Transnational And Community Literacies For Teachers

By Author: Amandda
Total Articles: 60
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In her classic text, Subtractive Schooling, Valenzuela (1999) described how secondary school-aged, Mexican-origin students and their teachers frequently misunderstand one another. After observing one particularly heated exchange between an English teacher and his students, Valenzuela agreed to talk to an angry class, asking, "Do they [the teachers] at least care for you?" One student responded, "If they really cared, they wouldn't be boring" (p. 235). When the researcher pressed the student as to how teachers could show that they cared, another student responded, "Like maybe show that they care about our life" (p. 235). Valenzuela explained that if teachers truly want to demonstrate that they care about their students, "they must begin with a more complete understanding of both their social and academic milieu" (p. 115). We believe that the act of embracing and implementing transnational and Cartier Replica community literacies is one way for teachers to begin to build productive relationships with students who are English-language learners (ELLs).

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... this article, we provide a conceptual rationale for why it makes pedagogical sense to include transnational and community literacies in the literacy instruction provided to all students, including ELLs, in the United States. Although we believe that our proposal can be made accessible to students who are just beginning to learn English, namely through techniques such as scaffolded instruction and cooperative learning, for the purposes of this article we assume that ELLs are in at least the "speech emergence" stage (see Ernst-Slavit, Moore, & Maloney, 2002, for an overview of the four stages of language development). In this stage, students have begun to speak in phrases and complete sentences but continue to experience difficulty expressing all of their thoughts in English (Echevarria & Graves, 2006). We also provide multiple examples of transnational and community literacies and present a set of general guidelines for how teachers can transform these literacy practices into instructional activities.

Although skilled middle school teachers will be able to adapt our suggestions for use in their language arts and content area classes, our primary intended audience in this article is high school English teachers Tag Heuer Replica Watches and their students. It is worth noting that ninth grade and beyond are critical years for many ELLs due to the high drop-out rates at this level (Barton, 2005). Finally, we respond to potential objections regarding the inclusion of these forms of literacy in programs designed for ELLs.