Language And Cultural Diversity In U S Schools

Diversity is at the heart of today's education debates. Often, school policies and programs designed to encourage and embrace diversity are met with public ire and a deep misunderstanding of how diversity serves learning. This work explains how diversity is an essential element in classroom settings. As children from around the world continue to pour into U.S. classrooms, an understanding of cultural and linguistic diversity in its broadest sense moves to the foreground. In a post 9/11 world, the benefits of understanding diversity take on urgent meaning. The introdutory chapter, Participating in Democracy Means Participating in Schools, sets the tone for the discussion to follow. As the geographic backgrounds of immigrants becomes increasingly diverse, religion must be added to previous discussions of race, ethnicity, and language. Thus, the need for the public to understand how shifts in population affect schools, makes this work a vital resource for anyone concerned with education today.

In recent decades, the linguistic and cultural diversity of school populations in the United States and other industrialized countries has rapidly increased along with globalization processes. At the same time, schooling as it is currently constituted continues to be ineffective for large numbers of students. Exploring crucial issues that emerge at the intersection of linguistic diversity and education, this volume: provides an up-to-date review of sociolinguistic research and practice aimed at improving education for students who speak vernacular varieties of US English, English-based Creole languages, and non-English languages explores the impact of dialect differences and community languages on ethnolinguistically diverse students’ academic achievement challenges the dominant monolingual Standard language ideology presents sociolinguistically based approaches to language and literacy education that acknowledge and build on the linguistic and cultural resources students bring into the school. Throughout, the authors argue for the application of research-based knowledge to the dire situation (as measured by school failure and drop-out rates) of many ethnolinguistic populations in US schools. The overall aim of the volume is to heighten acknowledgement and recognition of the linguistic and cultural resources students bring into the schools and to explore ways in which these resources can be used to extend the sociolinguistic repertoires, including academic English, of all students.

With the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity of students in U. S. schools, all teachers, regardless of the content area or grade they teach, need research-based strategies for assisting all students to gain English proficiency. This practical, concise guide shows teachers what they need to know about language, how it is learned, how it is used, and how teaching about it can be incorporated into lessons throughout the curriculum. Understanding Language in Diverse Classrooms offers a model of how learning takes place and describes the critical role of teachers in that model. It includes comparison charts showing how some of the most common heritage languages represented among present-day students compare with English, and it provides examples of hands-on materials including checklists, rating scales, and sample lessons to help teachers prepare to teach all their students in diverse classrooms. Each chapter ends with questions to stimulate discussion and reflection on major chapter points, to enable readers to review and evaluate the information and then integrate it into their own practice.

This book confronts the patterns of school failure often faced by subordinated minority groups in the United States. It does so by presenting a socioacademic framework that is based on the notion that all groups can have comparable access to quality schooling, comparable participation in the schooling, and derive comparable educational benefits from their participation. Organized around three key, interrelated components--communication, integration, and cooperation--the book combines theoretical concepts with actual classroom practices that support change. It moves us from a position of rhetoric about educational equality to one that actively addresses the socioacademic needs of students in a culturally diverse society.

Language is perhaps the most common issue that surfaces in debates over school reform, and plays a vital role in virtually everything we are involved. This edited volume explores linguistic apartheid, or the disappearance of certain languages through cultural genocide by dominant European colonizers and American neoconservative groups. These groups have historically imposed hegemonic languages, such as English and French, on colonized people at the expense of the native languages of the latter. The book traces this form of apartheid from the colonial era to the English-only movement in the United States, and proposes alternative ways to counter linguistic apartheid that minority groups and students have faced in schools and society at large. Contributors to this volume provide a historical overview of the way many languages labeled as inferior, minority, or simply savage have been attacked and pushed to the margins, discriminating against and attempting to silence the voice of those who spoke and continue to speak these languages. Further, they demonstrate the way and the extent to which such actions have affected the cultural life, learning process, identity, and the subjective and material conditions of linguistically and historically marginalized groups, including students.

Distinguished multiculturalist Sonia Nieto speaks directly to current and future teachers in this thoughtful integration of a selection of her key writings with creative pedagogical features. Offering information, insights, and motivation to teach students of diverse cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds, examples are included throughout to illustrate real-life dilemmas about diversity that teachers face in their own classrooms; ideas about how language, culture, and teaching are linked; and ways to engage with these ideas through reflection and collaborative inquiry. Designed for upper-undergraduate and graduate-level students and professional development courses, each chapter includes critical questions, classroom activities, and community activities suggesting projects beyond the classroom context. Language, Culture, and Teaching • explores how language and culture are connected to teaching and learning in educational settings; • examines the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of language and culture to understand how these contexts may affect student learning and achievement; • analyzes the implications of linguistic and cultural diversity for classroom practices, school reform, and educational equity; • encourages practicing and preservice teachers to reflect critically on their classroom practices, as well as on larger institutional policies related to linguistic and cultural diversity based on the above understandings; and • motivates teachers to understand their ethical and political responsibilities to work, together with their students, colleagues, and families, for more socially just classrooms, schools, and society. Changes in the Third Edition: This edition includes new and updated chapters, section introductions, critical questions, classroom and community activities, and resources, bringing it up-to-date in terms of recent educational policy issues and demographic changes in the U.S. and beyond. The new chapters reflect Nieto’s current thinking about the profession and society, especially about changes in the teaching profession, both positive and negative, since the publication of the second edition of this text.

This fascinating text is designed to provide pre-service and in-service teachers with a sharper understanding of the nature of diversity in today's schools. Readers are initially introduced to concepts associates with diversity (culture, worldview, race/ethnicity) and are sensitized to the manner in which their own cultural orientations influence their approaches to the teacher roles. With this understanding, readers are then better equipped to approach the comprehensive chapters on five major racial and ethnic groups in U.S. schools: African Americans, Asian Pacific Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and White Americans. Later chapters describe strategies and techniques classroom teachers can utilize to enhance their effectiveness in teaching culturally diverse students. Finally, students are lead to critically analyze the bureaucratic dynamics of contemporary schools and how teachers can work to overcome the hurdles that impede effective multicultural schooling.