Understanding Language and Literacy Development - Paperback

by Xiao-Lei Wang (Author)

Understanding Language and Literacy Development: Diverse Learners in the Classroom offers effective supporting strategies to address the cultural and linguistic diversity of students in contemporary classrooms.

• Discusses learners with different linguistic abilities--infancy, early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence--by suggesting effective ways to reach them based on their strengths and needs
• Emphasizes language and literacy supporting strategies in a variety of everyday classroom settings
• Includes activities and questions to motivate readers to think and develop their own perspectives on language and literacy development
• Considers a variety of different language acquisition experiences, including monolingual, multilingual, and language impairment
• Discusses different types of literacies, including digital and hypertext
• Connects language and literacy development to identity and motivation to contextualize learning styles for pre-service teachers
• Supported by a companion website that includes additional resources such as PowerPoint presentations by chapter and a summary of relevant information from the Common Core K-12 English Language Arts Standards

Back Jacket

"Xiao-lei Wang's excellent volume, grounded in the best basic research and practice, provides a strong background in language and literacy diversity for elementary and secondary subject matter teachers."

William C. Ritchie, Syracuse University

"Great book! Dr. Wang combines the skill of a researcher, the passion of a teacher, and the love of a mother of two trilingual sons. A must-read!"

Jean-Marc Dewaele, Birkbeck College, University of London

Today's schools are characterized by significant cultural and linguistic diversity - and teaching is correspondingly becoming an increasingly complex, multifaceted, and challenging endeavor. Understanding Language and Literacy Development features a wide variety of effective supporting strategies to address the varying language and literacy developmental characteristics of children and adolescents in contemporary classroom settings. Utilizing critical discourse analysis as a conceptual framework, Wang examines the complexity of language and literacy and their roles in academic learning. The author expertly discusses children's developmental stages, considering a wide range of topics including English language acquisition among children and adolescents - and the typical issues related to comprehension and production at different stages and ages of acquisition - as well as the impact of various language impairments (from SLI to autism). Special features of this work include questions that engage and challenge the reader throughout the chapters, and exercises designed to facilitate understanding of language phenomena in the classroom and elsewhere; the author also ties her discussion into the new Common Core standards that underlie the public school curriculum. Innovative and timely, this is an invaluable resource to assist in meeting the teaching challenges of twenty-first century classrooms.

A companion website with additional resources is available at www.wiley.com/go/wang/langandlit

Author Biography

Xiao-lei Wang is a Professor in the School of Education at Pace University, USA. She has published extensively in academic journals and is the author of Learning to Read and Write in the Multilingual Family (2011) and Growing up with Three Languages (2008).