Ms. Varma, first-grade teacher, has taken advantage of a beautiful autumn day to take her class, which includes seven English learners, on an English scavenger hunt. Working in pairs, the class walks around the school, the school grounds, and nearby streets looking for words in English. They carefully observe and take turns writing down all the words they find. They will use these words to study phonics and the alphabet as well as to create and share sentences, stories, and maps when they return to class. The list grows and. .. Desta, a new arrival from Ethiopia, looks at the long accumulated list in amazement. " Ms. Varma, " he cries, " There's English everywhere! " Ms. Varma has designed a lesson that offers opportunities to learners at all levels and illustrates the usefulness of spoken and written English. She has structured a lesson that promotes conversation and connects to themes the class is studying in reading, science, social studies, and math. She has brought a new learner to delight in the language around him that he is beginning to learn, and she will use this experience as a starting place to take the child beyond delight to competence in using his new language. But on what does she base her choices and practices as a teacher of culturally and linguistically diverse learners? Though we still have far to go toward a thorough understanding of language development, language teaching, and language learning, the teaching profession has a rich body of research upon which to base our instructional decisions. Teachers need to understand and be able to articulate the principles that underlie their teaching, and these principles should be based on sound research about how language is learned and what works best in supporting language development in the classroom. The principles that teachers hold not only make a difference regarding how and how well they teach but they also make teachers more able to learn from observation of their learners and from reflection on their own teaching. What are the principles of integrated language teaching and learning? • What principles can we draw from research about language learning and teaching? • What are strategies and practices that exemplify research-based principles? In this chapter, we outline nine principles that apply our best understandings of research on both effective teaching and learning for school-age learners and specific knowledge about how language is most efficiently acquired and best taught. We have named our model the activity-based communicative teaching and learning model (or the ABC model). The nine principles are organized along two dimensions: (1) activity-based teaching and learning and (2) communicative teaching and learning. M01_LEVI5146_02_SE_C01.indd 1 23/03/12 6:59 AM
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Today's accountability demands can be challenging for teachers in any subject; however, many educators, especially elementary school teachers, manifest low self-efficacy when it comes to teaching education review // reseñas educativas editors: david j. blacker / gustavo e. fischman / melissa cast-brede / gene v glass a multilingual journal of book reviews Education Review http://www.edrev.info2 The discomfort that these teachers appear to experience may derive from shortcomings in preparedness that could have been addressed in college or graduate school. A study by Ugbe, Bessong, and Agah (2010), for example, found that one-third of teachers surveyed reported having had little or no pre-service mathematics training. The roots of the problem may run deeper, as many teachers also report having found mathematics difficult during their own primary and/or secondary education (Brown, McNamara, Hanley, & Jones, 1999). Yet whatever the cause, it is clear that easing teachers' anxiet.
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