This edition first published 2015
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Cover image: Study group © sturti /iStockphoto; Girl reading © Aaraujo /Shutterstock; Mother and baby © Evgeny Atamanenko /Shutterstock; School boy using tablet PC © michaeljung / Shutterstock
I credit the existence of this book to Danielle Descoteaux, the senior acquisitions editor of psychology and linguistics of Wiley Blackwell. I received an email from Danielle on November 16, 2010, asking whether I was interested in writing a book related to language development. This invitation has turned out to be a great opportunity for me to produce a book that is much needed for preparing preservice teachers to meet the Common Core State Standards and edTPA requirements in teacher education programs. Danielle, thank you!
Working with the staff at Wiley Blackwell has truly been a pleasure. I would particularly like to thank Julia Kirk, the senior project editor, for your patience, constant help, and support in the writing process. Julia has never failed to check upon my progress. Julia, it is thanks to you that I was able to complete the book on time.
The input of the anonymous reviewers helped the book find its shape. For example, the idea of putting the theories at the end of the book instead of at the beginning was proposed by one of the reviewers. The reviewers have also provided valuable suggestions for the revision of the book. I am deeply indebted to you for your guidance.
I also would like to thank Dean Andrea Spencer of the School of Education at Pace University for granting me a semester of sabbatical leave and the Pace Kenan Scholarly Research Committee for granting me a course release to work on the book. Without your generous support, I would not have been able to find the time to write this book.
My ED 650 students in the 2013 spring semesters and ED 632 and TCH 452 students in the 2013 fall semesters have graciously “experimented” with the book drafts. Your feedback about the book has been most helpful. I would like to thank in particular Amelia Nelson, Shannon Melissa Summers, Keisey Igo, Amanda Eisner, Theresa Connelly, Danielle Frasca, Danielle Rodriguez, Mellissa Silva, Nora Rugova, and Alex Lengers for contributing your language samples.
I would like to express my appreciation to several of my present and past graduate assistants for helping me with the book at its different stages: Amanda Albano, Theresa Connelly, Jennifer Argenta, Deborah Hurdis, and Courtney Klein. Without your hard work, some tedious but important jobs simply could not have been accomplished.
Last, but not least, my gratitude goes to my husband, Philippe, and sons, Léandre and Dominique, for your moral support and humor. You always help me find meaning in what I do!
This book is accompanied by a companion website:
This website includes:
For Instructors
For Students
This book is about the language and literacy developmental characteristics of children and adolescents with different abilities. Especially, this book is about how to use effective supporting strategies in classroom settings to help all students learn across subject contents. Some of you may be eager to find out what is in it, whereas others would not have touched the book if it were not a course requirement. To those of you who are not so enthusiastic about the topic of language and literacy development and believe that it is seemingly unrelated to the subject area that you are teaching or plan to teach, I would like you to meet Peter, a new math teacher in Herald High School (see Box 0.1). I hope that the challenges he encountered will convince you to give this book a real try.
Peter's experience indicates that teaching in a diverse classroom is particularly complex, multifaceted, and challenging. If you want to be successful in reaching all students in the subject content area, you must be ready to negotiate between teaching a subject and considering the learners' cultural, economic, linguistic, and developmental disparities. You must understand that the students' differences in the above-mentioned aspects often lead to their different abilities in reading, comprehending, and writing in the content area. Because students' language and literacy competence is critical to their academic content learning and social functioning, you must know how their language and literacy are acquired and developed before you can help them learn subject contents.
Peter's challenges are not his alone. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report suggests that one-third of students in the United States failed to achieve the basic levels of reading competence by the fourth grade (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2011) and only 38 percent of high school seniors scored at or above proficiency (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2009). Moreover, the 15-year olds in the United States continue to perform poorly in reading, math, and science in the Program(me) for International Student Assessment (PISA)1 compared with other industrialized nations.
