For English Learners and other struggling students, understanding and using academic language is absolutely critical to literacy development and school achievement, but it takes careful planning to help these students develop mastery. Ruth Swinney and Patricia Velasco's teacher-friendly guide explains how to weave together content and language goals when planning lesson units, as well as offering strategies for moving students from social to academic language and creating a curriculum of talk in the classroom. In addition, Swinney and Velasco provide detailed sample unit plans in all content areas to demonstrate how these strategies can be employed while simultaneously meeting curriculum demands. Using specific structures of balanced literacy including read along, shared reading, and shared writing, these unit plans also include a self-assessment guide for teachers to use as they scaffold the content to increase comprehension and student achievement

Exploring language, culture and education among immigrants in the United States, this volume discusses the range of experiences in raising children with more than one language in major ethno-linguistic groups in New York. Research and practice from the fields of speech-language pathology, bilingual education, and public health in immigrant families are brought together to provide guidance for speech-language pathologists in differentiating language disorders from language variation, and for parents on how to raise their children with more than one language. Commonalities among dissimilar groups, such as Chinese, Korean, and Hispanic immigrants are analyzed, as well as the language needs of Arab-Americans, the home literacy practices of immigrant parents who speak Mixteco and Spanish, and the crucial role of teachers in bridging immigrants' classroom and home contexts. These studies shed new light on much-needed policy reforms to improve the involvement of culturally and linguistically diverse families in decisions affecting their children's education.