Language And Learning In Multilingual Classrooms

This book offers practical research-based advice for teachers and other educators on how to adapt school and classroom procedures, curriculum content, and instructional strategies in order to provide a supportive learning environment for students of minority language backgrounds who are learning the language of instruction at the same time as they are learning the curriculum.

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.

A comprehensive source of ideas and advice for enhancing the learning of all students in all subject areas and at all grade levels.

This hands-on guide shows elementary school teachers how to create multilingual classroom communities that support every learner's success in reading, writing, and general literacy development. The author provides a practical overview of key ideas and techniques and describes specific literacy activities that lead to vocabulary and oral English proficiency. Instructional chapters will help teachers create a language-rich classroom environment, scaffold reading and writing tasks to match students' needs, and use students' language backgrounds as a bridge to literacy learning in English. As with all titles in The Practitioner's Bookshelf Series, this resource includes many user-friendly features such as bulleted summaries and checklists as well as photographs of linguistically diverse classrooms modeling the types of instructional interactions described in the book.

This book brings together research from six different countries across three continents where teacher educators and policy makers are addressing the under-preparation of content teachers to work effectively with multilingual learners. By highlighting this relatively young field of research at an international level, the book advances the research-based knowledge of the field and promotes international research relationships and partnerships to better support the education of multilingual learners and their teachers. The chapters represent high-quality empirical qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods studies about pre-service and in-service teachers. Comprising four sections, each represents a critical aspect of the equitable teaching of multilingual learners. All the research was conducted in countries that belong to OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) enabling the reader to compare contexts and outcomes. This book will be of particular interest to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of language education, teacher education, and education for multilingual learners. It will be of great value to anyone concerned with equity and social justice for multilingual learners whose languages, cultural practices, and resources are often overlooked and/or marginalized in the schools they attend.

While standard language ideology (SLI) is harmful in its exclusion of minorities through expression of language and race, translingualism provides a positive scaffolding characterized by the disposition of openness. Translingualism suggests that each utterance creates meaning and is a direct rebellion against SLI. It privileges unprivileged varieties of English over so-called Standard English. In order to combat SLI, scholars have emphasized the need for congenial multicultural spaces where students can use their cultural and linguistic resources as an asset and which supports the idea of students learning from each other through their diversity. Teaching Practices and Language Ideologies for Multilingual Classrooms is an essential scholarly publication that examines the educational necessities for diverse student populations and multilingual students and provides rich teaching resources for guiding the creation of classroom environments that engage multilingual students and support their writing and problem-solving skills. Featuring a range of topics such as ethics, code-switching, and language education, this book is ideal for teachers, instructional designers, academicians, sociologists, administrators, language professionals, researchers, and students.

The theme of this book is the multilingual classroom and the inter- relationships, interactions and ideologies that pertain in such classrooms. Drawing on studies from different multilingual communities in different parts of the world, the volume demonstrates the complex nature of the multilingual classroom from an ecological perspective.