LinguistiCAL

Teaching English language learners (ELLs) to become successful readers and also to meet new state standards requires a thorough understanding of how language figures in education. After all, teaching children to read is highly skilled work and teaching children whose first language is not English is even more challenging. All teachers need a solid grounding in educational linguistics that will help them to teach literacy skills and work with English language learners. Teacher preparation and in-service professional development programs need revamping to achieve this goal.

Teachers fulfill four crucial functions that call for more knowledge about language than most teacher education programs usually provide. These are the communicative, evaluative, instructional, and modeling functions. In the communicative function, teachers need to know how to adjust their language to help ELLs communicate, and they need to understand and respect variable norms for language and language use. Teachers need knowledge about testing and assessment, and they need a repertoire of assessment strategies to fulfill their evaluative function.

They must also be aware of how testing can sometimes create a distorted appraisal of a learner’s ability. For their instructional function, teachers need to understand how language skills develop in children so that they can "design the classroom language environment . . . to optimize language and literacy learning and . . . avoid linguistic obstacles to content area learning" (Wong Fillmore & Snow, 1999, p.8). In their final function, teachers serve as models of educated adults. Demonstrating an understanding of how English works helps establish a standard for what students should know.

To serve these functions, what should classroom teachers know about language that they aren't learning in their professional preparation? Wong Fillmore and Snow outline some areas of language study in which they think teachers need expertise:

• The basic analytic units of spoken language (phonemes, morphemes, grammatical elements, and discourse structures)
  
• Regularity and irregularity in English structures
  
• Orthographic systems of the world's languages and how they relate to the spoken languages they represent
  
• Rhetorical style in spoken and written language
  
• Vocabulary development
  
• Principles of English word formation
  
• Academic English
  
• Second language acquisition
  
• Dialects of English
  
• Text complexity
  
• Composition

Wong Fillmore and Snow contend that this may be a good time to rethink the language curriculum for teacher education. Teaching is changing. More teachers have ELLs in their classes, as programs for serving these students undergo change.

Teachers are confronting the new state curriculum standards and increased large-scale testing of their students. Teacher preparation is generally under scrutiny. It is time to consider what teachers need to know about language because so much of what goes on at school is language-based.

Note: This column derives from an institute at the 1999 Regional Conferences on Improving America's Schools led by Lily Wong Fillmore and Catherine Snow called "Helping LEP Students Learn to Read: What All Educators Need to Know."
References: August, D., & Hakuta, K. (Eds). (1997). Improving schooling for language minority children: A research agenda. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Snow, C.E., Burns. M.S., & Griffin, P. (Eds.). (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Wong Fillmore, L. , & Snow. C. (1999). What educators – especially teachers – need to know about language: The bare minimum. http://www.ncbe.gwu.edu/iasconferences/1999/institutes/lep/index.htm (NB: Comments on this draft paper are invited from ALR readers and can be addressed to iaspaper@cal.org).

Carolyn Temple Adger, Center for Applied Linguistics. Visit CAL's Web site: http://www.cal.org