Bilingual and ESL classrooms

"The major goal of this book is to take a comprehensive look at research, policy, and effective practices in U.S. schools for students who are from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The demographic predictions are that students with close connections to their bilingual/bicultural heritages (now labeled 'language minority students' by the federal government) will be very large in number in the near future, becoming the majority in many states over the next three decades. Thus we educators urgently need to provide appropriate, meaningful, and effective schooling for these students, who too often have been underserved by U.S. schools. This book speaks to all educators, with the goal of providing rich examples of effective practices and their underlying research knowledge base" (page xiii).

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.