Interviews with 32 teachers in 8 California school districts examined how teachers responded to Proposition 227. Three teacher reactions were identified: outward defiance, clarification of pedagogical purpose, and anxiety in the face of change. Key factors in these reactions were teacher ideology and experiences and the course of implementation…

Discusses why the right of access to the socioeconomically dominant symbolic resource, English, is a fundamental language right of Hong Kong children. Discusses why current English curricula design and practices do not provide such access and how they can be changed to provide Hong Kong with access to an English education that is compatible with…

More than a decade ago, no one held out much hope for the poor, immigrant children at Kennedy Middle School. Nobody thinks that now. This article presents how Kennedy Middle School transformed and beat all the odds to be a "school to watch." In many ways, Kennedy Middle School has become a model of middle-grades improvement. Test scores,…

A fair and valid assessment for every child, as mandated by legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 and the Improving America's School Act of 1994, must consider the complexity inherent in assessments for subgroups of students. Due to the rapid growth of the population of English language learners (ELLs) in the United…

There are many untested, long-held assumptions within the field of study abroad concerning the impact of program elements such as study duration, language of instruction, program models, and student housing choices. One assumption embraced within the field is that direct enrollment (or full immersion) programs are more effective at achieving a…

Teachers and community in a small rural Maori-medium school in New Zealand were concerned that their students who were highly literate in Maori experienced difficulties in reading and writing in English on entry to secondary school (where English was the medium of instruction). Consequently, this school and community introduced a 10-week…

This article explores the writing opportunities provided to Spanish-speaking and mandarin speaking English Language Learners at the fourth and fifth-grade level across the various classroom settings in which they participated daily: an all-English speaking classroom, an English-as-a-second language (ESL) classroom, and a native-language classroom.…

This paper is based on findings of two recent surveys on the language(s) used as the primary medium for the teaching and assessment of cultural modules. They were conducted between March 1999 and March 2000 in language departments in UK universities: the first among staff (146 replies), the second among language students (704 replies). Comparing…

This paper reports on a questionnaire survey carried out in the first and last classes of a single semester English "conversation" class at a national university in Japan. While the time frame is obviously limited, the project focuses on changes in attitude to using the Learners' Mother Tongue displayed by students with regards to use by…

Although task-based teaching is frequently practiced in contemporary English language teaching, it is underresearched in state school settings. This article contributes to filling this gap in the literature by using qualitative case study data to explore how a task-based innovation was implemented in three primary school classrooms in Hong Kong.…

This article describes the application of Bakhtin's (1981, 1986a,b) theorisation of language as dialogue to the study of young students' struggle with discourses of ethnicity within the context of a Studies of Asia curriculum project (Hamston 2003). Bakhtin's rich conceptualisation of the productive and ethical nature of dialogue has operated at…

Success at university depends to a large extent on students' ability to read expository texts effectively in order to access and understand information, and study it for exam purposes. An important component of the comprehension process is the reader's ability to connect current information with information mentioned previously. One aspect of this…

The most outstanding characteristic of language in education policy for South Asia (SA) is its multilingualism. All through recorded history the seven countries that constitute SA have been multilingual. For at least the first two decades of their existence as sovereign states the large nation states of SA failed to take into account this…

The majority of learners in southern Africa receive their education through the medium of a second language, English. Although teachers of English play a crucial role in helping learners to acquire language skills in the medium of instruction, we argue that subject content teachers' lack of attention to the teaching of the four language skills may…

This book is for teachers, teacher educators, school and district administrators, policy makers, and researchers who want to know about literacy, cultural diversity, and students who speak little or no English. It offers a rich picture of the incredible diversity of students who enter secondary school as immigrants--their abilities, their needs,…