TEACHING FOR DIVERSITY:
ADDRESSING DIVERSITY ISSUES IN RESPONSIVE ESL INSTRUCTION
By
Jing Fu

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education – Doctor of Philosophy

2013

	
  

	
  
ABSTRACT
TEACHING FOR DIVERSITY:
ADDRESSING DIVERSITY ISSUES IN RESPONSIVE ESL INSTRUCTION
By
Jing Fu
Student diversity has become a typical phenomenon in American public schools. The
impact of increasing diversity on literacy instruction is unchallenged. Teachers reinforce this
message by often citing ESL student diversity as a barrier for literacy teaching. In order to
better understand the complexity of diversity issues, I explored two ESL teachers’
perspectives on how student diversity figures in literacy instruction in an elementary ESL
class, and the extent to which interventions both teachers received help them teach literacy to
ESL students with diverse backgrounds. I analyzed how they conducted responsive literacy
instruction based on their understanding of diversity issues.
Both teachers’ explorations of diversity issues are in many ways unique to their
personal and professional experiences. Their personal and professional experiences with ESL
learners, immigrants and other foreigners register their understanding of ESL student
diversity: caring, sensitivity to diversity, and intention to use student diversity as teaching
resources. Their preliminary explorations of diversity issues in this particular school started
with the ESL Student Language Proficiency Plan, the guidance of the required language and
literacy policies, and critical reviews of the changing demographics of ESL students, coupled
with their multicultural and ESL teaching experiences. However, their first impressions were
often at odds with the reality of ESL student diversity. They were also confused by the
diversity that they themselves brought into the multicultural settings. They did not receive
any assistance for addressing their confusion. Accordingly, when exploring diversity-related
issues and teaching in response to diversity, both teachers felt they had to purposefully ignore
their own diversity.

	
  
This study identified three categories of student diversity that impacted ESL teachers’
design and enactment of responsive literacy practices: intercultural diversity, intracultural
diversity and human variability. ESL students’ culture-oriented diversity played a decisive
part in their enforcement of multicultural awareness at the school level, in selecting teaching
materials, and setting up ESL learning goals and interpreting mistakes. Culture-oriented
diversity of ESL students from a particular ethnic group is necessary to help teachers design
responsive activities especially when teachers had limited knowledge of ESL students’
backgrounds, but was an insufficient condition for providing opportunities for effective ESL
students’ learning. Cross-culture diversity such as socio-economic power could significantly
moderate or even counteract cultural control. Students from the same ethnic group sometime
might demonstrate similar learning styles, but they were not necessarily the best ways for
them to learn. Understanding diversity issues only with cultural insights might lead teachers
to overestimate the power of culture on ESL learning. Additionally, when applying the
research-based strategies to classroom instruction, both teachers cautiously took human
variability into consideration, and demonstrated that effective instruction should be not only
linguistically and culturally responsive but also individually responsive. Therefore,
responsive ESL instruction calls for us to look beyond ESL students’ cultural and linguistic
diversity and draw upon students’ individual funds of knowledge.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Finishing this dissertation is impossible without the support of several people. I would
first express my sincere gratitude to the two teachers who graciously allowed me to join their
ESL classes and to get access to their professional lives, and invited me to their family
dinners. Although having an outsider sitting in the class was disruptive enough, they always
tried to build an “inclusive” environment for me to explore diversity issues, and made me feel
welcome in their classroom. My work on this dissertation was so much easier because of
their honesty and generosity of sharing. I hope this study honors their commitment to
responsive ESL literacy education.
I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Cheryl Rosaen, for her excellence of guidance,
caring, patience and generous advising during the writing of this dissertation and over the
years of my doctoral study. She is the finest of mentor who is capable of using powerful
intelligence to help me find my own ideas and push me beyond my limits. I am also grateful
for the members of my dissertation committee: Dr. Susan Florio-Ruane, Dr. Marilyn Wilson,
Dr. Susan Melnick and Dr. Jeff Bale. I will always be grateful to Dr. Susan Florio-Ruane,
who opens my eyes with sociocultural studies and makes me find out the power of “making
familiar things strange” in educational research. Dr. Marilyn Wilson helps and directs me to
understand the political nature of language and literacy education. Dr. Susan Melnick
enlightens me with theories of teacher identity and teacher learning. Dr. Jeff Bale suggests
important readings about ESL education.
Doctoral studies at Michigan State help me make great friends. I would like to thank
Ann Lawrence who is always the first one coming to show her support and encouragement
whenever I need help. She is the finest scholar and writer that I have known and the dearest
friend that I ever met. Without Ann’s generosity of sharing time, critical feedback and
writing tips, I would not possibly pass comprehensive exam, improve writing skills, or even
iv	
  

	
  
finding out my real research interests. Weekly meetings with Jackie Sweeney recharge my
energy. She always generously shares ideas from the perspective of critical theorist, and
teaches me how to become a good mom. I also feel thankful for the following colleagues who
contribute to my professional growth as a multicultural scholar: Marj Terpestra, Jeff Rozelle,
Erik Byker, Akesha Horton, Nicole Martin and Rui Niu. It is them who make this academic
journey so enjoyable!
I owe a lot to my parents: Shanming Fu and Xiuzhen Wang, who long for this
achievement to come true. They have shown me the true worth of hard work. Their
unwavering confidence in me, and unconditional love and support has shaped me to be the
person I am today. They gave me far more than I could have returned. A special thanks also
goes to my cousin, Ling Fu – the first “Dr. Fu” in our family – who inspired me with her
perseverance, enthusiasm and intelligence as an accomplished female physicist. I will spend
my career striving to emulate her. Most of all, I thank my husband, Xinliang Wang and my
three wonderful daughters, Michelle, Emma and Claire. Michelle, the apple of my eye, has
tolerated early mornings and Sundays when I rush to write. Thank you, Emma and Claire, for
listening to mom’s dissertation so patiently while mom is breastfeeding you. You all make
me become a stronger and better person. I am deeply indebted to my husband, Xinliang
Wang, who supports me in every possible way through the course of this long journey. I
could not have wanted to do this without your encouragement. Thank you for the countless
occasions when you dropped everything to read and provide critical and insightful feedback
on my work. Because you are by my side, my life is richer and I believe the best in our life is
yet to come!

v

	
  
TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................... ix
LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... x
CHAPTER 1
A HOLISTIC REVIEW OF DIVERSITY ISSUES IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS ........... 1
Introduction .....................................................................................................................1
Review of Literature ........................................................................................................3
Language, culture and second language development ...............................................3
Relationship between language and culture ...........................................................4
The influence of first language on second language development .........................7
Linguistic and cultural complexity in American public schools ...............................9
Linguistic and cultural diversity among ESL students .........................................10
Teacher homogeneity and ESL student diversity ..................................................15
Political nature of education for ESL students in the United States ........................19
The historical and political contexts for educating ESL students ........................20
Effects of policy on language instruction: teachers’ choices ...............................24
Theoretical Framework ................................................................................................28
Sociocultural theory ..................................................................................................29
Theorizing literacy instruction in a multicultural setting..........................................33
Theorizing teacher identity from a sociocultural perspective...................................35
Research Questions ......................................................................................................38
CHAPTER 2
METHODS AND CONTEXT ..........................................................................................41
Sketches of Participants and Setting ............................................................................41
Research site ............................................................................................................41
Pull-out-push-in ESL program in RCES .................................................................46
Participants ..............................................................................................................47
Deb ......................................................................................................................48
Kelly ....................................................................................................................49
Data Collection ...........................................................................................................51
Data Analysis .............................................................................................................56
Limitations of the Study: Incomplete Nature of Cultural Analysis ...........................59
CHAPTER 3
TEACHERS’ NUANCED DESCRIPTION OF DIVERSITY ISSUES ...........................62
Intercultural ESL Student Diversity and Literacy Discipline ......................................63
Home language(s) and dialect(s) ............................................................................63
Linguistic features of home languages ...................................................................66
Diverse academic experiences ................................................................................67
ESL learning experiences ....................................................................................68
Literacy learning experiences .............................................................................70
Diverse choices in daily life ..................................................................................72
vi