The twenty-first century is characterized by significant cultural and linguistic diversity in schools, which requires teachers to have knowledge of their students' language and literacy development differences and to know how to respond to these differences in instruction. Therefore, ask yourself these questions: “Do I believe all students should benefit from learning?” “Do I want to create a learning environment that allows all students to participate fully and optimize their potentials?” “Do I believe all students can succeed?” “Do I want to be effective in reaching all students?” “Do I want to turn students' challenges into teaching opportunities?” and “Do I want to be more prepared than Peter when I walk into a classroom with diverse learners?” If your answers to these questions are yes, then read on; you are likely to find that the pages that follow will help you become more confident and competent in teaching your content area, whether it is math, science, social studies, or any other subject. In fact, a majority of teachers who have completed a course related to the basic linguistic principles found the information useful for their teaching, regardless of their specialty (Moats, 1994).
To better prepare you in responding to the challenges in diverse classrooms, this book takes the following unique approaches.
When addressing language and literacy development, textbooks often tend to pay most attention to describing typical linguistic development characteristics while parenthesizing the characteristics of multilingual children and children with language and literacy learning difficulties. As you have observed in Peter's classroom, students with different language and literacy abilities often learn within the same classroom environment (i.e., the inclusive classroom environment). Therefore, it is unconscionable not to give enough attention to different language learners and not to address their characteristics concurrently. If we are sincere about providing equal opportunity for all students, we must have sound knowledge about their variations in language and literacy development. Thus, this book discusses the variations of language and literacy learners in parallel chapters to help you see the complexity of your students' language and literacy development and find effective ways to reach them based on their different strengths and needs.
This book not only provides you with information on language and literacy developmental characteristics in different populations, but also with information on how to support students' language and literacy development in the everyday classroom environment. Although many language and literacy supporting strategies can be used for students across various abilities, some are particularly emphasized for a specific population.
Before you are introduced to the contents of a given chapter, you are asked to think about some important questions or carry out activities that are relevant to that chapter. These activities and questions will facilitate the development of your own perspectives in explaining the language and literacy development phenomena you have observed in life or classrooms. By doing so, you are likely to be more motivated to read the chapter and to bring in your own questions, thoughts, and observations. Consequently, your interaction with the chapter will be more in-depth. Similarly, you will have many opportunities to respond to important issues in the “Your Turn” sections (as you were just asked to do) and to ponder upon big questions in the essential question sections. Even though you often may not be able to provide all the answers and solutions to these questions, you are put in the thinking mode and are encouraged to search for the information constantly while reading.
Moreover, you are asked to be an accountable reader. This means that you are not spoon-fed the information. Instead, you are asked to engage actively in searching for answers to an issue. For example, in the “Your Turn” sections, you are sometimes required to research databases such as ERIC2 and PsycINFO3 to find more up-to-date knowledge on a topic under discussion. This practice will help you become an active consumer of research literature and continue to update your knowledge.
Unlike most of the textbooks on language and literacy development, which tend to introduce theories in the beginning, this book introduces theories in the last chapter. The purpose is to give you opportunities to come up with your own explanations about language and literacy development first. In this way, you are likely to be more critical in relation to the established theories with your own perspective.
My hope in doing the above is to help you form the habit of asking questions about what you see and do in your classroom, make an effort to explain the reasons behind the linguistic behaviors of your students, and plan your supporting strategies more thoughtfully.
Language and literacy development are not an isolated domain in human development. Instead, they are influenced by the development in other areas such as biological, cognitive, and social. Although in this book it is not possible to address all these areas due to space limitation, the cognitive and social developmental profile in a specific developmental period is discussed before the language and literacy development in that period is examined. The purpose is to remind you that you need to take into consideration your students' cognitive and social developmental characteristics at a given period when examining their language and literacy development to provide appropriate instructional support for them.
