Book’s Blog 11

                          Final word

                 
            

As I read the book, I feel that the reason of the book is to purify scholarly research and make it available to practicing teachers. Yvonne and David Freeman review a broad range of research, from Cummins’ work to the research and theories of John Ogbu, David Brown, Halliday, James Gee, Robin Scarcella, Mary Schleppegrell, and many others. They approach the issue from the point of view of ESL research. They tackle how to effectively address the goals of simultaneously developing academic content knowledge and English language proficiency among the nearly five million English language learners (ELLs) in the United States.

I believe that this book is particularly essential for secondary content area teachers of diverse students in a variety of contexts. The Freemans bring in examples of individual students to illustrate the challenges, present summaries of relevant research, and suggest practical applications to teaching throughout the book. Although it is written primarily for secondary content area teachers, the authors’ approach to teaching ELLs as a whole and their inclusion of a wide range of applicable topics, including language acquisition theory, instructional strategies, and scholarship, make this text a worthy read for educators, researchers, linguists, and policy makers alike.

I like how they organize the book. One of the greatest strengths of the book is how they include some application activities in each chapter, encouraging readers to discuss and apply concepts in light of current research. Moreover, as I said above, the authors present classroom examples to illustrate research-based recommendations on supporting academic language development, suggesting methods teachers can employ across the content areas. Teachers at the middle and secondary levels will benefit from applying these strategies, and teacher educators in TESOL and bilingual education may also find the book useful as required or recommended reading in methods courses.

I am pleased to realize that there is plenty to learn from the book. It is worthy to buy because it has a lot of ideas that I will implement for my future lesson plans. I have more ways to scaffold and benefit my students. I think it is important read book for all teachers, particularly new teachers. There are many helpful tips that explain research on second language acquisition and support every statement teachers need. It breaks many misconceptions about English Language Learners, such as the differences between conversational and academic language proficiency and the reason why many students are inappropriately placed in early exit programs or Special Education programs. It is very user friendly and has a lot of examples that are easy to picture.

Overall, I am so glad that I got this book. I recognized why it is available in my country that is not an ESL context because it should be on the desk of every language teacher regardless the context. It guides me to the right direction to make sure that I consider all the different levels of academic language support I must provide in the classroom.


Many thanks to all readers.
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