Reimagining Language Instruction

Use this unique volume to transform the learning and teaching of language so that all students are empowered to succeed. This book offers insight into how to teach language--a core component of developing skilled readers and writers across all content areas--in ways that value the rich and diverse language assets students bring to the classroom. The authors provide guidance to help K-12 teachers move beyond current approaches to teaching language in the classroom to support equitable student outcomes in both linguistically diverse and linguistically homogeneous classrooms. The text provides a step-by-step process to uncover conceptions of language and its instruction that undercut opportunities to learn. Readers will gain new strategies for teaching the language of school tasks while integrating students' distinctive language experiences as resources for learning. School leaders will learn how to implement a schoolwide exploration into teaching language that promotes equity, all while building collaboration among administrators, teachers, and students. Book Features: Promotes linguistic equity by providing teaching strategies and whole-school practices critical for optimizing student success and access to instruction, assessment, and reading. Provides classroom examples that show readers how to engage in the core practices described in the book across developmental levels and academic disciplines. Includes reader-friendly and user-supportive features, such as text boxes that describe the principles that undergird the approaches. Offers classroom vignettes depicting common instructional challenges and tensions to show how teachers can engage in equitable, evidence-based practices for student success. Uses reflection questions to help readers track their developing understanding of ideas and to reflect on their own values and teaching goals.

New Directions in Teaching English: Reimagining Teaching, Teacher Education and Research attempts to create a comprehensive vision of critical and culturally relevant English teaching at the dawn of the 21st century. This book is multi-voiced. It includes perspectives from classroom teachers, teacher educators, and researchers in language and literacy, positioned to respond to recent changes in national conversations about literacy, learning, and assessment. These variously situated authors also recognize the rapidly changing demographics in schools, the changing nature of literacy in the digital age, and the increasing demands for literacy in the workplace. This book is critical. At all times education is a political act, and schools are embedded within a sociocultural reality that benefits some at the expense of others. Therefore the approach advocated through many of the chapters is one of critical literacy, where English students gain reading and writing skills and proficiency with digital technologies that allow them to become more able, discerning, and empowered consumers and producers of texts.

Situated on the cutting edge of theory and classroom practice, this volume highlights transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research in language education and other disciplines and epistemological spaces. The authors provide insights from language education and its potential to connect with a broad range of disciplinary traditions that include medicine, literature, fine arts, mathematics, and more. This forward-looking text addresses contemporary themes of social justice, intercultural citizenship, and antiracism throughout. Chapters provide educational research examples that can be applied in innovative ways to extend beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. Language applications included are ESOL, Spanish, German, and Russian, with implications for both commonly and less commonly taught languages. Novice and experienced educators alike will benefit from the rigorous discussion of practice and contemporary theoretical issues. Book Features: Represents a range of research methods and practical approaches that integrate language acquisition with academic content. Shows best practices for conducting transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research and how it can enrich language education as a whole. Addresses contemporary topics such as language policy, STEM education, integrative teaching, content area education, arts integration, and White supremacy culture. Offers creative and collaborative approaches for reaching beyond the ordinary conventions of TESOL and foreign/world language education.

"This book is for teachers who want to honor their students' experiences as writers and readers-and their own." -Maja Wilson In Reimagining Writing Assessment,Maja Wilson shows us that by replacing the scales embedded in rubrics with new tools--an array of interpretive lenses designed to observe and describe growth-we can create healthier readers and writers who are more proficient in the long run and more motivated to read and write. She reminds us that "assess" in its Latin derivation means "sit beside." In this book she models new ways of "sitting beside," listening to student stories of the writing, respecting the writer's intentions, and telling stories of our reading. Taking the form of conversations, Maja's new definition of writing assessment is not an outcome or final evaluation: it is an ongoing process in which writers and readers make meaning from texts and attempts, from intentions and effects. In this process, teachers come to understand how to teach and talk with each student about writing differently. And students learn to understand and take control of their own development as decision-makers.

Languaging is a term coined by Swain (1985) relating to the cognitive processing and the production of meaningful and comprehensible output as part of language learning. The term also refers to making meaning, and the shaping of knowledge and experience, through language. So then, what does it mean to reimagine languaging as educators? Thinking about this question, we need to begin by considering ourselves as agents of change, and continually encourage students to engage in aspects of deeper learning. We can aim to approach this through the lens of five perspectives: transformation, education and technology, humanistic, teaching and learning, and by rethinking what education means when considering learner special needs.Transformation involves thinking about what constitutes a classroom today and how our views of instruction need to change. Linked to this are educational and technology aspects, particularly how technology has and will undoubtedly continue to alter and reshape how we must provide learning. This includes the challenge of delivering both instruction and content in more meaningful and increasingly engaging ways, considering how the type of students that we teach need to adapt, how we as instructors need to adapt, and how both of us may perceive such changes from different standpoints. A humanistic perspective then becomes important, as does one where we need to shift our understanding of how we as people fit into the learning landscapes in which we live and teach. If we as educators can do this, then we can perhaps provide a better learning experience, especially if we can equip ourselves with the right methods, approaches, and techniques, and tailor our pedagogy to those students who enter our teaching and learning sphere. We also need to account for aspects of special needs and rethinking education, so that we can understand how to deliver the educational experience to our learners in ways that can help them to appreciate each other's abilities, and how we as educators can assist all learners in achieving their best. To do this, we need to rethink the role of the teacher, which also intertwines with aspects of our mental health, as well as the educational philosophy that we possess when providing such critical provisions of learning.With these aims, this book becomes an essential read for any educator, student, administrator, or stakeholder involved with the teaching of English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), particularly those who want to understand how pre-service and in-service teachers are honing their craft, and how the reimagining of languaging is currently, and will potentially, impact the educational sector.

This book builds upon the growing field of Linguistic Landscape in order to demonstrate the power of a spatialized approach to language, culture, and literacy education as it opens classrooms and cultivates new competencies. The chapters develop major themes, including re-imagining language curricula, language classrooms, and schoolscapes in dialogue with the heteroglossic discourses of the local; developing L2 learners’ symbolic, translingual competencies through engagement with situated, multimodal texts; fostering critical social awareness through language study in the linguistic landscape; expanding opportunities for situated L2 reading and writing; and cultivating language students’ capacities for engaged scholarship and research in out-of-class contexts. By exploring the pedagogical possibilities of place-based approaches to literacy development, this volume contributes to the reimagining of language education through the linguistic landscape.

Presents a collection of essays and practical advice, including lesson plans and activities, to promote writing in all aspects of the curriculum.

This book responds to a growing body of work in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics that places an emphasis on situated descriptions of language education practices and illuminates how these descriptions are enmeshed with local, institutional and wider social forces. It engages with new ways of understanding language that expand its meaning by including other semiotic resources and meaning-making practices and bring to the fore its messiness and unpredictability. The chapters illustrate how a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language pedagogy can provide a point of entry to reimagining what language education might look like under conditions of heightened linguistic and cultural diversity and increased linguistic and social inequalities. The book unites an international group of contributors, presenting state-of-the-art empirical studies drawing on a wide range of local contexts and spaces, from linguistically and culturally heterogeneous mainstream and HE classrooms to complementary (community) school and informal language learning contexts.