Refugee students arrive in Canada with varying amounts of previous formal education. School-aged refugees who lack a solid first language education may find learning to read in English and studying subject content especially challenging. If these students leave school, they depart with inadequate English reading proficiency for further academics…

This review synthesizes research on English reading outcomes of all types of programs for Spanish-dominant ELLs in elementary school. It is divided into two major sections: the effect of language of instruction on achievement (i.e., bilingual vs. English-only instruction) and effective reading approaches for ELLs other than the use of native…

This article examines the Paper Partners program at Ryerson University, Toronto. This peer-mentoring program was developed to support the academic writing skills of students whose first language of academic study was not English. The program integrated a team of student-facilitators, a talk-aloud co-editing process, and a reflective feedback…

This paper is an exploratory study of the childhood academic language environments (CALEs) of bilingual Japanese expatriate students. Student (n=28) and parent (n=67) surveys were adapted from the Life History Calendar (Caspi et al. 1996) to gather retrospective CALE data at a Japanese-English bilingual high school. Principal Components Analysis…

The increasing linguistic diversity among both international and domestic students in English-medium universities creates new challenges for the institutions in addressing the students' needs in the area of academic literacy. In order to identify students with such needs, a major New Zealand university has implemented the Diagnostic English…

How much do specialized academic discourse communities matter to undergraduate writers? To what degree should theories of specialized discourses influence the design of undergraduate Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs? At the University of Iowa, where an undergraduate Writing Fellows program engages peer tutors in writing-intensive…

Profiles a writing-across-the-curriculum project in an accountancy program. Notes that the team's collaborative process produced three critical planning decisions: (1) establishing "fitness-for-use" for evaluating student communications; (2) selecting only those forms of communication used in accountancy; and (3) teaching only those…