English Learners, Academic Literacy, and Thinking: Learning in the Challenge Zone

For educators individually and collectively who aspire to implement a curriculum based on intellectual quality, and who recognize the importance of infusing the teaching of academic literacy across the curriculum, Pauline Gibbons’ book provides inspiration and guidance. The wealth of classroom examples based on actual practice convincingly refutes the argument, reflected in much current practice, that EL and low-income students are incapable of benefiting from an intellectually challenging, inquiry-based curriculum.

• engaging deeply with intellectual contexts
• developing academic literacy
• employing reading strategies and improving comprehension
• gaining writing independence and learning content-area genres
• using classroom talk to make sense of new concepts and as a bridge to writing.

Pauline Gibbons taught postgraduate and undergraduate TESOL courses at the University of Technology, Sydney, for many years, and is now an Adjunct Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She is also an independent EL consultant and her work with teachers has taken her to Hong Kong, Sweden, Laos, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, China, South Africa, Marshall Islands, Iran, Germany, UK, and USA. She has published extensively in EL education, including Bridging Discourses in the ESL Classroom: students, teachers and researchers (Continuum, 2006), and two other Heinemann books: Learning to Learn in a Second Language (1993) and English Learners, Academic Literacy and Thinking: Learning in the Challenge Zone (2009).

Jim Cummins teaches in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the nature of language proficiency and second-language acquisition. He is the coauthor of Scott Foresman ESL: Accelerating English Language Learning, among many other publications.