Teacher Preparation

Although the subtitle states the book is for K-12 teachers, it would also be valuable to college teachers. A comprehensive, concise, and accessible one-volume introduction, it lays out what teachers of ESL students should know about the students, linguistics, and teaching and assessing learning. It includes information about legal matters affecting ESL students, a glossary of professional terms, and a CD-ROM workbook.

This book outlines three kinds of changes that composition teachers can make to change the way they approach language diversity in the classroom: (1) acquiring knowledge about African American Vernacular English (AAVE); (2) self-interrogation regarding beliefs and prejudices; (3) personal and professional change, including a dozen classroom strategies that enhance the success of AAVE speakers.

Available at http://www.public.asu.edu/~pmatsuda/cccc/committee/statement.html

Adopted in 2001, the statement gives guidelines on placement, assessment, class size, credit, teacher preparation, and teacher support. Includes a brief bibliography.

Proposes reasons why the US academic world view and writing style are so foreign to international students and offers ways to help “world majority students” make sense of expectations for academic writing in American universities.

Intended for teachers new to teaching ESL students, contains chapters on the history of teaching ESL writing, models of second language acquisition, ESL and basic writers, characteristics of ESL students, classroom expectations and behaviors, writing behaviors, L2 composing, contrastive rhetoric, sentence-level errors, and responding to ESL writing.

Situates second-language writing within composition studies, identifies characteristics of second-language writers, explores theoretical implications of seeing ESL learners at the heart—not the margins—of the classroom, proposes curriculum designs, and discusses how to respond to and assess second-language writing.

Includes 16 essays published between 1962 and 1997 on topics ranging from assessment and linguistic matters to cultural thought patterns and ideology.

A collection of essays on theory, research, instruction, assessment, ideology and politics, and articulation with other fields.

Compares and contrasts monolingual composition studies with studies of ESL writing. Shows how applied linguistics, the parent discipline of second language acquisition and composition, takes a positivist, realist, objectivist, empirical, manipulative, and explanatory view of language and of itself, as well as its role and instructional objectives. Composition studies, on the other hand, tends to emphasize the relativist, subjectivist, hermeneutic, and dialectical nature of reality and of the field.

Contains seven essays on issues related to teaching in linguistically diverse classrooms: language and racism, language and nationalism, and the challenge of teaching writing while respecting and celebrating students’ own languages.