BOOK REVIEW

Book Review

Book Review

A reading of Good Study (Neil Burdess, 2007) evokes memories of an earlier work, The CALLA Handbook (Chamot & O'Malley, 1994) in that both books are geared towards practitioners striving to help their students successfully navigate the world of academic literacy as they engage in reading and writing activities across the content areas.

The field has come a long way since The Handbook was printed. Since then, a series of works have been published on academic language. These works include thought pieces and theoretical perspectives on the nature and acquisition of academic literacy (Zamel & Spack, 2007); discussions on different genres and features of school literacy (Schleppegrell, 2004); academic writing in a second language (Belcher & Braine, 1995); academic writing development among Generation 1.5 students (Harklau, Losey, & Siegal, 1999); and descriptions of school and classroom frameworks that support the development of academic literacy by ELLs (Bunch, Abram, Lotan, & Valdés, 2001; Schleppegrell & Colombi, 2002).

Good Study is one of the most recent contributions to the arena of academic language development, and is different from most other works in the area because of its practical nature. Like its predecessor, it is also written in the style of a handbook in which, except for the first two chapters, the theoretical underpinnings relevant to classroom practice are very briefly highlighted and followed by elaborate discussions on tools and strategies that may be used to assist students as they face the challenges of content area literacies. The organizational plan for the book takes the reader from a discussion on the nature of language and academic literacy to specific descriptions of academic language in the content areas and strategies for developing this language in the classroom. Neil Burdess ends by discussing the importance of ongoing classroom assessments of student learning and the role that teachers must take to help low-performing students close the achievement gap.

There are several key notions in the book that merit elaboration. Three of these are 1) the need to help students focus on deeper levels of talk as a way of scaffolding thinking and academic language use; 2) the use of metacognition and metalinguistic awareness to help practitioners analyze classroom interactions and to help their students develop academic literacy; and 3) the use of visuals coupled with writing to help develop academic thinking. Each of these is described below.

Neil Burdess makes the point that teachers often use many types of activities that promote classroom talk, but that there is a need to think about the quality as well as the quantity of talk. A focus on deeper levels of talk is a strategy that can be used to increase the quality of talk. This is done not only by talking to students about what a good classroom discussion sounds like, but also by modeling conversations that go beyond limited facts and unsupported opinions to include a planned direction, evidence, explanations, interpretation, and synthesis as appropriate-elements that lead to deeper levels of thinking, questions, and ...