The Multilingual Ela Classroom - by Mary Amanda Stewart Paperback

Book Synopsis

Heritage language speakers, emergent bilinguals, simultaneous bilinguals--multilingual students are in nearly every classroom in the US and Canada. Their rich languages have a unique place in English language arts, allowing the subject to be taught more deeply by reading, writing, speaking, creating, viewing, and critically thinking across languages.

Yet how can ELA teachers do this successfully when they don't speak their students' languages? In this book, meet five ELA teachers in grades preK-12 who put literacy and language theory into practice in creative, innovative, and student-centered ways.

Each chapter contains specific teaching ideas and projects implemented by these teachers to engage their linguistically diverse students in authentic meaning-making. Learn how you can teach language arts through a multilingual approach that decenters the English component and allows for richer, multifaceted learning.

About the Author

Mary Amanda (Mandy) Stewart is a professor at Texas Woman's University in the Division of Language and Literacy. She is passionate about the bilingual and additional language literacy development of multilingual children and adolescents, focusing on the intersection of critical literacy and language research. Recently she has partnered with teachers in the US, Costa Rica, Poland, and Greece to support multilingual students and regularly enters classrooms to try out teaching ideas herself. In addition to articles in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, Language Policy, and Journal of Language, Identity & Education, she has also authored or edited seven books that focus on language and literacy. Among these are the practitioner-focused But Does This Work with English Learners? A Guide for English Language Arts Teachers, Grades 6-12 as well as the critical research book Radicalizing Literacies and Languaging: A Framework toward Dismantling the Mono-Mainstream Assumption. Additionally, Stewart is coeditor of English Journal and is affiliate professor of research at DSW University of Lower Silesia in Poland, where she supports teachers of refugee students.