The Literate Bias of Clasrooms: Helping the ESL Learner

Abstract

It has been argued recently that the language of the classroom is more decontextualized ("bookish" language) than the language of normal, everyday conversation. Those children who have had an early exposure to bookish language are better equipped, it seems, to handle the language of the school. For the ESL learners the problems are two-fold: they have to learn a new language and they have to learn the language of school. In order to bridge the gap between the home language and the language of the school, an experiment in which reading materials were introduced into a print-deficient environment will be discussed. The results of this experiment indicate that the provision of books and regular reading in the school curriculum not only improves proficiency in the second language but also has a positive effect on academic achievement in other subjects.