	
  
Intracultural Student Diversity and Literacy Disciplines ..........................................75
Imposed learning styles .........................................................................................75
Regional differences ..............................................................................................78
Human Variability ......................................................................................................81
Conclusion: Using ESL Students’ Diversity as Literacy Instruction Resources........83
CHAPTER 4
TOWARD EXPLORING THE COMPLEXITY OF DIVERSITY ISSUES ...................86
Starting Point of ESL Student Diversity Exploration ...................................................88
ESL student profile and language plan .....................................................................88
Guidance of educational policy .................................................................................91
Teachers’ critical reflection on ESL education .........................................................94
Teachers’ multicultural experience with ESL students.............................................96
Ongoing Exploration of Diversity Issues......................................................................99
Collaboration with ESL student parents .................................................................101
Learning from ESL students ...................................................................................105
Professional development opportunities.................................................................108
Personal readings ....................................................................................................111
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................114
CHAPTER 5
RESPONSIVE LITERACY INSTRUCTION IN ESL CLASS .....................................116
Basic Literacy Skills ...................................................................................................117
Using student book ................................................................................................118
Oral survey as routine activity ...............................................................................123
Scaffolding how to use language to learn ..............................................................128
Meaning Construction.................................................................................................131
Building the relationship between language and object ........................................131
Reconstructing meanings in American context .....................................................134
ESL Students’ Ownership Literacy ............................................................................138
Highlighting ESL students’ diversity ....................................................................139
Encouraging parents to take literacy ownership ....................................................141
Respecting ESL students’ own choices in literacy learning ..................................144
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................145
CHAPTER 6
RESPONSIVE LITERACY INSTRUCTION: TEACHING FOR DIVERSITY ...........148
Studying Diversity Issues: Lessons from In-Service ESL Teachers ..........................148
Embracing the complexity of diversity in ESL literacy instruction .......................148
Diagnosing intercultural and intracultural diversity and human variability ...........152
Possible Attempts: Preparing Teachers of Diversity Issues in Literacy Instruction...154
Judging ESL students’ literacy achievement ..........................................................156
Understanding literacy practices in the context of globalization............................159
Examining teacher accountability in education governance...................................161
Developing teacher identity in a multicultural setting............................................162
Final Thoughts: Teaching Literacy for Diversity .......................................................165
Confronting conventions of literacy education.......................................................165
Progressing toward teaching for diversity ..............................................................167
APPENDICES .................................................................................................................171
vii

	
  
APPENDIX A: First Interview ...................................................................................172
APPENDIX B: Second Interview...............................................................................174
APPENDIX C: Third Interview..................................................................................176
REFERENCES ...............................................................................................................178

viii

	
  

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Summary of Data Collection .............................................................................51
Table 2: Matrix of Data Collection ..................................................................................54

ix

	
  

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Semantic Triangle Adapted from Ogden and Richards (1927) ..........................5
Figure 2: Sociocultural Theory Adapted from Vygotsky (1976) ....................................31
Figure 3: Student Book Example: Clothes ....................................................................119
Figure 4: My Five Little Valentines: Page One ..............................................................120
Figure 5: My Five Little Valentines: Page Two .............................................................121
Figure 6: My Five Little Valentines: Page Three ...........................................................121
Figure 7: Snapshot of Online Lunch Menu at RCES .....................................................133

x

	
  
CHAPTER 1
A HOLISTIC REVIEW OF DIVERSITY ISSUES IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS
Introduction
Linguistic and cultural diversity among students has become a typical phenomenon in
American public schools (Flores-Gonzalez, 2005; National Clearinghouse for English
Language Acquisition, 2006; Genishi & Dyson, 2009; Suarez-Orozco, 2001). In 2008, the
overall number of English Language Learners (ELLs) aged five to seventeen increased 20.5
percent (National Center for Education Statistics, 2008). Researchers predict that in 2030,
approximately forty percent of students in American public schools will be those who come
from families speaking languages other than English (Crawford, 2000; Thomas & Collier,
2001). The impact of increasing numbers of ESL students on English language and literacy
instruction is unchallenged. Teachers reinforce this message by often citing ESL students’
linguistic and cultural diversity as a barrier for classroom teaching. More than 87 percent of
teachers in American public schools reported they received inadequate training in how to
teach ESL students (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002a). To prepare teachers for
working with a diverse student population, three primary lines of inquiry have emerged:
linguistic studies informing children’s second language acquisition and development
(Cummins, 1996; Freeman, 1998); educational studies analyzing specific cultural models and
learning needs of ESL students with specific cultural backgrounds (Genishi & Dyson, 2009;
Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 2000); and studies focusing on content-based English
language teaching and learning (Au, 1994, 1998; Fradd & Lee, 1999; Stoddart, Pinal &
Canaday, 2002).
Applied linguists emphasized children’s first language and culture in their second
language development, and suggested children’s proficiency in their first language is closely
related to their performance in learning a second language (Krashen, 1995; McLaughlin,

1

	
  
1984). Educators also pointed out that teachers must develop their understanding of the role of
the first language and culture in learning English as an additional language and in other
academic contents (Clair & Adger, 1999; Clair, 2000, Walqui, 1999), and improve their
ability to recognize how culture and language intersect with classroom participation (Antunez,
2002; Menken & Look, 2000). Educational researchers, especially multiculturalists,
accordingly advocated using culturally responsive pedagogy to develop a more collaborative,
culturally relevant, and democratic learning community for this group of students (Banks,
1996; Delpit, 1986; Landson-Billings, 1994). However, teachers’ own views of ESL students’
cultural and linguistic diversity are notably absent in research, even though they are the ones
expected to conduct culturally relevant teaching. In particular, researchers have paid little
attention to how ESL students’ linguistic and cultural diversity figures in teachers’ design and
enactment of academic content instruction. Furthermore, in a linguistically- and culturallydiverse classroom, teachers have to face challenges in teaching ESL students due to their
diverse linguistic and cultural needs and interests. It is surprising then that teachers’
understandings of the possible conflict and its influence on classroom instruction are rarely
explored in research.
Thus, although existing research offers a compelling case in favor of taking into
account ESL students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds in ways that will support their
learning English as a second language (ESL)1, we still have much to learn from teachers’
perspectives on this topic. That is, we need to know more about their views on ESL students’
cultural and linguistic diversity in academic content instruction. How do teachers understand
the expectations of the curriculum in terms of teaching diverse ESL students? How do they
define linguistic and cultural diversity? How do they design and enact their lessons and
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
1

I am using ESL because this is the term that my research participants and their
school use.
2

	
  
classroom activities based on their understanding of diversity? What preparation (if any) have
they had to better teach students with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds? In an
attempt to re-conceptualize and broaden our understanding of literacy instruction, I conducted
a study to explore, from two teachers’ perspectives, how linguistic and cultural diversity
figures in literacy instruction in elementary ESL classrooms. This dissertation will describe
my observations of this specific type of literacy instruction through the lens of ESL teachers’
interpretation of ESL curricula, their choices of teaching materials and other related artifacts,
adoption (and adjustment) of instructional strategies for literacy and the process of designing
literacy lessons for ESL students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
Review of Literature
I introduce the review of literature with an overview regarding the relationship
between language, culture, and second language development. I then review literature
focusing on linguistic and cultural complexity that reflects the current state of American
public schools, and this is followed by an examination of the political nature of education for
ESL students in the United States.
Language, culture and second language development
The relationship between language and culture is interdependent and inter-influential.
In a community where people speak the same language, there is linguistic evidence that
language and its use in daily conversation or other contexts constricts the development of
existing culture; that in turn complicates and constrains people’s communication through (oral
or written) language as a medium (Kaplan, 1966; Lakoff & Johnson, 2003; Ogden & Richards,
1927; Whorf, 1940). Indeed, as I will discuss below in more detail, the complex relationship
between language and culture, and the incompatibility among different languages and cultures,
become a visible barrier when people communicate in a second language, especially when
people attempt to learn a second language or teach in a second language. In spite of this, there

3

	
  
is little published research targeting children’s second language learning in a culturally and
linguistically diverse setting. Existing research has focused on children’s second language
acquisition and development in general (Cummins, 1996; Freeman, 1998), analyzing cultural
models and learning needs of ESL students from a specific cultural background (SuarezOrozco & Suarez-Orozco, 2000), and identifying ways to support children’s English language
development, especially in terms of their academic language (Bunch, 2006; Huang & Morgan,
2003; Scarcella, 2003; Schleppegrell, Achugar, & Oteiza, 2004). ESL students’ English
language and literacy development is implicated in each of these areas, although few studies
attempted to investigate how teachers understand and address the complexity of language and
culture or how they help ESL students overcome language barriers related to the constraints of
culture on their second language development in a multicultural setting.
Relationship between language and culture
Odgen and Richards (1927) developed the “Semantic Triangle” model (see Figure 1)
to illustrate the indirect relationship between Symbol (or Language) and Referent (or Object)
and concept (or thought). The semantic triangle is “a simple model in which the three factors,
Symbol, Concept and Referent, involved with the statement or idea are placed in the corners
and the relationships between them are represented by the sides” (Ogden & Richards, 1927,
p.10). Symbol, Concept, and Referent are elements situated in the triangle as shown in Figure
1, and “the relationship between the Symbol and the Referent is purely indirect in that it is an
arbitrary relationship created by someone who wishes the Symbol to represent the Referent
(Thought/Concept/World Experience)” (Ogden & Richards, 1927, p. 11). For example, in
Figure 1, the word “literacy” is a Symbol. When attempting to refer to something as “literacy”,
people may first think about what “literacy” means to them or rely on their prior experience of
“literacy.” Through the mental process, people may then match the Symbol “literacy” with the
Referent. As illustrated by Odgen and Richards, the Symbol “literacy” is associated in both

4

	
  
speaker’s and listener’s minds as a particular object. During the process of communication, it
is quite possible for people to use the same symbol (the word “literacy”) to indicate different
Referents (the object “literacy”) and vice versa. It is the “Thought/Concept/World
Experience” at the top of the Triangle that results in the differences. Due to people’s different
experiences of the real world, Symbols (or words) are granted additional meanings, which
become invisible when people communicate with each other. Accordingly, certain meanings
of the word may disappear when the speaker tries to talk with the listener through language.
Or, it is quite possible that the listener may interpret more information from the word than the
speaker planned to convey. The worst scenario is when the listener and the speaker have
different thoughts and world experiences with the Referent, but they still use the same Symbol
to indicate the Referent. Invisible miscommunication might then occur between the speaker
and the listener.
Thought/Concept/World Experience
Experience

Referent (Object “literacy”)

Symbol (Word “literacy”)

Figure 1. Semantic Triangle adapted from Ogden and Richards (1927).
Linguists further argue that culture is among the core factors that shape thoughts and
world experiences. Believing in linguistic relativism, Sapir (1929) first explained the interrelationship among language, thoughts and culture. Sapir (1929, p. 209) argued that culture
determines language, which in turn restricts people’s thoughts and behaviors:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of
social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the
particular language which has become the medium of expression in their society. It is

5

	
  
quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of
language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific
problems of communication or reflection: The fact of the matter is that the ‘real
world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.
No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the
same social reality. The words in which different societies live are distinct words, not
merely the same word with different labels attached...Even comparatively simple acts
of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words
than we might suppose...We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we
do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of
interpretation.
According to Sapir, human beings are unaware of the connection among language and
culture and are affected by the connection without choice. Whorf (1956), the student of Sapir,
suggested that language strengthens culture through semantics, syntax and vocabulary, and at
the same time determines people’s interpretation of world reality. In support of their
hypothesis, Sapir and Whorf investigated the differences between several languages from
syntactic and vocabulary perspectives. For example, they compared the vocabulary related to
snow in the Inuit and Aztec languages, and found only one word in Aztec used for snow
while Inuit had an unusually large vocabulary for referring to snow. Comparing Hopi with
English, Whorf found that tense was seldom used in the Hopi language and suggested that
time may not be regarded as one of the dimensions of the real world in Hopi. The differences
in tense use may cause communication barriers between spoken Hopi and English (Whorf,
1940).
In sum, when communicating in the same language, people may rely on their
respective world experiences to process language. Information might be misinterpreted due to
6

	
  
the characteristics of a particular language, and miscommunications among people
accordingly appear. Language is further constrained by the culture in which the language is
used, and people develop different habits and preferences for using language in their
respective cultures. Therefore, there is reason to believe that different interpretations and uses
of language may lead to miscommunication among people in the same culture or those who
speak different languages. However, previous studies of second language learning and
teaching paid little attention to the limits of language use in instruction and the possibly
inaccurate information that teachers pass to students through language, especially when
teachers are confronted with a group of students with diverse habits of language use. This
study will examine teachers’ perspectives on using English as a medium to teach literacy in a
multicultural setting, and aims to extend the literature with its focus on the extent to which
teachers consider language and culture as barriers or constraints for communication when
designing and delivering literacy knowledge in English to ESL students.
The Influence of first language on second language development.
Applied linguists have also demonstrated the influence of learners’ native culture and
first language on their second language development. Influenced by the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis, Kaplan first transferred the traditional theory from the broader area of second
language learning into the specific application of writing development in a second language
(González, Chen, & Sanchez, 2001). Kaplan (1966, 1972, 1987) suggested that people from
different linguistic and cultural backgrounds organize discourse differently, as a reflection of
their first language and native culture. Other applied linguists have also suggested that
people’s native culture exerts an influence on their values, behaviors, learning and use of a
second language (Hing, 1993; Qi, 1998; Wang, 1994; Yu, 1996).
For example, in a study about Chinese students’ writings in English as a Foreign
Language (EFL), Matalene (1985) supported Kaplan’s (1966) observation of second

7

	
  
language learners’ different rhetorical structure preferences across cultures, and found that
most of her Chinese students’ EFL persuasive essays, as well as the ‘‘arguments’’ in the
Chinese–English newspaper China Daily, offered assertions rather than proofs. Chinese EFL
students’ argumentative essays followed a standard pattern: ‘‘an opening description of a
specific incident, a look back at the usually unfortunate history of the issue or practice, an
explanation of the current much improved state of affairs and a concluding moral
exhortation’’ (Matalene, 1985, p. 800). In a study of Chinese ESL writing, Alptekin (1988)
identified some rhetorical patterns in their expository compositions: a non-linear rhetorical
organization, complementary propositions with Yin-Yang attributes, analogies, and a global
perspective of the topic as an essentially indivisible entity. In a case study, Cai (1999)
focused on Chinese ESL learners who took undergraduate English composition courses in the
United States, and investigated their ESL writing portfolios. Cai’s findings concurred with
Kaplan’s claim that Chinese EFL writing was influenced by the eight-legged essay structure.
He suggested that this structure, qi (beginning) –cheng (transition) –zhuan (turning) –he
(synthesis) –jie (end), instead of the typical American topic-support organization,
characterized Chinese EFL students’ paragraphs across all essays.
Studies comparing argumentative writings in English by Chinese EFL students and
English-speaking students in the United States further disclosed that cultural differences led
to different rhetorical patterns (Benson & Heidish, 1995; Cahill, 2003; Connor, 2001; Grabe
& Kaplan, 1989, 1996; Kaplan, 2001; Kirkpatrick, 1997, 2002; Liu, 1990; Taylor & Chen,
1991). For example, Taylor and Chen (1991) detected differences between Chinese ESL and
American writers in the field of science, and suggested the salient difference was that
American scientists showed a preference for elaborated structures while Chinese scientists
tended to omit a summary of the literature and preferred a simple, unelaborated pattern. It is
obvious that language learning cannot avoid the influence from one’s culture. Indeed, culture

8

	
  
of ESL students’ first languages exerted influences on not only ESL students’ understanding
of the world but also the rhetorical expressions when they use English for academic purposes.
The studies discussed above demonstrate that one’s native culture and first language
exerted great influence on second language development and the ways that learners use a
second language. Accordingly, in a multicultural ESL class, teachers are faced with a variety
of ways of students’ learning and developing literacy skills in English. In addition, students,
including ESL students, construct sophisticated and effective language learning strategies
through interaction with their peers (especially mature learners) in a particular context (Lave
& Wenger, 1994; Vygotsky, 1979; Wertsch, 1985). Simply imposing second language
acquisition theories, teaching strategies and materials on teachers may not necessarily lead to
effective instruction or plausible student performances (Freeman, 2006; Johnson &
Golombek, 2003). Therefore, in-service ESL teachers are expected to continually reassess
ESL students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds while dealing with possible
miscommunications during the instruction process. It is surprising then that ESL students’
cultural and linguistic diversity in ESL classrooms is not well understood. Previous research
has seldom paid attention to how these different learning habits in a multilingual and
multicultural classroom influence teachers’ literacy instruction, and how teachers have
attempted to develop a collaborative learning community based on those diverse learning
habits. This study will reveal culture-related complexity in ESL teaching by underscoring the
diverse first languages and cultures that ESL students bring into ESL classrooms, and
examining them as potential barriers or opportunities for teachers to use in developing an
effective and collaborative community for the learning of English language and literacy.
Linguistic and cultural complexity in American public schools
Applied linguists offer a convincing argument in favor of focusing on children’s first
language and culture in their second language development, and suggest the children’s first

9

	
  
language proficiency is closely related to their performance in learning a second language
(Krashen, 1995; McLaughlin, 1984). Educational researchers, especially multiculturalists,
accordingly advocate culturally relevant teaching and culturally responsive pedagogy that
suggests the necessity of relating classroom practices to ESL students’ cultural and linguistic
backgrounds (Au, 1993; Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1995a). While existing literature offers
convincing arguments in favor of addressing students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds in
ESL instruction (Cummins, 1985; Delpit, 1988; Nieto, 1999, 2000), few empirical studies
have attempted to investigate teaching practices that are responsive to students’ diversity in
real elementary ESL classes. Indeed, linguistic and cultural complexity in American public
schools has mainly resulted from the increasing diversity among ESL students in terms of
their learning needs, cultural interests (e.g. religious beliefs) and potential conflicts (e.g.
Indian ESL students vs. Pakistani ESL students). However, previous studies concerning
education for ESL students focused on teaching practices in response to ESL students with
one specific cultural and linguistic background (i.e. Mexican ESL students) while neglecting
the complexity and the possible challenges in teaching ESL students from multiple cultures in
the same classroom. In addition, teaching in a multicultural setting representing a range of
cultures has become a normal phenomenon for American elementary teachers (Au, 1993;
Genishi & Dyson, 2009). A substantial body of educational research further presents a
compelling argument that the linguistic and cultural gap between teachers and ESL students
often results in instruction that may disadvantage and discourage minority students (Cohen,
1993, 1997; Hale, 1994), which thereafter exerts a negative impact on ESL students’
performance and undermines democracy in American education system (Agee, 2006; Gay,
2000; Landson-Billings, 1994).
Linguistic and cultural diversity among ESL students
The ESL student population has been changing rapidly in recent years. During the

10

	
  
school year of 2007-2008, ESL students’ enrollment in American K-12 schools increased
53.25 percent compared to that in 1997. The total ESL student population in 2003 amounted
to 5,318,164 (NCELA, 2010). There are more than 400 languages other than English spoken
by ESL students in U.S. schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2003). Although nearly 80
percent of ESL students who attended American schools are Spanish speakers, over 75
percent of school districts nationwide reported their ESL students came from more than one
language group other than English and Spanish. Seventeen percent reported that more than
ten languages were spoken among ESL students in their school districts (NCELA, 2007). The
educational setting in American public schools was further complicated by ESL students’
birthplaces and schooling history. Seventy-four percent of ESL students were reported to
have been born in the United States but spoke a language other than English at home. They
usually started their schooling of kindergarten and first grade in the United States (Batalova,
2006). The other 26 percent came to the United States and entered American schools at
different ages.
Intensive research on ESL students from specific ethnic groups (e.g. Yemenis,
Vietnamese, Chinese, Mexicans) has demonstrated that they had diverse learning preferences,
interests, and goals for learning English language and literacy. Although mostly having
difficulties in learning English language and literacy, ESL students need help in different
aspects of ESL to improve their language and literacy achievement in school (Espiritu, 2001;
Sarroub, 2000, 2001; Suarez-Orozco, 2004). For example, Asian Americans are usually
regarded as a model minority in American K-12 schools (Ng, Lee & Pak, 2007) while being
described as “intelligent but unintelligible” (Schmidt, 2000). They may do well in school, but
seldom communicate with teachers and peers because of the lack of language and cultural
knowledge about ways of communicating with teachers and other students. In an action
research study, Palmer et al. (2006) focused on the language and literacy learning of two

11

	
  
Chinese ESL students from second grade. The article first presented Chinese ESL students’
ways of literacy acquisition, such as re-reading for memorization and correct spelling. They
also found Chinese ESL students relied more on teachers (instead of parents) for modeling
reading regardless of their parents’ English proficiency and social status. They preferred
teacher-centered instruction and tended to learn more effectively when teachers gave them
explicit instruction and tasks to accomplish. In addition, when learning literacy, Chinese ESL
students were hesitant to share their views in public and would rather seek a small group as a
safe zone to discuss ideas and assignments. Palmer et al.’s study further suggested that
teachers should give the recognition of educational, cultural and linguistic differences for
Chinese ESL students the highest priority. Setting up cooperative groups for Chinese ESL
students was a necessity for their effective learning in school. Teachers’ additional support
beyond the classroom would not only contribute to improving the students’ learning but also
their better understanding of students’ learning needs.
Contrary to Chinese ESL students’ reluctance for expressing ideas through oral
language, research suggested storytelling was a traditional and powerful tool for Sudanese
youth to learn literacy. For example, Perry (2008) employed an ethnographic study to
demonstrate the importance of storytelling and narratives for orphaned Southern Sudanese
refugee youth in terms of their literacy learning, identity construction, and life adjustment in
the United States. The author found storytelling, as a tradition and tool that elders used to
pass on history and culture to the younger generations in Sudan, transformed “from an event
that happens in the local community to one that is shared with the global community” (p. 37).
Sudanese refugee youth used transformed storytelling to keep their Sudanese identity in the
local community and to become educated in the United States. The study suggested that
incorporating the stories of those refugee youth would provide global audiences with literacy
learning opportunities to better understand the Sudanese community. At the same time,

12

	
  
encouraging Sudanese youth to make use of their storytelling skills would “offer more
authentic learning opportunities for students and may motivate them to engage more deeply
in school literacy practices” (p.40).
Researchers also suggested the importance of literacy learning for ESL students’
achievement in school and their involvement in the local community, although ESL students
[and their parents] were stretched by a different conceptualizations of literacy in school and
the local community. For instance, Sarroub (2002) suggested that relating ESL students’
backgrounds with literacy teaching and learning in school was not only important for their
academic performance but also necessary for their after-school life in the local community.
The author investigated how Yemeni-American girls in high school used religious and
secular texts in school, at home and in the local community and how they negotiated social,
academic and cultural norms between their homes and schools. Sarroub (2002) interviewed
six Yemeni-American high school girls (who were born in the United States) and observed
their after-school life for two years. At the same time, she also interviewed 75 teachers who
taught in Arabic neighborhoods in Michigan. The findings showed Yemeni-American girls
used literacy as adaptation to both American and Yemeni norms, seeing it as a source of
power to be literate in both English and Arabic, and as a way to realize their state of grace as
a literate and religious person. However, literacy education in American schools challenged
Yemeni girls’ cultural traditions that privilege kinship ties within the community. For those
girls, knowing how to read academically in school did not mean being literate at home. They
were forced to adjust their literacy skills to fit the norms in the Arabic community, and to
organize behaviors and speech based on what they learned from the Qu’ran and other related
religious education. The study also suggested that Yemeni-American girls had to accomplish
academic goals and live up to and satisfy family (and community) responsibilities, while
neither their families nor teachers noticed their in-between struggle.

