This practical guide shows teachers how to introduce academic language to young children, with an emphasis on appreciating and leveraging linguistic diversity. New educational standards are asking students to master content-area concepts and increasingly complex texts in earlier grades. This practitioner-friendly text provides instructional materials, sample dialogs, and assessment tools to facilitate academic language use in PreK–3 classrooms. The authors describe the word, sentence, and discourse levels of academic language, while encouraging teachers and students to consider purpose, participants, discipline, and context. Strategies are provided to help readers adapt language for a variety of academic purposes across mathematics, science, play, mealtimes, and ELA instruction. The text includes discussion questions, reproducible activities, planning materials, assessment tools, and handouts to facilitate smooth implementation into classroom practice. From Words to Wisdom will empower teachers to build bridges to academic success for all young learners. Book Features: Expands teachers’ understanding of academic language beyond vocabulary to include syntax and discourse-level features.Includes specific strategies, activities, and suggestions for teaching from and with academic language across multiple settings and disciplines.Addresses all students, including multilingual and linguistically diverse speakers.Incorporates user-friendly features, such as text boxes, vignettes, assessment protocols, and sample teaching materials.

This booklet, which was developed for adult literacy educators in Australia, summarizes selected research on health practices, communication, and literacy and outlines some issues that adult literacy teachers might consider in their work. The booklet begins with three anecdotes previewing the practical everyday challenges that literacy poses for medical practitioners and the people to whom they provide services. Examined next is the problem of health promotion and providing health services and information to people with limited literacy capabilities. A research project in which health workers and patients in low socioeconomic and high migrant areas are being interviewed about medical practices and literacy is discussed, and ways of connecting literacy, health, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status are presented. Concluding the booklet are eight strategies that literacy instructors can use to help health workers and their clients communicate better. Among the strategies suggested are the following: use health materials in teaching literacy; explore the readability of health materials with students; engage literacy students in a discussion of the problems they present to health providers; and spell out ways clients can request and expect guidelines on accessing available health literacy materials. The booklet contains 16 references. (MN)

Effective early language and literacy instruction to remediate language deficits and to prevent problems in learning to read is an important area for intervention research. Children with early language deficits who are growing up in poverty are dually at risk. Early deficits in language development predict both continued delays in language development and problems in acquisition of reading-related skills (Dickinson, McCabe, Anastasopoulos, Peisner-Feinberg & Poe, 2003; Snow, Burns & Griffen, 1998; Spira, Storch & Fischel, 2005; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002; Walker, Greenwood, Hart & Carta, 1994). Early emergent problem behavior, particularly in children with low language skills, also predicts difficulties in reading, academic performance and peer relationships (Hester & Kaiser, l998). Without effective early intervention to teach language and emergent literacy skills, many of these children will require intensive, long-term special education. This paper reports findings from a large randomized field trial examining the effects of three variations of early literacy curricula implemented in Head Start classrooms on children with low language and matched children with average language skills. This project involved the comparison of three conditions: "Opening the World of Learning" ("OWL"), "OWL" combined with "Enhanced Milieu Teaching" ("EMT") for low language children, and an enhanced version of "Creative Curriculum" ("CC"), the existing literacy program used by the Head Start center. Effects of the preschool curricula on children's end of preschool, end of kindergarten, and end of first grade outcomes were examined. This intervention took place in Head Start preschool classrooms in Birmingham, Alabama. Overall, there were few systematic differences in language and literacy outcomes across time for low language and matched typical language children. Outcomes varied by child language status (low vs. matched language) and assessment time (end of preschool vs. end of K vs. end of 1st). The results were not those anticipated. Four potential explanations are being considered and examined in follow up analyses of predictors of child outcomes, teacher implementation fidelity, and "active ingredients" (specific teacher behaviors associated with positive language and literacy outcomes). The authors have not yet completed the full set of moderator analysis and they anticipate these analyses will aid in understanding the treatment outcomes. (Contains 1 table.