ESOL AND LITERACY LEARNING

ESOL and Literacy Learning



ESOL and Literacy Learning

Introduction

Supporting ESOL and literacy learning across the curriculum

Crossing the curriculum offers some fascinating observations and insights into what goes on in the minds of faculty and ESOL students as they learn to adapt to the changes and challenges that they face in linguistically diverse college classrooms.

The controversial issue of ESOL learners with language difficulties in college classrooms in a refreshing and captivating way through letting us hear a wide variety of frank and personal accounts from the different players involved: from researchers and faculty who have learnt to break down prejudices and to separate grammatical accuracy from assessing academic competence, and from students themselves, who talk about some of the problems they encountered while trying to negotiate different styles of learning and teaching together with new fields of academic discourse.

Analysis

Investigating Students' Experiences Across the Curriculum Through the Eyes of Classroom Researchers ESOL and composition researchers who have investigated multilingual students' experiences across the curriculum; Learning Across the Curriculum: Through Students' Eyes, consists by two multilingual learners who chronicled their experiences during six years of their studies; and Engaging Students in Learning: Through the Eyes of Faculty Across the Curriculum,” different faculty who discuss how they address the needs of multilingual learners in their classrooms. The theme of learning across the curriculum runs throughout themselves self-contained accounts that can be read and enjoyed selectively, or in order of print (Gravells 2008).

Investigating students' Experiences across the Curriculum

Through the Eyes of Classroom Researchers different ESOL and composition researchers who have investigated different experiences of multilingual students in undergraduate courses across the curriculum. The authors in their various texts, (1) recount some of the problems that students face in trying to acquire multiple academic literacies and how different individual students have managed to overcome them; (2) argue that a student's achievement in a college courses depends on the complex interplay between the student's abilities and background and the expectations and tasks of specific courses and that consequentially ESOL and composition classes cannot prepare ESOL students for all of the discipline-specific demands they will encounter; and (3) remind us that language and literary acquisition is a long-term, evolving process and that since language is also acquired while students explore and engage in subject matter, faculty are also inevitably involved in the process of ESOL students' language acquisition (Walker 2007).

Learning across the Curriculum: Through Students' ...