters, chapter 1 and chapter 2. The topics addressed in these two chapters lay a foundation for the rest of the book. Careful reading of the content will help you understand the importance of teacher knowledge regarding language and literacy and its relevance to teaching diverse learners. It will also help you become cognizant of the various complex factors that influence students' language and literacy development.

After finishing this part, you will have an opportunity to analyze a writing sample of a student by applying the information you read. You will learn how to use the critical discourse analysis (CDA) conceptual framework and the transformative pedagogy (TP) approach to help you put your students' language and literacy errors in perspective and turn their mistakes into teaching opportunities.

---

Essential Questions for Part I

• On what basis should a teacher make instructional decisions?
• Should “what works best for the individual student is the best pedagogy” be the motto for education?
• How can we reconceptualize literacy development in the digital age?
• How can the education process help students with various cultural, linguistic, and intellectual variations achieve language development potential and ultimately academic potential?

---

1
Working with Diverse Students
Some Important Issues

Prereading Questions and Activities

The questions and activities listed in the beginning of each chapter throughout the book are meant to help you think about the important issues addressed in a given chapter. It is likely that you may not be able to answer or complete them fully. Nevertheless, by trying your best to reflect on the questions and carry out the activities, you will be more critical about what you will read.

• After reading Peter's challenges in the chapter “About the Book” (Box 0.1), you were asked to give him some suggestions. If you were able to provide suggestions, how do you know they would work? If you found it difficult to provide suggestions for Peter, what could be the reason? Would you feel more confident providing suggestions for Peter if you had sufficient information on the students' cultural, linguistic, and developmental backgrounds?
• What is your own definition of literacy? Do you think that how you define literacy will influence what you choose to emphasize in teaching your content area? Why or why not?
• What is in a label? Why are labels used to describe different student populations important for educators? Do you think the label you use to describe a student will affect the way you interact with that student? Why?
• Do you know what conceptual frameworks are? If not, research them. Do you have any experience in using a framework to guide you to do something? If so, what is the advantage of having a conceptual framework?

Topics to Be Addressed in This Chapter

• Importance of teacher knowledge of language and literacy development
• Critical discourse analysis (CDA) conceptual framework
• Transformative pedagogy (TP)
• Evolving definition of literacy
• Reconceptualization of labels for diverse learners

---

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Understand the importance of teacher knowledge on language and literacy development in effective instruction.
• Become familiar with the CDA framework and TP and understand the advantage of using them to work with diverse students.
• Know that the words you choose to describe your students can influence your attitude toward and interaction with them, and exercise extra caution when using words and labels for diverse students.

---

Importance of Teacher Knowledge on Language and Literacy

---

Box 1.1 Peter's Challenge – Understanding the Nature of Student Language Difficulties

Two weeks after Peter had his first encounters with his Period 2 geometry class, the guidance counselor sent him an initial report from a language specialist regarding one of his students, Andrea. Andrea was not yet officially classified as a student with a particular kind of language impairment. However, since he came to the school district two years ago from Albania, he had had persistent difficulties in academic learning. He was referred to the specialist at the end of eighth grade. The report came to the high school counselor recently, and it contains some of the following information: “Student shows signs of dysgraphia … He has trouble organizing his thoughts … He seems to have impaired phonological memory … He has trouble understanding and producing complex syntax … He also exhibits difficulties in finite verb morphology …”

Peter read this report several times; he still did not understand some of the terminologies used by the specialist. What frustrated him most was that he had no clue how to provide specific instructional support for Andrea in his geometry class based on these linguistic and cognitive issues reported by the specialist. If he had to wait for the official disability classification report, the development of an Individualized Educational Program (IEP), and the assistance from a special education teacher, Andrea would fall further behind …

---

Peter is between a rock and a hard place. He is supposed to teach ninth grade math, yet the issues that he has to deal with in Andrea's case are far beyond his content area. To be able to help Andrea move forward in geometry learning, Peter must have sufficient knowledge of Andrea's linguistic and cognitive characteristics and know how to provide effective strategies to support him in learning the math content. This is indeed the challenge of teaching diverse students in the inclusive classroom environment.

However, if Peter were knowledgeable about Andrea's linguistic characteristics in the specialist's report, he would have an inkling of Andrea's condition; that is, he might have specific language impairment (SLI). He would have more effectively addressed Andrea's specific issues and utilized some of the instructional strategies recommended for students with SLI such as focusing on developing Andrea's skills in comprehending and producing complex sentences (which are prominent in academic texts; in this case, math reading materials). He could do this by modeling how complex sentence are used and scaffolding Andrea to recast the modeled complex sentences in his own production. Peter's experience reminds us that teachers must develop in-depth knowledge of their students' language and literacy development regardless of what content area they teach. There are at least three important reasons to do so.

Interpreting assessment results from specialist reports

As shown clearly in Peter's case, teachers need to have the ability to interpret specialists' reports and utilize the information to help their students learn. Reports from specialists often include language and literacy assessment results that contain terminologies about students' linguistic characteristics such as phonological abilities, fast naming, phonological memory, letter knowledge, alphabetic principle, sight word knowledge, pseudo word decoding, orthographic ability, morphosyntactic knowledge, and metalinguistic awareness. (Don't worry about these terms at this moment; you will know them after reading this book.) If teachers do not understand the relationships between these skills and the role each of these skills plays in students' learning, they are unlikely to help their students succeed in the content-area learning.

Identifying students' linguistic needs

In addition to knowing how to interpret the assessment results from specialists, teachers need to develop abilities to identify their students' linguistic difficulties and needs, and know how to address them in instruction and assessment. To simply wait for the specialist's assistance will not meet students' immediate learning needs (e.g., Soodak, 2003).

In the classroom environment, students need to have proficient language and literacy skills to function well in various content areas. In other words, language and literacy skills are the basis for content learning. Often, when students have difficulties learning a content area, they are also likely to have difficulties processing information (for example, being unable to comprehend what the teacher says or what is written in the text). Research in the past few decades clearly indicates that learners with linguistic processing difficul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• About the Companion Website
• About the Book
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Developing Language and Emergent Literacies: Divergent Abilities in Infancy and Early Childhood (Birth to 5)
• Part III: Developing Language and Literacies: Divergent Abilities in Middle Childhood (6–11)
• Part IV: Developing Language and Literacies: Divergent Abilities in Adolescence (12–18)
• Part V: Theoretical Perspectives on Language and Literacy Development and Learning
• Appendix: Examples of Standardized Language Assessments
• Glossary
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement