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April 2018 | Volume 75 | Number 7 Learning to Write, Writing to Learn Pages 44-52
Tasha Tropp Laman and Amy Seely Flint
To develop as writers, multilingual students must have opportunities for authentic expression.
When we walk into Nancy's 2nd grade classroom in Columbia, South Carolina, there are labels and signs posted around the room in Chinese, Spanish, and Urdu.1 During morning meeting, the children sing a song in Hindi. And when it is writing time, we observe a student crafting a letter in Japanese to her grandparents, while other children speak Arabic, Spanish, and Korean as they write with tablemates.
According the National Center for Education Statistics (2017), there are 9.4 million English language learners in U.S. public schools, up from 9.1 million in 2004. With this increase, there is a high probability that many teachers in classrooms today have students for whom English is not a first language.
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