ABSTRACT
Bilingual learners represent a growing population in Massachusetts classrooms, with a 13% increase in the last ten years. Approximately 50,000 students in Massachusetts, speaking 112 languages, were identified as limited English proficient in 2006 (National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition, 2006). In addition, Massachusetts is one of a number of states that passed legislation eliminating most forms of bilingual education, the only exception being two-way programs. This restrictive language policy, coupled with the barrage of standards and test requirements mandated to ensure accountability under the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), has placed an increasing strain on schools with large numbers of students acquiring English as a new language. In Massachusetts, as in other states, language policies that place bilingual students in mainstream classrooms increasingly create a context that generalizes the linguistic and cultural needs of bilingual learners, thereby operating under the assumption “that effective instruction for [English language learners] is little more than good teaching practices for a diverse group of native English speakers” (Harper & de Jong, 2005, p. 55). As a result of this assumption, the specific linguistic and cultural features of school writing remain invisible to those acquiring English as an additional language since most teachers do not explicitly teach those features to native English speakers. Bilingual learners need to acquire the second language in addition to literacy and content knowledge (Bernhardt, 1991) to competently perform in the academic registers required of mainstream monolingual classrooms. If the specific teaching of language is ignored, students develop a dialect that allows them to cope with everyday communicative challenges (Fillmore & Snow, 2000), but “when lexical and grammatical development does not keep pace with school expectations, students are unable to meet the reading and writing demands of disciplinary learning” (Schleppegrell, 2004, p. 80). However, little is known about best practices for writing instruction for bilingual learners (Fitzgerald, 2006).