There is a general belief among educators that they teach students at their specific grade level or specific age groups, that is, high school teachers teach students at the high school level, elementary teachers teach children at the elementary level, and preschool teachers teach young children. A case in point is Peter, who thought his ninth graders should function academically as typical 14 and 15 year olds. However, in a diverse classroom environment, a learner may have reached a given chronological age (the amount of time that has elapsed since birth), but does not function at a given developmental age (a typical chronological age at which a student can perform a skill in a given area), and language age (the language ability and skills demonstrated at a certain age) (Gillam and Gillam, 2011). Some students at middle or high school level may still function at the elementary literacy level and some elementary children may perform at a higher age level. Therefore, regardless of what grade level you teach, you need to be knowledgeable about the language and literacy strategies for younger or older students. Teachers who teach younger students need to have a long-term goal for them, know what language and literacy skills their students will develop down the road, and begin to build those skills accordingly. Teachers who teach older students need to know the strategies for younger students because some of your students may not have developed literacy skills at the middle or high school level and you may have to use the strategies for younger children to help them.
Language and literacy are closely related. The development of language and literacy should be considered complementary to each other rather than as two separate entities, although language and literacy do have their differences (e.g., spoken language in its early acquisition period is not formally taught, and literacy often needs to be explicitly taught). Research has shown that children's language skills influence their literacy skills in a significant way. For example, the properties of spoken words such as stresses in English, syllables in French and morae in Japanese (a mora is the basic timing unit in Japanese) are closely associated with written language processing (Wang, Yang, and Cheng, 2009). A student's knowledge established in oral language, such as phonological awareness (the awareness of the sound structure of a given language), is closely linked to the student's ability to read. In this book, the development of oracy (oral language knowledge and skills) is treated as importantly as literacy.
Academic language is the language used in school to learn content in various subject areas. Unlike everyday social language that students use, academic language is more purposeful and precise (E. Johnson, 2009). In everyday social language, you often hear students using words and sentences that are vague and imprecise such as stuff and things, “They told me to do it,” “The soda is better; I like it more” (Costa, 2009). However, academic language must be used accurately to define terms, form concepts, and construct knowledge.
There are two types of academic languages: content language and general academic language. Content language provides essential building blocks from which conceptual knowledge can be built. The more a student understands the specific content language of a particular subject matter, the faster and more efficiently they can gain additional knowledge. Each subject area has its own unique academic language demands placed on students. These specific language demands set each content area apart from other disciplines and make each discipline unique. For example, fraction, angle, and factor are often used in mathematics; photosynthesis, compound, and force are frequently seen in science; democracy, civilization, and legislation usually occur in social studies; and alliteration, plot, genre, and theme are routinely used in language arts.
General academic language provides a foundation for educational success and can be applied to every content area. The words in general academic language such as estimate, reduce, analyze, hypothesize, and conceptualize act like mortar (E. Johnson, 2009). These words hold and bind specific content-area language and concepts together within the minds of students. General academic language helps students cement the building blocks of specific content language into conceptual knowledge. The words in academic language connect concepts, outline transitions, and demonstrate relationships. Developing academic language requires students to engage in abstract actions and to organize complex concepts. For these reasons, it is apparent why academic language is cognitively challenging for all learners (E. Johnson, 2009).
Moreover, academic language is the important groundwork for academic literacy (e.g., reading, writing, critical skills used to understand and analyze school subjects). Academic literacy is different from everyday literacy (for example, writing a letter, email or text to a friend). Academic literacy requires a more advanced level of cognitive function. To be able to do well in academic learning, students must be able to accurately express and justify their ideas and solutions. It is a known fact that the major cause of the academic gap between students, especially students from different socioeconomic groups, is the academic language and literacy gap (Hirsch, 2003; E. Johnson, 2009). If our students are going to meet the literacy demands of an increasingly global environment in the twenty-first century, they must master academic language and literacy (Wong-Fillmore, 2007). Therefore, this book provides supporting strategies to help students develop academic language and literacy, aiming to close the achievement gap between students with different backgrounds and abilities.
