H-813
Bilingual Learners: Literacy Development and Instruction
(Formerly titled Language Minority Learners)
Paola Uccelli
As the number of children who speak, or are exposed to, more than one language increases in US classrooms and in classrooms around the world, educators at all system levels and across varied settings must be prepared to provide high-quality, rigorous education to ever more linguistically diverse groups of students. Designed for researchers and practitioners, this course will focus on the pressing issues related to bilingual students’ literacy and language instruction. The term “bilingual” in this course will be used to refer to a variety of students who have diverse and unequal experiences in more than one language and who speak or hear a language different from the societal language at home, but who might receive bilingual or monolingual instruction at school. The course will provide opportunities to discuss and investigate the literacy development of bilingual learners and to learn and reflect about the efficacy of research-based reading methods in various instructional settings. A number of societal factors related to language and academic achievement will be explored as well: the many modes of being bilingual or multilingual, the role of linguistic minorities in society, the role of educational resources, and the impact of educational policies on bilingual populations. This course will employ an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on sociocultural, psycholinguistic, and cognitive frameworks of research. Note: This course was formerly numbered H-810W/H-810X. Students who have taken H-810W/H-810X should not take this course.
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