About the Author:
Dr. Short is a division director at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in Washington, D.C. She has worked as a teacher, trainer, researcher, and curriculum/materials developer. Her work at CAL has concentrated on the integration of language learning with content-area instruction. Through several national projects, she has conducted research and provided professional development and technical assistance to local and state education agencies across the United States. She directed the ESL Standards and Assessment Project for TESOL and co-developed the SIOP model for sheltered instruction.
Dr. Short's monographs include: Extend Your Students' Reach and Move Them Toward Independence, Base Your ESL Instruction in the Content Areas, Reach for the Common Core, Structural Supports for English Learners, Comprehensive and Responsive Assessment, and Developing Academic Literacy in Adolescents.
Dr. Tinajero specializes in staff development and school-university partnership programs and has consulted with school districts in the U.S. to design ESL, bilingual, literacy, and bi-literacy programs. She has served on state and national advisory committees for standards development, including the English as a New Language Advisory Panel of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards and the Texas Reading Academies. She is currently professor of Education and Interim Dean of the College of Education at the University of Texas at El Paso and was President of the National Association for Bilingual Education, 1997-2000.
Dr. Tinajero's monograph is titled Teaching the Fundamentals.
Dr. Schifini assists schools across the nation and around the world in developing comprehensive language and literacy programs for English learners. He has worked as an ESL teacher, reading specialist, school administrator and university professor. Through an arrangement with California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, Dr. Schifini currently serves as program consultant to two large teacher-training efforts in the area of reading for second language speakers of English. His research interests include early literacy and language development and the integration of language and content-area instruction.
From Publishers Weekly:
In this subdued and affecting story, a woman who was abandoned as an infant at a Saigon orphanage travels from the U.S. back to Vietnam to look for her birth family. Her 10-year-old daughter, Mai, narrates the story as she accompanies her mother. The only clue to the woman's identity is her sole possession at the time of her adoption by an American couple: a delicate, handmade kite. Most of the book follows the woman's involved search and fruitless efforts to discover her roots. But in the book's most childlike moment, Mai wistfully empathizes with her mother, since the girl has never met her own father: "Mom doesn't know where he is, and he's never tried to find me. I don't understand why people can't stay together." Their quest finally leads them to an elderly kite maker who, in an emotional reunion, relates his connection to the woman's parents, killed in a bombing, and how he rescued Mai's motherAand the kite, made by her father. But McKay's (Caravan) pacing is problematic: after the long buildup, this climactic moment gets short shrift. The Lees' (Baseball Saved Us) realistic art, by turns brightly lighted and almost oppressively dark, seamlessly matches the changing moods of the text. Throughout, the artists evoke a clear picture of Vietnam's urban and rural landscapes (in one standout scene, the Lees deftly spotlight mother and daughter in a rickshaw in the midst of the chaotic streets of Shanghai). Uneven tempo aside, this text will engage anyone interested in Vietnam or adoption. Ages 6-up.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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