Beyond the Beginnings: Literacy Interventions for Upper Elementary English Language Learners (review)

This book addresses the needs of 'struggling English language learners' (ELLs) in US schools. The focus is on the development of literacy skills for academic success among students in Grades 4 through 8. These are critical years in the development of cognitive skills, academic knowledge, and literacy skills. Beginning in Grade 4, students are increasingly expected to learn demanding academic content through reading expository text and to demonstrate their learning through writing increasingly complex forms of text.

The authors identify struggling ELLs as those who have been mainstreamed before they have achieved the necessary level of academic language proficiency to succeed in mainstream classrooms, or who have never received any specialized ESL or bilingual instruction. As the authors rightly state, most of these learners are in monolingual English classrooms where the teacher teaches as if all the children were fully proficient in English and able to meet the academic and linguistic demands of the curriculum. This situation is common across Canada and the United States; indeed, most ELLs are in this situation for many years after their arrival in an English-language school. The authors hold schools responsible for providing the necessary long-term support for ELLs to enable them make adequate yearly progress towards grade-level standards, and Beyond the Beginnings is intended to enable all teachers in all schools to address the learning needs of ELLs.

The book is organized into eight chapters. The first provides an overview of the learners and their social, linguistic, and academic needs. The chapter includes profiles of four struggling ELLs in order to help teachers understand the needs of these learners.

The second provides background information on literacy and literacy development and describes two classroom scenarios to illustrate differing approaches that mainstream teachers may take to the instruction of ELLs in their classrooms. The third chapter focuses on the literacy demands of the curriculum. Importantly, the authors emphasize that all children enter the classroom as members of a linguistic community; their language competencies are not deficient but different. More could be said about the need for children to continue to develop their first language skills, at least until they are able to learn effectively through the medium of English; otherwise, what language can they use for sophisticated thought and problem solving?

Chapters 4–6 focus on specific instructional strategies for writing, reading, and content-based language instruction. The chapter on writing (chapter 4) provides a useful overview of scaffolded instruction, from 'teacher writing' (modelled writing) through children's independent writing. The overview of some text structures such as 'problem and solution,' and the examples of 'text signals' that indicate specific ways of organizing ideas (such as cause and effect, comparison and contrast, or linking a series), help to highlight important elements of academic literacy that are often 'invisible' and not explicitly taught. The chapter on reading (chapter 5) focuses on reading comprehension (rather than decoding) and outlines five approaches for scaffolding reading comprehension: reading aloud (i.e., teacher reading aloud to students), shared reading, guided reading, paired reading, and independent reading. The chapter also includes an overview of reading strategies, such as making inferences and predicting, that can be modelled and prompted by the teacher. Chapter 5 features a section on instructional strategies for vocabulary development; this section could have been considerably more detailed, given that vocabulary knowledge is the most important factor in reading comprehension. For example, there is no information about word families (e.g., educate, education, educational, educated, etc.) or the affix system of English. Chapter 6 outlines some important aspects of language that occur frequently in three demanding and very different subject areas (social studies, science, and mathematics) and identifies teaching and learning strategies that promote comprehension, vocabulary development, and thinking skills in those subject areas.

Chapter 7 is about assessment. It features excellent suggestions on how to gather information about students' oral language proficiency, reading comprehension, and academic...