It is important to stress that focusing on academic language and literacy does not mean downplaying the everyday social language and everyday literacy. In fact, in later chapters, you will read about their significance in overall language and literacy development. However, as the alarming statistics from the Center for Educational Statistics show, our students as a whole are not doing very well in academic literacy. That is why we need to emphasize the support in this area because it takes a lot more time and effort to develop academic language and literacy abilities.
Motivation is an important factor in developing language and literacy (Wang, 2011a), especially for students who are learning the school language as a new language and for students who are facing language-learning difficulties. Furthermore, language and identity develop concurrently; it is not an exaggeration to state that the acquisition of a language is also the acquisition of one's identity. When students identify with school language in a positive way, they may do well in learning that language.
Therefore, supporting strategies are introduced to help you motivate your students for academic language and literacy learning, and at the same time promote their positive identity development.
This book also widens the language acquisition experiences by including various language acquisition circumstances, such as children who acquire more than one first language from birth or during early childhood (multilingual first language acquisition), children who learn a new language after they have already developed their first language (new language acquisition), children who acquire a manual language as a first language (sign language acquisition), and children whose language acquisition is compromised as a result of various disabilities. Considering different language acquisition experiences will help you see how your students started their language journey, the circumstances under which they acquired their language(s), and how their academic performance is influenced by their earlier different experiences.
Ideally, all teachers need to have experiences in learning other languages. Realistically, this is often not realized (unfortunately). However, a teacher's knowledge about his or her students' language background is useful (particularly in a linguistically diverse classroom). Throughout the book, you are given some exercises to develop basic knowledge about other languages. For example, in Chapter 2, when discussing the different writing systems, you are asked to research on the internet the different writing systems and get the basic information about these systems, and in Chapter 4, you are asked to research and compare Spanish and English flaps, trills, affricates, and glides (don't worry about these terms now; you will be introduced to them later. However, if you want to have a head start, go ahead and check them out). Little by little, you will become less ignorant about other linguistic systems. The information you accumulate will not make you speak these languages, but it will make you more knowledgeable when planning your instruction and helping your students with different linguistic backgrounds.
There are different ways to distinguish developmental stages. This book will divide the developmental stages into infancy and early childhood (birth to age 5), middle childhood (age 6 to age 11), and adolescence (age 12 to age 18). The rationale for dividing the age range in this way is to make clear the specific language and literacy supporting strategies relevant to early childhood, elementary, middle, and high school settings. Further, dividing the developmental stages in this way allows us to see the qualitative differences in language acquisition and learning at different ages. If children are exposed to one or more than one language before age 5, the acquisition process is regarded as first language acquisition, and after that, the process is treated as new language acquisition (traditionally referred to as second language acquisition or additional language acquisition). Unless new research proves it otherwise, the current evidence seems to indicate that the quality of language acquisition appears to be different before and after age 5 (see more discussions in Chapters 4, 7 and 10).
This book is organized in five parts according to the contents. At the end of each part, a language sample (either a speech or a writing sample of a child or student) is provided to help you apply the information you read and deepen your understanding of the reading materials.
Part I includes Chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 1 emphasizes the importance of teacher knowledge on language and literacy development and its impact on student content area learning. It introduces critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a guiding framework and transformative pedagogy (TP) as an instructional and assessment approach to help you reconceptualize the way you teach diverse students. It explores the evolving definition of literacy and its significance in the twenty-first century. It also discusses how the labels that you use to describe your students with different linguistic abilities can influence the way you interact with them. These reconceptualizations are highlighted to help you holistically view the complex elements involved in student language and literacy development and their relationship to subject content area learning.
Chapter 2 foregrounds the intricacies involved in the process of developing language and literacy. It discusses what it means to be a language and literacy learner in different socioeconomic, cultural, linguistic, and developmental circumstances. Further, this chapter analyzes the complex factors that influence language and literacy developmental outcomes among different learners, and suggests how the consequences of the varieties of language and literacy development can affect the academic learning of children.
