As so often happens when writing a book, we encountered a new study along the way that echoed many of the concerns we were writing about. The Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation Study, led by Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Oroczo and Irina Todorova (2008), followed the academic and personal lives of more than 400 new arrivals to the United States for five years as they moved through middle and high school. Their findings were predictable to any who have dedicated their professional lives to these most hopeful students: that proficiency in English was the best predictor of academic achievement. This is no surprise considering that our measures of academic achievement are overwhelmingly in English. Sadly, over the course of the five-year study, more than two-thirds of the participants saw their grade point averages (GPAs) steadily decline.

This study resonated with us for other reasons as well. The researchers found that social engagement with teachers and peers, as well as students' cognitive inquisitiveness, played a significant role (30 percent of the variance in GPA) in achievement. The good news is that we as teachers have the means to promote the mental and relational connections necessary for learning. Our most effective tool is the talk we foster in our classrooms. We're not referring to the social chatter of peers making plans for after school (it seems as though that blossoms almost without our help!), nor do we mean the sound of our own voices filling the air. We mean the learning discourse—the back-and-forth discussion of ideas that deepens understanding.

Jeff Zwiers's (2007) careful study of the practices that enhance and inhibit discourse is a reminder of how the best of intentions are undermined when misapplied. We should use questioning to provoke thought, but that should not be mistaken for the interrogative practices that ask for little more than recall (Doug calls these practices "guess what's in the teacher's brain"). The use of gestures to reinforce the meaning of terminology is helpful, but not if it is so culturally bound that its meaning is lost. Zwiers cites the example of a teacher who flashed a peace sign with her fingers when she used the term pacify—a reference lost to many of her middle school English language learners. Most dishearteningly, he found that teachers too often accepted insufficient responses in a misguided effort to reduce the pressure on English language learners. Call it the "soft bigotry of low expectations," if you will (politicians on both sides of the aisle have done so), but a willingness to accept less and expect less from students who are learning English while learning in English communicates a lack of faith in their ability.

Of course, this doesn't mean ignoring the needs of students by wrapping ourselves in a cloak of "high standards for all." It does mean approaching academic discourse in our classrooms with the same precision that we devote to the content. We have written this book to describe the framework we use in our own teaching to foster the kind of talk that leads to the development of academic learning necessary for students to succeed:

• Planning for purposeful talk by incorporating standards; establishing a clear purpose; and identifying learning, language, and social objectives for lessons
• Creating an environment that encourages academic discourse, including the physical room arrangement, teaching the routines of talk, and scaffolding language
• Managing the academic discourse through grouping and collaborative activities that increase confidence and provide students with ways to consolidate learning with peers
• Assessing academic language development using practical tools for monitoring progress and identifying areas of need

We hope you find this framework useful in your own practice. Our task as educators is a huge one: to meet the diverse needs of learners, adhere to high expectations, and develop our students' sense of self as productive and valued citizens. To us, it all comes back to language. When we equip our learners with the tools to explain, inquire, question, dispute, and elaborate, we realize each of these missions.