Children and ESL: Integrating Perspectives

Abstract

U Lindfors (1984) has pointed out a serious misperception concerning first language learning. Teachers, researchers, parents, and even children confuse how language is taught with how it is learned. Lindfors cites Shuy (1981) as one leading researcher who confuses language learning with language teaching. Shuy presents child as beginning with accesses to reading (letter-sound correspondences, word parts, etc.) and moving toward meaning, which is actually sequence of much teaching of reading. Research on children learning to read, however, shows them focusing on larger units-genre, function, intention, and meaning-right from start. Such a confusion is not unknown in relation to second language considerations. In Children and ESL: Integrating Perspectives, editors work against this common confusion-not by separating teaching from learning (indeed, they deliberately weave these into one fabric), but by choosing contributions that are deliberate and self-conscious when shifting focus from teaching to learning. Although editors have tried to appeal to an audience of both ESL researchers and teachers of students of any age, they have not attempted to offer something for everybody. They maintain definite positions: Language cannot be divided into skills or divorced from context; language learning requires real use of language for users' own purposes rather than exercises with fragments displayed for teacher's purposes. The volume, comprised of papers that were presented at TESOL '85, contains introductory and closing framing sections by editors, Cazden's plenary address, a trilogy of different treatments of data from same subjects, and a report of research on and with an exceptional beginning ESL teacher. In calling for teachers to be language advocates for ESL children outside classroom, Cazden enumerates certain barriers that teachers as advocates could work to eliminate: reductionist conceptions of language and learning as well as behaviorist pedagogy accompanying such conceptions. She provides a much needed presentation of the real test bias-the pressure that makes curricula conform to tests in both format (multiple choice) and substance (fragmented, unrelated bits of content rather than logical arguments in extended prose about interrelated topics). However, Cazden's inclusion, with no dissociating comment, of

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