Part II is comprised of Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Chapter 3 describes the language and literacy developmental characteristics of children with typical development during early childhood. You are informed about the crucial language abilities children need for developing emergent literacy skills. In addition, emergent digital-mediated skills and emergent critical literacy skills are identified as necessary literacy skills. Supporting strategies are suggested on how to choose stimulating language and literacy materials and design engaging activities.
Chapter 4 discusses the unique language and emergent literacy developmental characteristics of children who acquire more than one first language during the early childhood period. It addresses the complex factors involved in multilingual first language acquisition. Recommendations are made on how to support multilingual and emergent multiliteracy development.
Chapter 5 addresses the distinctive language and literacy development characteristics of children with language impairment during early childhood. Special attention is given to the children whose language and emergent literacy abilities can be improved with the support of parents and early childhood educators, such as children with autism, Down syndrome, sensory impairment, and specific language impairment. In addition, multilingual children with various language impairments are also discussed. Supporting strategies are proposed to help these children maximize their learning potential.
Part III contains Chapters 6, 7, and 8. Chapter 6 focuses on the language and literacy developmental characteristics in middle childhood. It addresses the essential language and literacy skills that children of elementary school age need to develop in order to function well in their academic learning. Effective strategies that incorporate language and literacy into subject-area learning are provided to ensure students' simultaneous development in academic literacy, multimedia literacy, and critical literacy.
Chapter 7 examines the language and literacy developmental characteristics of students who learn English as a new language (Ln) during middle childhood. It focuses on the unique challenges of Ln learners. Recommendations are made on how to help Ln learners develop academic language and literacy by incorporating their cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge.
Chapter 8 touches upon the language and literacy development characteristics of children with language impairment (LI) during middle childhood. Discussion focus is on how to assist students with LI in subject-area learning and how to help them maximize their learning potential.
Part IV consists of Chapters 9, 10, and 11. Chapter 9 identifies the language and literacy developmental characteristics during adolescence. It suggests how to motivate adolescents to continue with their language and literacy development when they are undergoing many changes in their lives. It offers useful strategies that aim to facilitate the development of self-motivated language and literacy learning behaviors. It also recommends literacy materials and activities that can foster sustainable interests in furthering language and literacy development throughout students' lives.
Chapter 10 concentrates on the language and literacy developmental characteristics of adolescents who learn English as a Ln during adolescence. It discusses the unique characteristics of learning a Ln later in life. Recommendations are made on how to help Ln learning adolescents develop academic language and literacy by using their cultural and linguistic resources.
Chapter 11 gives attention to the language and literacy developmental characteristics of adolescents with LI. Special attention is given to assisting adolescents with LI in developing academic language and literacy. Suggestions are made to help these students maximize their potential.
Part V consists of Chapters 12 and an exit self-evaluation. Chapter 12 introduces some important theoretical perspectives about how language and literacy are acquired in different populations. These theories serve three major functions: to help you predict what may happen in in the process of children's language and literacy development, to explain their language and literacy development distinctions, and to help you become more confident in evaluating your students' language and literature performances.
In the exit self-evaluation, you are asked to complete a self-assessment by examining a writing sample of a student. You are asked to demonstrate whether you know how to apply the CDA framework as well as the big “D” and little “d” analyses4 to the student's work and whether you know how to use TP to help the student move forward in his or her language and literacy development. Through the exit evaluation, you are asked to confirm the belief that every student can learn with the right support, and you are encouraged to use this book as a starting point to continue to inform yourself as a teaching professional and to help your students grow.
Part I includes two chapters, chapter 1 and chapter 2. The topics addressed in these two chapters lay a foundation for the rest of the book. Careful reading of the content will help you understand the importance of teacher knowledge regarding language and literacy and its relevance to teaching diverse learners. It will also help you become cognizant of the various complex factors that influence students' language and literacy development.
After finishing this part, you will have an opportunity to analyze a writing sample of a student by applying the information you read. You will learn how to use the critical discourse analysis (CDA) conceptual framework and the transformative pedagogy (TP) approach to help you put your students' language and literacy errors in perspective and turn their mistakes into teaching opportunities.