California Comprehensive Center (CA CC)

Increasing calls for equity and accountability in U.S. secondary schools have led to intensified scrutiny of the academic literacy development of English learning (EL) adolescents. This paper discusses some of the challenges that EL secondary students face in achieving the language and literacy skills that will enable them to succeed in their mainstream classes, graduate from high school, and continue their academic careers into college. It presents an instructional approach used to work with students on academic language development and describes the language resources that students were able to take up following instruction. This paper suggests ways that secondary teachers can teach their EL students to use linguistic analysis in order to recognize the expectations of academic writing and produce texts that increasingly incorporate the linguistic features of academic language. # An English learning (EL) student who arrived in the U.S. in the seventh grade, 16-year-old Leticia felt that, regardless of her intellect and fluent conversational abilities in English, she was not considered intelligent by her teachers and native English-speaking peers based on her limited academic literacy proficiency in English. In her fourth year of schooling in the U.S., Leticia still found it difficult to fully comprehend grade-level textbooks in English and to effectively express her ideas in writing using an academic stance. Leticia perceived that her teachers incorrectly Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238-254 * Tel.

Among the many approaches proposed for closing opportunity and achievement gaps is supporting student’s academic language development. Often, however, instructional approaches that are more familiar to teachers, such as helping students learn new vocabulary, are prioritized over more complex and less familiar explorations into disciplinary language, such as analyzing how a whole text is organized or identifying grammatical boundaries within sentences and connecting these analyses to disciplinary learning goals. In addition, the cultural and linguistic assets students bring to the classroom, valuable resources for learning, are often neglected in school, depriving students an opportunity to leverage and expand such resources. This article argues for an instructional approach that integrates disciplinary language and literacy teaching with culturally sustaining pedagogy. We synthesize research and theories on the approach and provide illustrative examples with elementary grades Hmong-American children.

California school systems and lay the foundation for substantive conversations about what education policies should be sustained and what might be improved to ensure increased opportunity and success for all students in California in the decades ahead. Getting Down to Facts II follows approximately a decade after the first Getting Down to Facts effort in 2007. This technical report is one of 36 in the set of Getting Down to Facts II studies that cover four main areas related to state education policy: student success, governance, personnel, and funding. Insights on Standards Implementation in California’s Schools Technical Report