ABSTRACT
Before we begin looking specifically at academic language literacy and applications of the research base to classroom practice, we want to spend some time on the topic of student motivation. During the course of the Cognitive Academic Language Literacy Instruction (CALLI) project that inspired this book (see preface), one of the major issues that arose was resistance to the ideas we were presenting that was based, in large part, on the general teacher complaint that their students didn’t want to learn. Teachers said that if the student doesn’t want to learn, applying the best techniques and practices to the student gets you nowhere. We found ourselves in the position of not only needing to address the topic of student motivation, but we also realized that we needed to motivate the teachers participating in the project to learn the academic language techniques we were advocating.
