Robert James Scholes is Professor of Speech and Linguistics at the University of Florida.

Accessibly written, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach provides detailed coverage of all major writing systems of historical or structural significance with thorough discussion of structure, history, and social context as well as important theoretical issues. The book examines systems as diverse as Chinese, Greek, and Maya and each writing system is presented in the light of four major aspects of writing: history and development; internal structure; the relationship of writing and language; and sociolinguistic factors. The volume is extensively illustrated and the glossary of technical terms, exercises, and further reading suggestions that accompany each chapter make Writing Systems a valuable resource for students in linguistics and anthropology.

Bringing together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and white linguistic supremacy, this book provides ethnographic snapshots of how Black students navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts. By highlighting the counterstories of Black students, Baker-Bell demonstrates how traditional approaches to language education do not account for the emotional harm, internalized linguistic racism, or consequences these approaches have on Black students' sense of self and identity. This book presents Anti-Black Linguistic Racism as a framework that explicitly names and richly captures the linguistic violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization Black Language-speakers endure when using their language in schools and in everyday life. To move toward Black linguistic liberation, Baker-Bell introduces a new way forward through Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy, a pedagogical approach that intentionally and unapologetically centers the linguistic, cultural, racial, intellectual, and self-confidence needs of Black students. This volume captures what Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy looks like in classrooms while simultaneously illustrating how theory, research, and practice can operate in tandem in pursuit of linguistic and racial justice. A crucial resource for educators, researchers, professors, and graduate students in language and literacy education, writing studies, sociology of education, sociolinguistics, and critical pedagogy, this book features a range of multimodal examples and practices through instructional maps, charts, artwork, and stories that reflect the urgent need for antiracist language pedagogies in our current social and political climate.

This book gives pre-service and experienced teachers the knowledge and tools they need to teach reading and writing effectively and engagingly in pre-K through grade 8 settings. Using a conversational tone to present a wealth of critical content, this book helps readers connect theory to practice through vignettes and sample lessons from real classrooms; authentic student work samples; ideas for using and integrating print-based and digital texts across the curriculum; and tools for organizing and managing a comprehensive, developmentally-responsive literacy program.

According to International Educational Statistics (2008), there are total of 654.9 million school-age children in the world. If dyslexia affects 10–15% of these youth (Fletcher et al. 2007), this translates to approximately 65–98 million students with difficulties in reading and writing. The EU strategic plan for education (2010) recognises the need for EU citizens to speak a foreign language. As such, foreign language courses are introduced on an obligatory basis at the primary level of education. Dyslexic students are not exempt from this regulation, and, thus, are confronted with different language systems that must be mastered. The difficulty here escalates if the systems differ significantly in their levels of orthographic transparency. Reading and writing are operationalised by the same biological functions that are defined by the universal perspective. However, language systems differ in terms of their transparency; for example, English and French are considered opaque scripts, whereas Spanish and Italian are described as transparent orthographies. These differences are discussed in this book as part of the language specific perspective, which can, in turn, raise questions such as: “Is a dyslexic student equally impaired in any language they study?” and “Is the type of difficulty primarily dependent on the language system or is it rather a dyslexia syndrome?” This volume provides answers through a synthesis of research on reading difficulties in first and foreign languages and existing taxonomies of dyslexia sub-types.

Teachers who attempt to enhance the reading and writing skills of their students face one of the most difficult tasks in education. Not only are reading and writing two of the most difficult processes to teach and reinforce but they are two of the most important. After working with literally thousands of teachers to improve their effectiveness at enhancing these key literacy skills and after surveying the research, we have come to some conclusions about how reading and writing can be taught and reinforced. We present what we have learned in this book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).

What does it mean to teach reading in the context of the middle and high school classroom? Don’t students already know how to read by the time they get to secondary school? And how can a busy teacher take time away from the packed curriculum of science, history, mathematics, or language arts to teach reading? This book presents a linguistic approach to teaching reading in different subjects; an approach that focuses on language itself. Central to this approach is a view that knowledge is constructed in and through language and that language changes with changes in knowledge. As students move from elementary to secondary schools, they encounter specialized knowledge and engage in new contexts of learning in all subjects. This means that the language of secondary school learning is quite different from the language of the elementary years. While in the elementary years the subject matter of reading materials is often close to students’ everyday life experiences, the curriculum of secondary school deals with knowledge that is removed from students’ personal lives and everyday contexts. The language that constructs this more specialized knowledge thus tends to be more abstract, technical, information-laden, and hierarchically organized than the more familiar and “friendly” language that students typically encounter during the elementary years. Students need to develop specialized literacies (literacy relevant to each content area) as well as a critical literacy they can use across subject areas to engage with, reflect on, and assess specialized and advanced knowledge. This functional language analysis approach is shown using actual secondary social studies, science, and math textbooks and using a literary text.