ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the educational experiences that students who are bureaucratically designated “Long-term English Learners” undergo in school and the severe limitations of instructional approaches that typically characterize these experiences. We propose and describe a more effective alternative: a pedagogy that, building on sociocultural theory, has at its center student engagement in critical dialogue. As part of this description, we offer an instructional example that illustrates the importance of scaffolding as structure and process in dialogic interactions and of the availability of affordances (van Lier, 1998) to bring forth learners’ voices and support their increasing autonomy. Underlying this instructional approach is a clear realization that bureaucratically designated Long-term English Learners have immense strengths to build on and potential to realize, which require a proleptic pedagogy. Such a future-oriented pedagogy involves substantive, supported interactions around a wide variety of texts that afford this group of learners the right to be heard, and the opportunity to grow into the powerful, intellectual, socially contributing people they can be.