13

	
  
Bankston and Zhou’s (1995) case study on Vietnamese ESL students further
demonstrated the positive influences of children’s language and literacy development in their
first languages on their literacy development in English and academic achievements in other
subjects. In light of their study of 386 Vietnamese ESL students in New Orleans, the authors
suggested literacy development in Vietnamese helped this group of students gain access to
social capital at the community level, and realize cognitive transference at the individual
level. Other studies informing ESL students’ literacy learning characteristics also
demonstrated that ESL students had better comprehension and higher proficiency when
reading literature related to or similar to their cultural (or religious) backgrounds (Carrell,
1987; Droop & Verhoeven, 1998).
The aforementioned studies highlight different learning needs and preferences of ESL
students due to their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The studies recognize the
importance of including students’ cultural references in all aspects of literacy learning (e.g.
instructional strategies, teaching materials and parental involvement). Educators suggested
culturally responsive pedagogy and culturally relevant teaching that might contribute to ESL
students’ academic achievement, personal growth as well as heritage awareness (Banks,
2001; Gay & Howard, 2001; Landson-Billings, 1994). Teachers are expected to “construct
pedagogical practices in ways that are culturally relevant, racially affirming, and socially
meaningful for their students” (Howard, 2003). Significantly, existing research eschews the
view that teachers are confronted with ESL students with diverse learning needs, different
schooling and life experience in their home country. Teachers, especially ESL teachers, have
to teach a group of ESL students with diverse backgrounds at the same time. How to enact
culturally relevant teaching in a classroom full of ESL students with diverse cultural interests
and linguistic needs has seldom been addressed in previous studies. Very few studies have
examined how teachers choose teaching materials, develop instructional strategies, facilitate

14

	
  
communication, and reshape curriculum in response to ESL students’ diverse needs within a
classroom. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that possible conflicts do occur in
culturally- and linguistically-diverse classrooms due to differing cultural interests or religious
beliefs. This dissertation study attempts to extend the current literature informing literacy
instruction for diverse student populations and to document teachers’ perspectives regarding
a specific type of teaching by underscoring ESL teachers’ choices of literacy teaching
materials, instructional strategies, and facilitation of collaborative interaction in a
multicultural and multilingual setting.
Teacher homogeneity and ESL student diversity
Educational settings in the United States nowadays are characterized by teachers’
homogeneity and students’ diversity. As previously discussed, today’s student population is
increasingly diverse. In contrast to the increasing diversity among students in American
public schools, only ten percent of teachers in the teaching force are from ethnically-diverse
groups; the majority of in-service teachers are most likely to be white, middle-class, and
female. Research shows that both in-service and pre-service teachers generally hold negative
attitudes toward language diversity and ESL students (Byrnes, Kiger & Manning, 1997;
Garcia, 1990, 1996), feel unprepared for teaching linguistically- and culturally-diverse ESL
students (Berman et al., 1992; NCES, 2002a, 2002b; Nieto, 1992), and request extra help to
deal with cultural and linguistic complexity in class (Florio-Ruane, 2001; Sleeter, 2001).
Jiménez (1997) found that teachers’ knowledge base of literacy instruction for culturally and
linguistically diverse students was still in formative stages.
To help teachers teach ESL students with diverse backgrounds in a more effective
way, three lines of inquiry have emerged: studies informing basic and general constructs of
second language development regardless of students’ first language background (Clair &
Adger, 1999; Cummins, 1984), research on the learning styles and needs of students with

15

	
  
specific linguistic, cultural and schooling backgrounds (Antunez, 2002, Goodwin, 1997;
Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 1995, 2001), and instructional strategies of relating English
language and content-based learning with ESL students’ life experience (Banks, 1989; Gay,
2000; Lipman, 1995). Freeman and Freeman (2007) further synthesized the key factors that
lead to ESL students’ academic success: theme-based curricula that help ESL students build
up academic concepts, collaborative and scaffolding activities that relate to ESL students’
cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and confidence among ESL students that respect both
school and their own values. Nevertheless, research showed that teachers tended to impose
standardized education on all students regardless of their backgrounds in rural, suburban and
urban schools (Cuban, 1989a; Kliebard, 1986; Lee, 2004). To be more specific, teachers
usually judge ESL students’ behaviors by the mainstream (or dominant) culture in the United
States, while complaining about the uniqueness of the difficulties they encounter in schools
(Florio-Ruane, 2001), and assumed the culture that they themselves abide by overpowered
those that ESL students bring into schools. The interactions between ESL students and
teachers in school become more linear instead of dynamic (Cole, 1980): teachers
(unconsciously) deprived ESL students of their rights of including their own cultures in their
communication, and further expected them to behave in light of dominant culture accepted in
American society.
Previous studies comparing ESL students’ home cultures’ and schools’ norms showed
the discrepancies of expectations between ESL students’ parents and teachers. Teachers
tended to standardize education through forcing the students to follow school norms while
ignoring the norms accepted and applauded in ESL students’ families or local communities.
For example, Shultz, Florio and Erickson (1982) carried out a two-year ethnographic study in
Italian-American suburb, in an attempt to address factors in classroom organization that
confused Italian-American ESL students with distinctive communication traditions.

16

	
  
According to their observation of those ESL students’ communication in school and at home,
the authors found that a mismatch existed between teachers’ expectations of Italian-American
ESL students and their behaviors and knowledge of norms for appropriate behaviors in
school. In those ESL students’ families, multiple communications with different people at the
same time were allowed. In schools, teachers strictly controlled the sequence and time of
student participation, and considered interruption inappropriate and unacceptable in the
classroom. It is quite obvious that Italian-American ESL students’ social etiquette learned at
home failed to meet the expectations in school. The authors suggested teachers should
“understand more fully children's socialization into communicative traditions at home and in
school, traditions that may be mutually congruent or incongruent” (p. 91).
In another study focusing on Latino students, Suarez-Orozco (2000) also pointed out
parents hold different opinions concerning mainstream culture and norms in the United States
and these influence their children’s academic and life success. He categorized the culture into
two groups: expressive culture (i.e. realm of social values, patterns of interpersonal relations
and sense of self) and instrumental culture (i.e. skills, competencies and social behaviors
aiming to make a living). Teachers and ESL students’ parents expected ESL students to learn
a variety of both expressive and instrumental culture widely accepted the United States, and
finally realize their social mobility in the future.
Immigrant parents are very much aware that if their children are to thrive they must
acquire these skills. Indeed, immigration for many parents represents nothing more,
and nothing less, than the opportunity to offer children access to these skills…many
immigrant parents strongly resist a whole array of cultural models and social practices
in American youth culture that they consider highly undesirable. These include
cultural attitudes and behaviors that are anti-schooling ("school is boring") and antiauthority, the glorification of violence, and sexually precocious behaviors.

