Research on Preparing Preservice Teachers to Work Effectively with Emergent Bilinguals

Research on Preparing Preservice Teachers to Work Effectively with Emergent Bilinguals, Emergent bilinguals are those students who come to school speaking languages other than English. In 2010 there were an approximately 5.3 million emergent bilinguals in U.S. schools, and by 2020, it is predicted that half of all public school students will have non-English speaking backgrounds. With this growth in the numbers of emergent bilinguals in schools, the days of relegating them to specialist teachers are gone. Now all teachers, not only English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers or bilingual teachers, need to understand how to support students whose home language is not English. There is a critical need for teacher education programs to help preservice teachers, most of whom are racially, culturally, and linguistically different from their future students, value the diversity emergent bilinguals bring to schools and prepare them to teach these students effectively. Teacher educators need to be able to not only teach preservice teachers how to teach language arts, math, social studies, or science, but also to teach the language their students need to talk, read, and write about these subjects. Despite this need, there is a lack of research on how best to prepare preservice teachers to teach emergent bilinguals. In this book, teacher educators from institutions across the U.S. report their research with preservice teachers in large cities, suburban communities, and rural border areas. In each chapter, the authors explain what they have learned as they have conducted research on education for preservice teachers who will teach emergent bilinguals in mainstream, bilingual, and ESL.