Special PLC discount when you buy 15 copies of English Learners, Academic Literacy, and Thinking. A $352 value for $282.

A Study Guide is available for this title. Click here to download. To download some helpful suggestions for book study groups, click here."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." - Jim CumminsUniversity of Toronto Deep understanding, critical thinking, subject knowledge, and control of academic literacy are goals we have for all our students. The challenge for teachers is to find a way of teaching that helps everyone, including English learners, to reach these high expectations. In "English Learners, Academic Literacy, and Thinking"," " Pauline Gibbons presents an action-oriented approach that gives English learners high-level support to match our high expectations. Focusing on the middle grades of school, she shows how to plan rigorous, literacy-oriented, content-based instruction and illustrates what a high-challenge, high-support curriculum looks like in practice. Gibbons (author of "Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning") presents and discusses in detail five broad areas that enable English learners to participate in high-quality learning across the 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. Based on these areas she then presents guidelines on designing long-term, high-quality instruction that simultaneously provides explicit scaffolding for English learners. Gibbons makes these guidelines an instructional reality through dozens of examples of rich activities and tasks that can be used across the curriculum and that support the learning of all students. "English Learners, Academic Literacy, and Thinking" supports teachers with doable plans for instruction, reflection questions for individual or group study together, and suggestions for further reading. The book is a valuable resource for inservice training and college courses and provides an ideal basis for a schoolwide response to the growing challenges of raising the achievement of English language learners.

Bridging Discourses in the ESL Classroom is concerned with the nature of talk in multilingual classrooms. Examining the interactions between students learning in and through English as a second language and their teachers, this book identifies the patterns of discourse which support and enable both second language development and the learning of curriculum knowledge. These patterns are 'bridging discourses', combining the everyday language used by the student with the specialised language of the academic register. Drawing on second language acquisition research and systemic functional linguistic theory, in particular the work of Halliday and Vygotsky, Pauline Gibbons develops tools to view classroom talk through a powerful interdisciplinary lens. Putting forward an innovative new theory of classroom discourse analysis, this book focuses on applying theory to practice. This is an invaluable resource for all teachers, researchers and students of linguistics and education.

"Bridging Discourses in the ESL Classroom" examines the interactions between learners and teachers in a content-based classroom. It aims to identify patterns of discourse which support both second language development and curriculum learning, and the pedagogical contexts in which they occur. These interactional patterns are bridging discourses in that they build on the everyday language and prior experiences of the student in the process of developing the specialised academic registers of school. The study examines the use of these bridging discourses in two case study classrooms to show how they offer affordances for learning. This book puts forward an innovative new approach to the analysis of classroom discourse. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics and sociocultural theory, it argues that the significance of classroom talk for second language development can only be understood when it is examined within its situational, historical and sociocultural context. The book is recommended for academics and postgraduates researching applied linguistics and education.