Welcome to Second Language Literacy teacher-scholars' blog

Dear all,

Welcome to English 495. I'm glad you are here and glad that we will be exploring various important second language literacy related topics in this class. I look forward to our online and off-line discussions on the class readings, your experiences and reflections. Your entries in this blog can include your comments on what interested you in the readings, what you considered as key/critical issues, what questions you have for the class to consider, and how the readings apply to your own research and/or teaching. Although I said in your syllabus that one entry per week is required, you are strongly encouraged to use this space as frequently as you can to log your reflections on the topics that provokes intellectual thought.

Let me also reiterate the main goals of this course and how I believe it'll contribute to your intellectual and professional growth as emerging teacher-scholars. This course will introduce you the ways in which second language literacy is learned and taught in various educational contexts. I hope that it will also provide you with various opportunities to grow as critical language educators who will perceive literacy as situated, material, ideological and historical, and who are passionate about creating democratic learning environments for second language learners in K-12 and beyond. In addition to discussing theories related to second language reading and writing, in this course we will also explore various topics including intercultural rhetoric, textual borrowing/intellectual property, teaching of genre and academic writing across multiple educational contexts (e.g. K-12, ESL/EFL post-secondary education). Finally, the materials and the class discussions will encourage you to critically examine pervasive language ideologies, such as “monolingualism, ”,“language purism, ” “English-only” movements and “standardization,” as these apply to teaching of second language literacy and policy making.

With the above rationale in mind, this course will have a number of goals:

1. Discussing instructional strategies and pedagogy for teaching English reading and writing to ethnolinguistically diverse student population;
2. Examining the dominant schools in teaching of second language reading and writing;
3. Understanding current theory and research about becoming literate in a second language;
4. Understanding how literacy works in a multiliterate and multicultural globalized world;
5. Raising awareness on critical second language literacy and challenging ideologies that conceptualize second language writers from a deficit model;
6. Improving the teaching of second language literacy in K-16 (i.e., reading, writing, speaking and other media connections).
7. Learning to analyze and critically evaluate ideas, arguments, and interpretations, and engaging in scholarly dialogues and interdisciplinary conversations about second language literacies.

I'm always open for changes in this course. Although I taught this course before, it's always exciting to see how the members of a class community of learners (scholars, teachers etc.) can change/enrich the nature of the discussions. Therefore, if there are any topics that you would like us to go in-depth or any aspects of our discussions that you would like us to elaborate and critically examine, please do let me know so that I can make the necessary amendments/additions to the reading.

Best wishes for a rewarding course,
Lisya Seloni