Assimilated or Acculturated? Helping Students Navigate Two Worlds, by Nathan Hall

I like to use current events in my ELL classes, but I hate seeing immigration in the news. This politically touchy subject comes up everywhere from the presidential candidate debates to my own state’s legislature, where politicians want to make English the official language to save on translation fees (exactly how much they’ll save is never specified). One of the bill’s defenders said denying these services will “help immigrants to assimilate.”

Without going into my political problems with this legislation, the part that struck me was the idea of promoting assimilation. It made me think of an excellent book I read in graduate school, The Inner World of the Immigrant Child by Christina Igoa. The author grew up in many different countries and later became sympathetic to the plight of her English-language-learning students. She describes how damaging the pressure is for children to give up their native culture to fit into a new one that often seems unwelcoming. Read More.

Spelling deMYTHtified: 7 Insights for Language Teachers, by Karen Taylor de Caballero

It’s been sent to you dozens of times by well-meaning friends and family. Perhaps you’ve  forwarded it to folks in your own address book, or perhaps you’ve even developed a pronunciation lesson around it, as I did several years ago.

It’s a meme, really, one that simultaneously bemoans and celebrates the idiosyncrasies of spoken vs. written English. It might go like this:

Crazy English (anonymous)
We’ll begin with box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese…

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4 Pathways to a Culturally Responsive Classroom, by Judie Haynes

Culturally relevant or responsive teaching is a pedagogy grounded in the idea that educators teach to students’ unique cultural strengths. Geneva Gay is one of the early leaders in this field, and her book Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice (2000) became popular as a way to teach ethnically diverse students. Early work in this field focused on African American and Native American students in the United States.

In 2004, I published an article on my website entitled ESL Teacher as Cultural Broker after hearing James Banks speak on multicultural education. I urged classroom and content-area teachers to avoid interpreting the behavior of others through the eyes of their own culture. Read More.

Calling All Collaborators for PLCs, by Kristen Lindahl

In teacher education and development, much of the focus is on classroom practices, toolkits, strategies, curriculum mapping, and so on. Less of the focus shines light on teachers themselves as communicators, even though they communicate daily with their students, administrators, colleagues, parents, and community members. (See Wong-Fillmore and Snow, 2000, for a discussion of the many roles of teachers). As a teacher educator, one skill that I feel we assume future and current teachers have is the ability to effectively collaborate. Read More.