April 20, 2009

Professor publishes article on multi-lingual learners

Shagoury published an article titled “Language to Language: Nurturing Writing Development in Multilingual Classrooms” in the March 2009 issue of Young Children.

Ruth Shagoury, Mary Stuart Rogers professor of education:

Shagoury published an article titled “Language to Language: Nurturing Writing Development in Multilingual Classrooms” in the March 2009 issue of Young Children. In the article, Shagoury recounts her time spent in a multilingual kindergarten classroom in which six or more languages were spoken by the children. She provides examples of the process young dual-language learners engage when learning written languages in both first and second languages. “When the two written language systems that children are learning are very different, children still draw on their knowledge of their home language as well as their growing understanding of English, testing out hypotheses just as they do in their oral language,” Shagoury said.

Young Children is the journal for the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). The theme for the March issue was “Supporting All Kinds of Learners.”  In the introduction to the issue, the editor states:  “All the articles in this cluster are about getting to know individual children and then planning a curriculum and teaching strategies that will support every child’s development and learning.”