Language Issues In Literacy And Bilingual Multicultural Education

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, this text is intended for upper-undergraduate and graduate-level students and professional development courses. 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. Each chapter includes critical questions; classroom activities; and community activities suggesting projects beyond the classroom context. Over half of the chapters are new to this edition, bringing it up-to-date in terms of recent educational policy issues and demographic changes in our society.

This book provides a conceptualisation of bilingual (French-English) and multicultural education. Its main purposes are to synthesise recent responses to bilingual and multicultural education; to identify the issues arising out of the schools' responses to these new challenges; and to examine future directions for educational policy.

This book focuses on how to address persistent linguistically structured inequalities in education, primarily in relation to South African schools, but also in conversation with Australian work and with resonances for other multilingual contexts around the world. The book as a whole lays bare the tension between the commitment to multilingualism enshrined in the South African Constitution and language-in-education policy, and the realities of the dominance of English and the virtual absence of indigenous African languages in current educational practices. It suggests that dynamic plurilingual pedagogies can be allied with the explicit scaffolding of genre-based pedagogies to help redress asymmetries in epistemic access and to re-imagine policies, pedagogies, and practices more in tune with the realities of multilingual classrooms. The contributions to this book offer complementary insights on routes to improving access to school knowledge, especially for learners whose home language or language variety is different to that of teaching and learning at school. All subscribe to similar ideologies which include the view that multilingualism should be seen as a resource rather than a 'problem' in education. Commentaries on these chapters highlight evidence-based high-impact educational responses, and suggest that translanguaging and genre may well offer opportunities for students to expand their linguistic repertoires and to bridge epistemological differences between community and school. This book was originally published as a special issue of Language and Education.

How does language comprise the implicit or explicit curriculum of teaching and learning in multicultural science settings? Building on a growing interest in the ways in which language and literacy practices interact with science teaching and learning to facilitate or obstruct successful student outcomes, this book contributes to scholarship on the role of language in developing classroom scientific communities of practice, expands that work by highlighting the challenges faced specifically by ethnic- and linguistic-"minority" students and their teachers in joining those communities, and showcases exemplary teaching and research initiatives for helping to meet these challenges. Offering teacher practitioners and researchers in the fields of science education and multicultural education lenses through which they can critically consider the myriad of classroom settings, instructional approaches, curricular materials, and scientific topics involved in what it means to teach science while pointedly addressing concerns about equity of educational opportunity, this volume serves as a powerful resource for linking theory and practice. End-of-chapter reflection questions and engagement activities facilitate discussion round these issues and provide rich opportunities for the reader to consider the implications of each chapter for science instruction and research and to apply insights developed in a real-world science teaching and learning contexts.

This book examines the linkage between literacy and linguistic diversity, embedding them in their social and cultural contexts. It illustrates that a more complete understanding of literacy among diverse populations and in multicultural societies requires attention to issues of literacy per se as well as to improving an educational process that has relevance beyond members of majority cultures and linguistic groups. The focus of the book is on the social and cultural contexts in which literacy develops and is enacted, with an emphasis on the North American situation. Educators and researchers are discovering that cognitive approaches, while very valuable, are insufficient by themselves to answer important questions about literacy in heterogeneous societies. By considering the implications of family, school, culture, society, and nation for literary processes, the book answers the following questions. In a multi-ethnic context, what does it mean to be literate? What are the processes involved in becoming and being literate in a second language? In what ways is literacy in a second language similar and in what ways is it different from mother-tongue literacy? What factors must be understood to better describe and facilitate literacy acquisition among members of ethnic and linguistic minorities? What are some current approaches that are being used to accomplish this? These are vital questions for researchers and educators in a world that has a large number of immigrants, a variety of multi-ethnic and multi-lingual societies, and an increasing degree of multinational activity. Beyond addressing applied concerns, attending to these questions can provide new insights into basic aspects of literacy.

Language Policy in Schools provides school administrators and teachers a practical approach for designing a language policy for their school and for dealing with the language issues that confront schools, particularly those operating in settings of linguistic and cultural diversity. It can be used as a text in teacher and administrator preparation programs, graduate programs, and in-service and professional development programs. Special features include: * a clear, jargon-free writing style that invites careful reading; * abundant examples that students of education everywhere can learn from--including samples of school language policies developed for real schools by real teacher-researchers; * questions at the end of each chapter to highlight key points and stimulate informed discussion among pre-service and experienced teachers and administrators; and * an up-to-date international and cross-cultural biography.

Exploring language, culture and education among immigrants in the United States, this volume discusses the range of experiences in raising children with more than one language in major ethno-linguistic groups in New York. Research and practice from the fields of speech-language pathology, bilingual education, and public health in immigrant families are brought together to provide guidance for speech-language pathologists in differentiating language disorders from language variation, and for parents on how to raise their children with more than one language. Commonalities among dissimilar groups, such as Chinese, Korean, and Hispanic immigrants are analyzed, as well as the language needs of Arab-Americans, the home literacy practices of immigrant parents who speak Mixteco and Spanish, and the crucial role of teachers in bridging immigrants' classroom and home contexts. These studies shed new light on much-needed policy reforms to improve the involvement of culturally and linguistically diverse families in decisions affecting their children's education.