17

	
  
Both studies showed that ESL students’ habits and use of language at home differ
from those that were favored in school. However, teachers enacted standardized instruction
for all students regardless of their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. To make matters
worse, research showed that teachers tended to show negative attitudes toward language
diversity and held stereotyped views of ESL students. For example, in an empirical study,
Byrnes, Kiger and Manning (1997) investigated mainstream teachers’ attitudes toward
language diversity and ESL students with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The
study focused on five variables that are associated with teachers’ attitudes: experience with
linguistically diverse students, region of the country that they teach in, formal training in
second-language learning, graduate education, and grade level taught. One hundred ninetyone teachers from Arizona, Utah and Virginia participated in this study. The results showed
that most teachers (more than 64.87%) hold negative attitudes toward diversity that ESL
students brought to their class. Generally speaking, teachers’ attitudes toward language
diversity and ESL students varied significantly with the region in which those teachers taught,
their personal and professional experience with ESL students, and formal training they had
received about positive attitudes toward ESL students and language diversity. The authors
further indicated that teachers’ attitudes toward language diversity were relatively consistent
no matter what first languages ESL students spoke (e.g. Spanish, Vietnamese, Navajo or
Chinese). The findings suggested that teachers did not pay attention to language-minority
students as individual groups but to “multiculturalism more generally” (p. 641). Formal
training might contribute to reducing teachers’ negative attitudes and stereotypes of ESL
students. This study investigated how teachers viewed ESL students and the extent to which
they took into account the range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds present.
In addition to these two studies, there are other studies that illustrate this complexity:
Au’s research on communication in Hawaiian classrooms (Au, 1980), and Phillips’ work

18

	
  
with Warm Spring Indians (Philips, 1992). These views complicate the assumptions behind
teacher homogeneity and student diversity in public schools – although students came to
school with diverse cultural preference and norms, these studies suggest that teachers’
reaction to ESL students’ “inappropriateness” was quite similar especially when their
behaviors were contrary to teachers’ expectations and school norms. Yet it is of particular
interest that teachers at the center of these studies did not draw attention to the discrepancy in
terms of their view of ESL students’ diversity and their teaching choices. Certainly lack of
knowledge of students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds and preferences played a
profound role in teachers’ standardized instruction for a diverse group of ESL students, but it
seems unlikely that this was the only issue at play. This study aims to extend people’s
understanding of teachers’ views of ESL students’ diversity and their choices of instruction in
response to this diversity, an issue that has been neglected in current literature. This
dissertation will also focus on to what extent and how students’ diversity figures in teachers’
choices of teaching strategies, use of materials and development of classroom routines in a
multicultural classroom.
Political nature of education for ESL students in the United States
Linguistic studies provide a theoretical foundation for second language development
and a compelling argument for effective teaching practices (Kirshner & Whitson, 1997;
Pennycook, 1990, 2001; Toohey, 1998, 2000). However, educators have criticized linguistic
theorists for focusing exclusively on individual learners while ignoring the importance of
social contexts on language learning and teaching (Peirce, 1995a; Toohey, 1998; Willett,
1995). After the 1980s, researchers became more concerned with how second language
learners were situated in specific social, historical, and cultural contexts and how teachers
and learners resist or accept the positions those contexts offer them (Freeman & Johnson,
1998a; Horberger & Corson, 1997). On a school and classroom level, Lave and Wenger

19

	
  
(1991) suggested that social contexts might lead to unequal access to resources necessary for
success. From a macro-sociological perspective, educational systems are often structured in a
manner that handicaps attempts by disadvantaged groups to realize their democratic equality,
social efficiency, and social mobility through education, especially when they have different
interests than powerful groups that have control over the existing (educational) system
(Archer, 1978). Other educational scholars have reinforced the notion that schools perpetuate
prevalent societal images of immigrants and minority groups through a hidden curriculum of
schooling that functions as a means of socializing immigrants to take on roles and positions
in society such as consumer, worker, and tenant (Auerbach, 1995; McGroarty, 1985;
Tollefson, 1989).
Previous studies informing ESL teachers’ instruction for ESL students focused more
on the influence of local, community or school-level factors while neglecting the power of
federal policies. Indeed, language and literacy education for ESL students has been closely
related to immigrant and language policies, which has been changing dramatically ever since
the beginning of the 20th century (i.e. “English Only” policy, bilingual education policy,
“Limited English Proficiency” policy). A careful macro-sociological review of national
policies of English language education contributes to an understanding of the context of
classroom practices for ESL students. It also offers a possible explanation for how federal
policies play a role to constrain or provide opportunities for teachers’ choices of language
and literacy practices in the current educational setting of the United States.
The historical and political context for educating ESL students
Widening the lens to explore the historical and social contexts of education for
linguistically and culturally diverse students in the United States invites consideration of
political forces on teaching English language and other academic contents for English
language learners (Graddol, 1999, 2006; Pennycook, 2001). A macro-sociological review of

20

	
  
English language education for linguistically and culturally diverse students contributes to
understanding the purpose, and position and development of language education in the
United States with respect to the changing national views on English as a second language,
ESL students’ home language, and the consequent ESL pedagogical preference. This review
will present the context of education for ESL students in United States today, and further
provide possible explanations informing the impact of ESL students’ diversity on ESL
education from historical and macro-sociological perspectives.
Before the 20th century, most immigrants to the U.S. came from Europe. The United
States did not have a national language policy. Local administration, including state
government, school districts, and schools, retained the rights of deciding language policy
based on the local reality and community needs. Local language choice was considered an
important symbol of democracy and decentralized governance. English did not dominate, but
it was widely used along with other languages such as German, Dutch and Swedish in the
United States at the same time (Crawford, 1995; Lawton, 2008). For example, in a Germany
community, church services were conducted in German, and some newspapers were written
in German as well. But, some local schools would employ English as an instructional
medium to teach German immigrants as well as other minority groups in this community.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the United States began experiencing
dramatically increased levels of immigration, becoming a melting pot with immigrants from
all parts of the world. As a result, language as a symbol of national unity and loyalty received
intensive attention from the government. The federal government thought linguistic and
cultural diversity would harm national unity (Anderson, 1990; Gonzalez, 1975; Paulston,
1978; Walsh, 1991). In order to strengthen national unity, the federal government adopted a
language and culture assimilation policy. This policy promoted the English language as well
as Anglo-Saxon values. English became one of the most important tools and medium to forge

21

	
  
similar social values in the United States (Leibowitz, 1971). The federal government started
promoting English as the only language for education in the United States by cutting minority
language funds for private and church-affiliated schools. Local schools accordingly accepted
English as the exclusive language of teaching and learning. Teachers were not allowed to
teach students in other languages. Both teachers and students would be punished if languages
other than English were used in school. For example, teachers would be fired and sent to
court if they communicated with the students in any other language than English (Cortes,
1986; Crawford, 1995). Immigrant students were expected to assimilate into the American
culture as much as possible, and their own cultures were disregarded in American schools
(Dewey, 1932).
In 1940, the National Act and its addenda reinforced the policy of language and
culture assimilation. This Act required new immigrants to have high English language
proficiency and English literacy skills if they wished to be naturalized in the United States.
Immigrants who intended to apply for American citizenship had to improve their English
language proficiency and pass a naturalization test in English. Consequently, immigrants
were deprived of their democratic rights of using their original language (Crawford, 1995;
Heath, 1976). Schools were required to impose English on ESL students and to alienate ESL
students from their native languages and cultural identities. Ideally language assimilation
leads to cultural assimilation; unfortunately, though, many non-native speakers who had
unequal access to cultural and social capital in the United States eventually ended up losing
their heritage language while still not being accepted by the mainstream culture (Gonzalez,
1975; Ogbu, 1978; Paulston, 1978).
In the1960s, with growing awareness of the proliferation of ESL students in schools
and the importance of improving the academic performance of all students (Bruner, 1960),
the federal government put forward the Bilingual Education Act of 1968. This Act allowed

