The narrowing of English language education curriculum in many contexts has negatively impacted classroom teaching and learning. High-stakes standardized testing, scripted curricula, and the commodification of English have converged to challenge socially meaningful classroom literacy instruction that promotes holistic development. Although in different ways, these factors have shaped the teaching of English as both first and second language. How can English educators respond? This book argues that the first step is to take account of the broader policy, political and cultural landscape and to identify the key constraints affecting teachers, students and parents. These will set the broad parameters for developing local pedagogic approaches, while still recognizing the constraints that actively push against them. Using Singapore English language teaching as a case study, this book illustrates how this process can unfold, and how media literacy principles were vernacularized to design English classroom pedagogies that stretched the bounds of what is acceptable and possible in the local context.

This practical text offers guidance on how to provide explicit, systematic instruction on language and literacy to English learners.

The narrowing of English language education curriculum in many contexts has negatively impacted classroom teaching and learning. High-stakes standardized testing, scripted curricula, and the commodification of English have converged to challenge socially meaningful classroom literacy instruction that promotes holistic development. Although in different ways, these factors have shaped the teaching of English as both first and second language. How can English educators respond? This book argues that the first step is to take account of the broader policy, political and cultural landscape and to identify the key constraints affecting teachers, students and parents. These will set the broad parameters for developing local pedagogic approaches, while still recognizing the constraints that actively push against them. Using Singapore English language teaching as a case study, this book illustrates how this process can unfold, and how media literacy principles were vernacularized to design English classroom pedagogies that stretched the bounds of what is acceptable and possible in the local context.

Language and literacy instruction in English needs to begin early and continue throughout the elementary years. This new book in the Practitioners Bookshelf Series provides research-based, best practices for developing language and literacy from kindergarten through 5th grade. Teachers are encouraged to build on ELL students existing linguistic and cultural background knowledge, to explain the many idiosyncrasies of the English language and U.S. school culture, and to involve students in their own learning, encouraging them to express themselves in many ways including in their native language. The hands-on text features sample lesson plans and childrens literature that can be used to help ELL students develop the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in school.

The role of parent-child and teacher-child shared story telling and storybook reading is a key vehicle for supporting children's development of emergent literacy and early language skills. This highly usable and practical book brings the advantages of sharing books and stories to educational and clinical settings, effectively demonstrating how it may be used to support: print knowledge phonological awareness vocabulary inferential language abilities grammatical and narrative skills With contributions from notable scholars who actively conduct research in the areas of education, developmental psychology, speech language pathology, reading, and early literacy, this unique resource synthesizes and applies current theory and research on uses of sharing books and stories in educational and intervention contexts.

Using Singapore English language teaching as a case study, this book illustrates how media literacy principles were vernacularized to design English classroom pedagogies that stretched the bounds of what is acceptable and possible in the local context.