Status Updates From Language and Learning in Mu...

In five years or so, someone will perfect the Babel Fish and everyone will have a device in one’s ear with instant translation of languages, making books like Coelho’s and all her time-worn strategies obsolete. For now teachers have to devise worksheets, printed material and tests to accommodate students who are less likely to catch up the older they arrive. But can we just get rid of flashcards as their last resort?

Back to the basics for bilingual education, meaning less research-based charts, more friendly classroom photos. The third section develops the idea of Vygotskian scaffolding for students who have language barriers, are shy or cannot understand instruction yet. And for teachers candidates soon to start reading this textbook, they get to hunt for several Coelho contradictions strategically placed in various paragraphs.

Nearing the halfway point of this textbook and the writing starts to get bogged down with data analysis and an earnest plea for teachers to delve into multifaceted findings from research. I suspect not many teacher candidates will care, wanting more practical application like in Chapter 6 - and yet, without the theory and research, it becomes a shopping list of so many "display questions" making for passive learners.

Getting into the nuts and bolts of how learners learn and teachers teach with emphasis on the gap between everyday English acquired within two years and academic language students should have by year five. Chapter 3 will be the last place BICS and CALP are mentioned; not going to miss them! Chapter 4 replaces friendly school photos with CEFR-based charts and text-filled graphics, providing a map from A1 to C2 skills.

Another textbook to use in the Classroom Discourses course I will soon be teaching, and this one seems to be on the ball for teachers (hopefully teacher candidates, too) interacting with ELL students. Of course, the world has changed dramatically over the five years since the book was published, so it helps that the general information on how immigrant and refugee get settled into schools in Canada is still relevant.