Zwiers+Notes

Chapter 1 - "To complicate matters, large numbers of students with language-based performance issues remain underneath our radar: they have little or no accent, they turn in homework, they are well behaved, and they try hard. Yet they fall further behind each year, often just getting by, playing the game of school. Contrary to what too many people consider to be common sense simple "equal treatment" and basic immersion are not enough for many students who are significantly below grade level. The y do not just naturally pick up academic language as easily as they pick up other types of social language (Scarcella, 2003)." p. 2

Definition of "standard English" - "the narrow range of accents, vocabulary, and grammar typically valued by those in power" (p. 2)

Key concepts in the chapter: 1) significant mismatches between home and school, 2) how to help diverse students //add on// ways of thinking and communicating that will help them succeed academically, 3) curricular and assessment changes that can help (p. 3)

"It makes sense that the more "school-like" the tasks and communication are at home, the better students are likely to perform at school. Likewise, the more "teacher-like" the language of a student is, the more the student will meet our expectations and be considered successful." (p. 3)

Definitions of social, cultural, knowledge, and linguistic capital - p. 7 - "Families pass on these different types of capital to their children, who then "invest them" in school and the working world."

Register - "adjusting our language according to the situation and the audience" (8)

Invisible criteria - "when we (teachers, schools, tests) assess students on things that we haven't taught (Schleppegrell, 2004). We use criteria, invisible to us and to students, that depend heavily on background knowledge and language features, many of which come from non-school experiences." (9)

"Many of us reward home-based skills without realizing it. We unconsciously expect certain ways of talking about texts and expressing ideas in writing - ways that are often rooted in our own cultural values and beliefs. Then we reward those ways that most align with our own expectations of evidence of learning." (9)

"Do we grade Leslie higher because of the more advanced language she used? If so, have //we// taught that language, or did she learn it at home? This is a pair of questions that we must continue to ask ourselves." (P. 9-10)

"We must therefore be able to validate the thinking processes and languages that students bring with them, while also explicitly teaching new forms of school language." (10) ". . .the words and their organization may be a more significant issue in learning than the actual content or skills we are teaching." (10)

"If we fail to directly teach academic ways of doing and communicating to our diverse students, what can result is the "pedagogy of entrapment," a term used by Donald Macedo (1994, p. 34) to refer to situations in which schools require from students the academic discourse skills and knowledge that we don't teach." (10-11)

". . . the middle and upper classes tend to define what is intellectual, logical, linguistically appropriate, academic, and organized in a given setting. Dominant groups then set up systems (for example, certain types of testing and teaching practices) for preserving power and for limiting access of non-mainstream groups to such systems. Although these systems supposedly evaluate abilities, much of what is tested is the cultural capital and language abilities that align with mainstream expectation. For this reason, we must continually reflect on the power that language has to separate, marginalize, and oppress." (11)

"We must create learning spaces for our diverse students so that they build from what they have and //add// the knowledges and language skills needed in future schooling and work. We must challenge students to expand their linguistic capital. Yet at the same time, we must be willing to push back against society's narrow-minded expectations (often evidenced through tests, writing samples, and grading practices) and limited perceptions of our students' abilities." (12)

"Our diverse students' knowledge and linguistic abilities are assets that should be integrated into how and what we teach." (12)

"But in school, because most classrooms are so large and diverse (and because students are very different from teachers), we seldom have a clear agreement on the meaning of words and their arrangements, even though we might see many nodding heads. If a teacher uses too many unknown words and complex sentences for a student to understand, then communication isn't happening." (13)

"Thus one of our tasks as teachers is to get to know the meanings that our students have for words and terms, especially the important school-based ones. Once this happens, we get our meanings and theirs to overlap enough to reach a common understanding." (13)

"We need to seek to know what students think is important as they read and learn in all content areas, not just language arts. At the same time, we need to apprentice them into new ways of looking at meaning and what is meaningful to experts in a discipline." (14)

". . . a hierarchical way of organizing knowledge tends to shape the thinking and language of mainstream groups . . . Hierarchical thinking requires students to understand subordinate and superordinate categories of knowledge. . . Large numbers of students, however, do not organize knowledge in the same ways that teachers and textbooks do. These students have had very different home experiences, with different types of stories, messages, and categories for knoweldge. And yet most teachers have been so immersed in hierarchical ways of thinking that it is almost impossible to see how others could organize knowledge differently. But as we get to know students, we can understand how they see the world and give it meaning; then we can more effectively share new ways of communicating, comprehending, and organizing knowledge." (15)

"We need to know how students think and communicate because we need to know where to start teaching. We need to find out what they think is important in life and why. This includes learning how they organize the facts and concepts of our content area and how they connect learning to life. Thus, in the first part of the year we must come up with a wide range of ways to observe thinking and learning and language use." (15)

"How can we understand why so many children do not learn what the mainstream schools think they are teaching unless we can get "inside" the learners and see the world through their eyes? If we do not try to do this, if we continue to use the mainstream experience of reality as the perspective, we fool ourselves into believing we are looking through a window when instead we are looking into a mirror." (Purcell-Gates, 1995, p 6) (16)