22

	
  
immigrant students to receive education in two languages: English and their native language.
Before the 1980s, bilingual education had been narrowly regarded only as temporary services
for English language learners. The Bilingual Education Act of 1980 then started reexamining
the effectiveness of previous language policies such as the definition of limited English
proficiency and the duration of bilingual education. The ultimate goal of the Act was to
improve ESL students’ academic achievement in mainstream schooling instead of simply
offering temporary language services. The Bilingual Education Act of 1980 was established
based on the pedagogical idea that students could learn new knowledge faster in their first
language (Cummins, 1986; Krashen, 1982). The main purpose of using the students’ first
language(s) was to help the students build a solid foundation of literacy skills in English, and
ultimately to prepare ESL students for mainstream schooling. Once students were evaluated
as having achieved the required English proficiency, the instruction in their first language
would cease.
In 2002, the English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement and Academic
Achievement Act took the place of the Bilingual Education Act of 1980. At the same time,
the federal office in charge of English policy changed its name to The Office of English
Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited
English Proficient Students (OELA). Title III (Language Instruction for Limited English
Proficient and Immigrant Students) is currently the federal guideline for ESL instruction in
American public schools. This policy aimed to improve ESL students’ language proficiency
first, and eventually to improve their overall academic achievement. However, the Act shifted
the emphasis to local accountability: the federal government granted funding to the state,
while the state and local school districts were expected to develop programs that would lead
to the most effective learning progress for local ESL students and result in their proficient
progress on national and local standardized tests (Beykont, 2002; Menken & Holmes, 2000;

23

	
  
Rice & Walsh, 1996). Local schools have more freedom to choose programs that work the
best for ESL students. In other words, the culture of the school and its policy guided (and
sometime determined) ESL teaching practices.
Through the macro-sociological lens of education for immigrant students in the United
States, one can understand the foundation and context of a particular ESL instruction model.
To be more specific, the historical review of education (or services) for ESL students
discloses the political nature of language education in the United States, and its influence on
ESL program structures, pedagogical preferences, and the status of American dominant
culture as well as immigrants’ first language and their own culture in language and literacy
education. The historical review also indicated that only powerful members of society (e.g.
policy makers, administrators) controlled the modification of educational systems as far as
educational input, process and goals were concerned (Archer, 1979; Kjaer, 2004). However,
today’s English language policy seemingly grants district and school administrators with
more freedom for designing ESL programs in response to local needs. Examining ESL and
literacy instruction under the decentralized language education system will showcase how
federal policy was adapted into local governance and met with learning and teaching needs in
multicultural educational settings. Through the lens of ELL practices in a particular school
culture, we can also see how the culture and policy of local schools impact ESL teachers’
design and implementation of responsive instruction. In sum, my study, focusing on teachers’
choices regarding language and literacy instruction under the guidance of federal policies,
examined, from teachers’ own perspectives, their accountability in adapting the policies into
classroom practices.
Effects of policy on language instruction: teachers’ choices
The importance of federal, state, local, and individual schools’ policies on teachers’
choices for classroom instruction have received intensive attention from educational

24

	
  
researchers in recent years. The effects of policies on effective teaching and learning go
almost unchallenged. Policies are the central component of nearly every school reform, and
have been central for understanding teaching and learning activities in classrooms. No one
doubts the guiding roles that policies play in classroom instruction. Teachers reinforce this
message, often citing school policy as the most influential factor informing the relationship
between teachers and students (Barth, 1984; Phillips, 1996), beliefs about teaching
(Richardson, 2001), and construction of professional identity (Gee, 2000; Sfard & Prusak,
2005). However, expecting teachers to satisfy all expectations and requirements of federal,
state and school policies is unrealistic (Daniels, Holst, Lunt & Johansen, 1996; Lampert,
1985). Indeed, while researchers present compelling arguments in favor of the guiding role of
policies in classroom instruction (Agee, 2006; Archer, 1978; Kjaer, 2004), a substantial body
of research also offers persuasive evidence that teachers taught classes based on their own
perception of effective teaching, even when sometimes the practices they used might not
meet with the requirements of existing educational policies or school expectations.
Researchers also suggest that teachers tend to develop hybrid practices based on their own
sense of effective practices and required policies (Florio-Ruane, 2002; Kersten & Pardo,
2007; Tyack and Cuban, 1995).
For example, in one case study, Salazar (2008) investigated the effects of school
district language policies on humanizing practices, through which students’ linguistic and
cultural resources are validated, as essential for the development of academic resiliency. The
school district policy focused on the linguistic aspects of ESL education. ESL teachers were
expected to devote effort to improving ESL students’ language proficiency, helping them use
appropriate language in communication, and learn content knowledge in English. The
researcher found district policy prevented ESL teachers from enacting humanizing practices
in classrooms, and teachers seldom questioned the drawbacks of the policy that ignored the

25

	
  
students’ native language and cultural knowledge on purpose. Also employing a multi-case
study, Achinstein, Ogawa, and Speiglman (2004) researched the development of ten
beginning literacy teachers’ views and pedagogical practices in response to school district
policies designed on the basis of state and national pressure over scores of standardized tests.
They found literacy teachers working in a low socio-economic school district tended to offer
more teacher-centered, scripted instruction. While teaching in a high-capital school district
with relatively less minority students, the other group of literacy teachers developed different
views of teaching. They responded more proactively and critically toward district policies,
socializing into more student-centered literacy practices by creating a more dialogical
learning discourse for students. Both studies confirmed that district and school policies
played a guiding (or a determinant) role on teachers’ choices of language and literacy
instructional strategies. When noticing the constraints of current policy, teachers tended to
passively accept its guidance instead of seeking alternatives.
Other teachers recognized the drawbacks of current policies, and attempted to initiate
instruction based on their own perception of good teaching that, to certain degree, conflicted
with current policies. However, they were eventually persuaded to fulfill the policies with the
highest priority. Agee (2004) showed an example of African American students’ ignorance of
their culture due to the school’s promotion of American mainstream culture through the
professional growth of Tina, an African American female teacher, from her pre-service to
induction years. Relying on the constructivist methods and multi-cultural education learned
from the teacher preparation program, Tina tried to integrate English literature concerning
African American life or written by African American authors into the curriculum because
she thought it was a good way to help African American students better understand
themselves, and to help white students broaden their own views of literature and historical
issues. To her surprise, neither African American nor White students were interested in this

26

	
  
kind of literature, which was not tested in exams. Although the school administrators did not
display negative attitudes toward Tina’s changes, they did ask her to focus more on testoriented readings. In light of this African American literature teacher’s experience, it can be
seen that the teacher’s efforts to introduce African American culture to the students were not
welcomed by the students. Although the students were not interested in this kind of
knowledge, it did not necessarily mean that knowledge about African American culture or its
instruction was not important. Indeed, “overt and convert messages that devalue the culture,
heritage, and identity of minority students” is a crucial issue of contemporary education in the
United States (Huffman, 2001, p. 25). However, both schools and students urged the teacher
to revise her conception of good teaching for the sake of standardized tests.
Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) from other countries had struggles
similar to Tina’s. Duff and Uchida (1997) documented two EFL teachers’ struggles to teach
American culture to Japanese students in a Japanese private postsecondary school. The
authors aimed to find out how EFL teachers perceived their roles when teaching English and
American cultures to Japanese adult students. They focused on three areas: what pedagogies
they adopted during the process of teaching another culture, how those EFL teachers
maintained their own socio-cultural identities, and how they related their established beliefs
about American culture with their life experience in Japan. The authors indicated paradoxes
between teachers’ reflection on professional identities and their representations in EFL
classes, and the disconnection between their understanding of culture and their classroom
practices. The authors suggested the discrepancies arose from the requirement of EFL
curricula in Japan that expected teachers to stick to Japanese culture, and to negotiate their
socio-cultural identities to meet with the curriculum requirements. This study demonstrated
school policies interfered with teachers’ enactment of good teaching based on their own
perception, and further exhibited teachers’ vulnerability when confronted with the pressure of

