Understanding Language and Literacy Development: Diverse Learners in the Classroom

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

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).