"Two key principles dominate much of the current scholarship and practice related to teaching multilingual learners: Teachers acknowledge that English (especially Academic English) is a form of social capital and it is their responsibility to provide students with this tool for social mobility. Teachers acknowledge the importance of validating and valuing home languages and dialects and welcoming them into academic spaces. These principles are often framed as a binary, when in fact both have value in our efforts to improve ...
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"Two key principles dominate much of the current scholarship and practice related to teaching multilingual learners: Teachers acknowledge that English (especially Academic English) is a form of social capital and it is their responsibility to provide students with this tool for social mobility. Teachers acknowledge the importance of validating and valuing home languages and dialects and welcoming them into academic spaces. These principles are often framed as a binary, when in fact both have value in our efforts to improve the odds of success for our nation's MLs. The failure of "English Only" policies that held sway in California and other states for decades is evidence that overemphasis on the first principle at the expense of the second is not only misguided but harmful. When both principles are upheld in classrooms and schools, our language-leaning children benefit. Language of Identity, Language of Access (LILA): An Anti-Oppressive Guide to Language in the Classroom is a toolkit for any teacher seeking to eradicate opportunity gaps and reduce home language loss for multilingual learners. LILA builds upon what has historically been called academic language instruction (Dutro & Moran, 2003; Zwiers, 2008) and embraces more modern approaches such as translanguaging (Garcia, 2009) and language architecture (Flores, 2015)"-- Provided by publisher.
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