Head Start. Bilingual education. Small class size. Social promotion. School funding. Virtually every school system in America has had to face these issues over the past thirty years. Advocates and dissenters have declared confidently that "the research" is on their side. But is it?
In the first book to bring together the recent history of educational policy and politics with the research evidence, Timothy Hacsi presents the illuminating, often-forgotten stories of these five controversial topics. He sifts through the complicated evaluation research literature and compares the policies that have been adopted to the best evidence about what actually works. He lucidly explains what the major studies show, what they don't, and how they have been misunderstood and misrepresented. Hacsi shows how rarely educational policies are based on solid research evidence, and how programs that sound plausible simply do not satisfy the complex needs of real children.
This volume was conceived as a first book in SLA for advanced undergraduate or introductory master’s courses that include education majors, foreign language education majors, and English majors. It’s also an excellent resource for practicing teachers.
Both the research and pedagogy in this book are based on the newest research in the field of second language acquisition. It is not the goal of this book to address every SLA theory or teach research methodology. It does however address the myths and questions that non-specialist teacher candidates have about language learning.
Steven Brown is the co-author of the introductory applied linguistics textbook Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation textbook (and workbook).
The myths challenged in this book are:
§ Children learn languages quickly and easily while adults are ineffective in comparison.
§ A true bilingual is someone who speaks two languages perfectly.
§ You can acquire a language simply through listening or reading.
§ Practice makes perfect.
§ Language students learn (and retain) what they are taught.
§ Language learners always benefit from correction.
§ Individual differences are a major, perhaps the major, factor in SLA.
§ Language acquisition is the individual acquisition of grammar.
Deaf students are attending mainstream postsecondary institutions in increasing numbers, raising the stakes for the complicated and multifaceted task of tutoring deaf students at these schools. Common tutoring practices used with hearing students do not necessarily work for deaf people. Rebecca Day Babcock researched and wrote Tell Me How It Reads: Tutoring Deaf and Hearing Students in the Writing Center to supply writing instructors an effective set of methods for teaching Deaf and other students how to be better writers.
Babcock’s book is based on the resulting study of tutoring writing in the college context with both deaf and hearing students and their tutors. She describes in detail sessions between deaf students, hearing tutors, and the interpreters that help them communicate, using a variety of English or contact signing rather than ASL in the tutorials. These experiences illustrate the key differences between deaf-hearing and hearing-hearing tutorials and suggest ways to modify tutoring and tutor-training practices accordingly. Although this study describes methods for tutoring deaf students, its focus on students who learn differently can apply to teaching writing to Learning Disabled students, ESL students, and other students with different learning styles. Ultimately, the well-grounded theory analysis within Tell Me How It Reads provides a complete paradigm for tutoring in all writing centers.
How can schools meet the needs of an increasingly diverse population of newcomers? Do bilingual programs help children transition into American life, or do they keep them in a linguistic ghetto? Are immigrants who maintain their native language uninterested in being American, or are they committed to changing what it means to be American?
In this ambitious book, Rosemary Salomone uses the heated debate over how best to educate immigrant children as a way to explore what national identity means in an age of globalization, transnationalism, and dual citizenship. She demolishes popular myths—that bilingualism impedes academic success, that English is under threat in contemporary America, that immigrants are reluctant to learn English, or that the ancestors of today’s assimilated Americans had all to gain and nothing to lose in abandoning their family language.
She lucidly reveals the little-known legislative history of bilingual education, its dizzying range of meanings in different schools, districts, and states, and the difficulty in proving or disproving whether it works—or defining it as a legal right.
In eye-opening comparisons, Salomone suggests that the simultaneous spread of English and the push toward multilingualism in western Europe offer economic and political advantages from which the U.S. could learn. She argues eloquently that multilingualism can and should be part of a meaningful education and responsible national citizenship in a globalized world.
Working Test: X-Word Grammar and Writing Activities for Students features 86 X-Word Grammar reading and writing exercises divided into five parts of increasing complexity. Deaf, second-language, and other students experiencing difficulty with English composition can perform these exercises as homework or as in-class activities. Through these exercises, they can master English grammar, improve their facility with language constructions, and meet the challenges of becoming better writers.
After teaching developmental writing to deaf students for may years, Sue Livingston found that students who can read and analyze written texts become better writers. They achieve their improvement by reading, then writing about what they have read. Livingston has embodied her successful approach in Working Text: Teaching Deaf and Second-Language Students to Be Better Writers.
In this straightforward instructional book, Livingston first explains what is involved and why her methods work with deaf students, second-language students, and other students who need to improve their writing ability. Upon this foundation, Working Text delineates how to teach students to write through reading and writing exercises. These exercises have been carefully crafted using the X-Word Grammar approach to help students discover common language constructions that they can apply to their own writing. As the students progress, their understanding of the elements of good writing will grow.
Working Text also includes all of the exercises and appendices featured in the Working Test: X-Word Grammar and Writing Activities for Students workbook, both in print and on on a special CD. The answers for the exercises are included as well, as are sample quizzes, and the CD can be used in the classroom for interactive lessons in conjunction with the student workbook. Working Text: Teaching Deaf and Second-Language Students to Be Better Writers, in concert with its companion student workbook, will help deaf, second-language, and other students develop into markedly better, more confident writers.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press