Educating Emergent Bilinguals

This accessible guide introduces readers to the issues and controversies surrounding the education of language minority students in the United States. What makes this book a perennial favorite are the succinct descriptions of alternative practices for transforming our schools and students' futures, such as building on students' home languages and literacy practices, incorporating curricular and pedagogical innovations, using proven-effective approaches to parent engagement, and employing alternative assessment tools.

This comprehensive and insightful book shows how present educational policies and practices to educate language minority students in the United States ignore an essential characteristictheir emergent bilingualism. Expanding on a popular report supported by the Campaign for Educational Equity (Teachers College), this accessible guide compiles the most up-to-date research findings to demonstrate how ignoring childrens bilingualism perpetuates inequities in their schooling. What makes this book truly useful is that it offers a thorough description of alternative practices that would transform our schools and students futures, such as building on students home languages and literacy practices in schools, curricular and pedagogical innovations, new approaches to parent and community engagement, and adoptive assessment tools.

Translanguaging for Emergent Bilinguals is a thorough examination of the development, evolution, and current realities of educating emergent bilinguals in U.S. classrooms. Through engaging vignettes, readers follow the experiences of emergent bilinguals in a variety of monolingual settings, tracing the challenges encountered by both the students and the schools that serve them. The authors argue that the future of emergent bilingual education lies in an inclusive translanguaging pedagogy. By embracing home languages and cultures, this approach nurtures the development of multiple literacies, enabling individuals to thrive academically, socially, linguistically, and intellectually. The text begins by showing how the authors evolved from monolingual language educators to translanguaging educators and ends with concrete takeaways for successfully using this approach in different education settings. “This book offers an uplifting alternative view of the lives and education of language-minoritized students. The authors present here a practice-based approach to translanguaging for all types of teachers of emergent bilinguals.” —From the Foreword by Ofelia García, The Graduate Center, City University of New York “A fascinating volume offering practical as well as theoretical insights into translanguaging pedagogy.” —Li Wei, UCL Institute of Education, University College London “Contributes significantly to our understanding of the nature of translanguaging and its potential to transform the education of emergent bilingual students.” —James Cummins, University of Toronto

This textbook is a comprehensive introduction to the assessment of students in K-12 schools who use two or more languages in their daily life: English Language Learners (ELLs), or Emergent Bilinguals. The book includes a thorough examination of the policy, history and assessment/measurement issues that educators should understand in order to best advocate for their students. The author presents a decision-making framework called PUMI (Purpose, Use, Method, Instrument) that practitioners can use to better inform assessment decisions for bilingual children. The book will be an invaluable resource in teacher preparation programs, but will also help policy-makers and educators make better decisions to support their students.

Recent educational reform initiatives such as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) largely fail to address the needs--or tap into the unique resources--of students who are developing literacy skills in both English and a home language. This book discusses ways to meet the challenges that current standards pose for teaching emergent bilingual students in grades K-8. Leading experts describe effective, standards-aligned instructional approaches and programs expressly developed to promote bilingual learners' academic vocabulary, comprehension, speaking, writing, and content learning. Innovative policy recommendations and professional development approaches are also presented.

This book features effective artistic practices to improve literacy and language skills for emergent bilinguals in PreK-12 schools. Including insights from key voices from the field, this book highlights how artistic practices can increase proficiency in emergent language learners and students with limited access to academic English. Challenging current prescriptions for teaching English to language learners, the arts-integrated framework in this book is grounded in a sense of student and teacher agency and offers key pedagogical tools to build upon students’ sociocultural knowledge and improve language competence and confidence. Offering rich and diverse examples of using the arts as a way of talking, this volume invites teacher educators, teachers, artists, and researchers to reconsider how to fully engage students in their own learning and best use the resources within their own multilingual educational settings and communities.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 English learners are students who speak a language other than English and are acquiring English in school. They are often misclassified as English language learners, but the official definition is of students who are ages 3–21, enrolled in elementary or secondary education, born outside of the United States or speaking a language other than English in their homes, and not having sufficient mastery of English to meet state standards and excel in an English-language classroom. A second misunderstood issue is the use of a single standardized test to evaluate student performance. It is one thing for states to report test scores, but it is quite another for the federal government to use those scores to make decisions about the entire country. There are now a number of studies that have compared outcomes for students in different states that use the same test (see Chapter 5). The differences in scores can be quite large. In 2016, the U. S. Department of Education published an article showing that although states were improving at different rates, their students were improving at roughly similar rates on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (U. Department of Education, 2016b). -> The most misunderstood issue in prekindergarten to 12th-grade education today is how to educate students who are not proficient in English. #2 English learners are students who speak a language other than English and are acquiring English in school. They are often misclassified as English language learners, but the official definition is of students who are ages 3–21, enrolled in elementary or secondary education, born outside of the United States, and not having sufficient mastery of English to meet state standards and excel in an English-language classroom. #3 The most misunderstood term in K-12 education today is English learner. The term English learner focuses on the students’ limitations rather than their potential. The terms CLD and LM students can also include culturally and linguistically different minority students who are already bilingual. #4 The most misunderstood term in K-12 education today is English learner, which refers to students’ limitations rather than their potential. The term emergent bilingual is more accurate in describing the type of student we are trying to help.

This text demonstrates how collective reflection can function as a central part of effective teacher preparation for work in inclusive bilingual environments. Through analysis of rich qualitative data, Teacher Education for Inclusive Bilingual Contexts shows how group reflection supports pre-service educators to recognize the intersectional circumstances faced by students and understand their identities beyond the possible confines of disability. This, in turn, engenders reconceptualization of standardized expectations and implicates the educator in developing student agency through individualized use of routine, language, and materials. The author offers cultural historical activity theory and disability studies in education as a basis for dialectal interactions to unearth contradictions and misunderstandings surrounding language acquisition and the learning of emergent bilinguals and highlight the ways in which educators can disrupt oppressive practices through expansive learning opportunities. This insightful volume will be of interest to researchers, scholars, and postgraduate students in the fields of inclusive education and disability studies, bilingual and language education, and teacher education.