front cover of Making the Transition to Classroom Success
Making the Transition to Classroom Success
Culturally Responsive Teaching for Struggling Language Learners
Helaine W. Marshall and Andrea DeCapua
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Features a chapter on flipped classrooms!
 
 Learners with no, minimal, or limited exposure to formal education generally do not share the expectations and assumptions of their new setting; as a result, they are likely to find themselves confounded by the ways in which the language and content are presented, practiced, and assessed in Western-style educational settings. Institutions and teachers must tailor therefore their instruction to this population. Making the Transition to Classroom Success: Culturally Responsive Teaching for Struggling Language Learners examines how understanding secondary and adult L2 learners’ educational paradigm, rooted deeply in their past experiences and cultural orientations, provides a key to the solution to a lack of progress.

Making the Transition to Classroom Success builds on and expands on two earlier books, Meeting the Needs of Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Schooling and Breaking New Ground: Teaching Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education in U.S. Secondary Schools.  These previous books focused specifically on a subset of struggling L2 learners--those with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE) in U.S. secondary schools—and detailed the instructional model (MALP). Making the Transition broadens the applications of the MALP model to include academic thinking tasks, flipped classrooms, project design, and rubrics.

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front cover of Mexican Americans and Language
Mexican Americans and Language
Del dicho al hecho
Glenn A. Martínez
University of Arizona Press, 2006
When political activists rallied for the abolition of bilingual education and even called for the declaration of English as an official language, Mexican Americans and other immigrant groups saw this as an assault on their heritage and civil rights. Because language is such a defining characteristic of Mexican American ethnicity, nearly every policy issue that touches their lives involves language in one way or another.

This book offers an overview of some of the central issues in the Mexican American language experience, describing it in terms of both bilingualism and minority status. It is the first book to focus on the historical, social, political, and structural aspects of multiple languages in the Mexican American experience and to address the principles and methods of applied sociolinguistic research in the Mexican American community. Spanish and non-Spanish speakers in the Mexican American community share a common set of social and ethnic bonds. They also share a common experience of bilingualism.

As Martínez observes, the ideas that have been constructed around bilingualism are as important to understanding the Mexican American language experience as bilingualism itself. Mexican Americans and Language gives students the background they need to respond to the multiple social problems that can result from the language differences that exist in the Mexican American community. By showing students how to go from word to deed (del dicho al hecho), it reinforces the importance of language for their community, and for their own lives and futures.
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front cover of South Asian in the Mid-South
South Asian in the Mid-South
Migrations of Literacies
Iswari P. Pandey
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015
Winner of the 2017 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award.

In an age of global anxiety and suspicion, South Asian immigrants juggle multiple cultural and literate traditions in Mid-South America. In this study Iswari P. Pandey looks deeply into this community to track the migration of literacies, showing how different meaning-making practices are adapted and reconfigured for cross-language relations and cross-cultural understanding at sites as varied as a Hindu school, a Hindu women’s reading group, Muslim men’s and women’s discussion groups formed soon after 9/11, and cross-cultural presentations by these immigrants to the host communities and law enforcement agencies. Through more than seventy interviews, he reveals the migratory nature of literacies and the community work required to make these practices meaningful.
Pandey addresses critical questions about language and cultural identity at a time of profound change. He examines how symbolic resources are invented and reinvented and circulated and recirculated within and across communities; the impact of English and new technologies on teaching, learning, and practicing ancestral languages; and how gender and religious identifications shape these practices. Overall, the book offers a thorough examination of the ways individuals use interpretive powers for agency within their own communities and for cross-cultural understanding in a globalizing world and what these practices mean for our understanding of that world.
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Sustaining Linguistic Diversity
Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties
Kendall A. King, Natalie Schilling-Estes, Lyn Fogle, Jia Jackie Lou, and Barbara Soukup, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2008

In the last three decades the field of endangered and minority languages has evolved rapidly, moving from the initial dire warnings of linguists to a swift increase in the number of organizations, funding programs, and community-based efforts dedicated to documentation, maintenance, and revitalization. Sustaining Linguistic Diversity brings together cutting-edge theoretical and empirical work from leading researchers and practitioners in the field. Together, these contributions provide a state-of-the-art overview of current work in defining, documenting, and developing the world's smaller languages and language varieties.

The book begins by grappling with how we define endangerment—how languages and language varieties are best classified, what the implications of such classifications are, and who should have the final say in making them. The contributors then turn to the documentation and description of endangered languages and focus on best practices, methods and goals in documentation, and on current field reports from around the globe. The latter part of the book analyzes current practices in developing endangered languages and dialects and particular language revitalization efforts and outcomes in specific locations. Concluding with critical calls from leading researchers in the field to consider the human lives at stake, Sustaining Linguistic Diversity reminds scholars, researchers, practitioners, and educators that linguistic diversity can only be sustained in a world where diversity in all its forms is valued.

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