27

	
  
policies.
These studies highlight the influences of policies on teachers’ choices of classroom
practices. Although federal, state and district policies are supposed to build up shared beliefs
and pass expectations to teachers, these studies also suggested that when public beliefs and
expectations (as represented in policies) conflicted with teachers’ own understanding of good
teaching, teachers tended to rely on their previous experience first. Yet it was of particular
interest that teachers did not fade into the shadows of policies. On the one hand, policies
determined what, how and by what means teachers teach in schools. On the other hand,
research suggested that teachers relied on their experiences and developed teaching practices
that they thought would work the best for the students. This dissertation study re-examines
these debates by underscoring teachers’ decision making regarding classroom instruction as it
occurred within a specific historical, social and political context. In addition, unlike other
educational policies, language policy targeting ESL students nowadays
(specifically/especially Title III) provides districts and schools with more freedom and rights
to develop their own language programs with an ultimate goal of satisfying the specific
learning needs of the local ESL student population. My focus on culture-complexity-related
ESL instruction will contribute to extending current literature on teachers’ accountability
through investigating how in-service ESL teachers enacted literacy instruction in ESL
classrooms to satisfy the learning needs of ESL students in local communities under the
guidance of federal and state policies, and how a particular ESL program model affords
opportunities for or constrains ESL literacy practices.
Theoretical Framework
Sociocultural theory orients most researchers’ conceptualization of literacy practices
in a multicultural setting (Au, 1993; Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Erickson, 1984; Gee, 1999;
Street, 1995). Understanding sociocultural theory is thus the first step in defining literacy

28

	
  
instruction in a multicultural setting. Therefore, in this section, I initially illustrate theories
that guide my understanding of literacy in a multicultural setting, and then discuss important
aspects of literacy instruction. Finally, from a sociocultural perspective, I theorize teacher
identity that provides a lens through which I can see how they learn to teach students with
diverse backgrounds. In this section, I present my conceptualization of literacy practices and
teacher identity by considering the following three questions: What does literacy instruction
mean in a multicultural setting? What roles do teachers undertake as they teach literacy to
ESL students with diverse backgrounds? And how do they understand the interventions they
undergo as they move through these social contexts?
Sociocultural theory
Sociocultural theory serves as a theoretical orientation of this study for understanding
literacy instruction in a multicultural setting. Vygostgy (1978) first developed sociocultural
theory to understand children’s cognitive development, and emphasized the forces of history,
culture and social context on human activities:
Learning awakens a variety of internal developmental processes that are able to
operate only when the child is interacting with people in his environment and with his
peers…. learning is not development; however, properly organized learning results in
mental development and sets in motion a variety of developmental processes that
would be impossible apart from learning. Thus learning is a necessary and universal
aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human,
psychological functions. (p. 90)
Although agreeing that humans’ cognitive abilities were biological in nature,
Vygostgy and his followers argued that cognitive development was fundamentally shaped
and mediated by activities that humans participated in (Cole, 1996; Hall, 1993; Kirshner &
Whitson, 1997; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Leont'ev, 1981; Wertsch, 1991). To be more specific,

29

	
  
Vygostgy suggested that human beings genetically inherit their elementary mental functions
from their birth parents, and reach their high-level cognitive development through culturally
mediated social interaction. Low-level mental function results in people’s impulse behaviors.
High-level mental function allows people to think, speak and act with self-awareness and in a
more complex manner. Vygotsky (1978) referred to the place that differentiated low-level
mental function from high-level cognitive development as Zone of Proximal Development
(ZPD). According to Vygotsky, ZPD is “the distance between the actual developmental level
as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as
determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more
capable peers” (p. 86). Through the ZPD, teachers can see what students have learned, what
they are achieving and what they are going to achieve academically and cognitively (see
Figure 2).
The Individual-Learner is shown at the bottom of the figure, to remind us of the
cognitive, cultural and historical backgrounds that students bring into the classroom. Learners’
cultural and language backgrounds and previous schooling experiences affect their future
academic development and achievement. As described in the literature review, ESL students
from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds have different learning preferences, levels of
cognitive development and skill bases. The next level of the figure highlights the Zone of
Proximal Development, and depicts how learning communities affect students, although their
academic success or failure is grounded in the skill bases and cognitive levels that they bring
into the learning community. Vygotsky believes that learning does not necessarily lead to
cognitive development, but only opens up the opportunity for learners’ development which
Vygotsky terms as “potential skill range as a result of social interaction.” The first area,
Individual Skill Range, has to do with a learner’s skill base and shows what s/he has learned.
The second area, the Zone of Proximal Development, is the buffering area between

30

	
  
“individual skill base” and “potential skill range as a result of interaction.” Locating the ZPD
is critical for teachers’ adoption of successful instructional strategies. To be more specific, in
the ZPD, teachers or other skilled learners may discover intersubjectivity (shared
understanding) with students, and then provide additional support for them to achieve new
tasks (or cognitive development) independently. Vygotsky and other sociocultural theorists
further suggest that instruction will be more effective if teachers are aware of learners’ skill
bases and the internal barriers that prevent learners from academic success (Cummins, 1986;
McLaren, 1989).

Figure 2. Sociocultural Theory Adapted from Vygotsky (1976).
The top area in Vygotsky’s framework deals with Social Interaction. He identifies
three key areas of social interaction: adult guidance, peer cooperation and the instructor.
Vygotsky indicates that learners’ interaction with adults (i.e. supervisors, mentors, and other
mature learners), collaboration with peers, and involvement in instruction affect their
cognitive development. Vygotsky and his followers (e.g. Smagorinsky & Lee, 1999)
demonstrate that shared activity in literacy learning is essentially democratic. It does not
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involve “a process of one-way appropriation,” they write, “but rather . . . a process of
multidirectional change over time. In such joint collaborative activity, teachers, students, and
even the nature of the task all change over time and are negotiated among interlocutors in
complex ways” (Smagorinsky & Lee, 1999, p. 5). Vygotsky hypothesizes that new forms of
understanding of language and literacy will not remove learners’ old forms. Instead, new
forms will complement old ones. Learners’ involvement in shared activities makes their
cognitive development and different forms of understanding possible. Many studies have
demonstrated that learners’ cultural backgrounds and the instructional interactions and shared
activities students experienced within the school and at home affected their academic
development and achievement (Gee, 1999; Johnson & Golombek, 2003; Kersten & Pardo,
2007; Smagorinsky & Lee, 1999), and that language and literacy instruction not only involves
“imparting knowledge about letters and sounds,” but also depends on areas such as literacy
curricula, community, family and society (Taylor, Anderson, Au & Raphael, 1999; p.7).
Educators with a sociocultural perspective toward classroom instruction are aware of the
effects of learning contexts, learners’ skills bases, and social interaction on the effectiveness
of teaching and learning, and seek to involve students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds as
they design classroom activities, select teaching materials, develop classroom routines, and
adjust curricula to satisfy students’ learning needs. In short, Vygotsky’s framework shows
how students’ backgrounds (or skill bases) and social interaction with peers and other mature
learners (e.g. teachers) affect their critical learning area, the Zone of Proximal Development.
He defines three areas of social interaction—adult guidance, peer collaboration, and
instructor—and proposes that mature (or adult) learners play significant roles in either
promoting or preventing learners’ cognitive development. Vygotsky argues that learners’
ZPDs are historically, culturally and socially situated. Successful teachers must create a
learning community that is built upon learners’ skill bases and where learners can interact

32

	
  
with their peers and expert learners.
In this dissertation, I use Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective to understand literacy
instruction in multicultural classrooms. These three levels serve as diverse instances where I
examine literacy instruction with emphases on learners’ backgrounds (or skill bases),
collaborative learning communities, and guided instruction from adults. The first level focuses
on what ESL students bring into literacy classes and how teachers understand the basis that
directs their design of effective teaching practices. The second level investigates what learning
opportunities teachers provided for students to realize their cognitive development. The third
level discusses how teachers initiated and guided social interaction in literacy education. Each
enjoys a prominent place in previous research literature, teacher education, and classroom
practices. The explanatory power of a sociocultural perspective on instruction enables ESL
and literacy teacher educators and researchers to move beyond simple description of
classroom instruction, and allows us to trace the inherent complexity of design and enactment
of those classroom practices and make visible what those practices ultimately lead to. By
capturing literacy instruction through a sociocultural lens, I am able to see the rich details of
how literacy instruction emerges out of and is constructed by both ESL teachers and ESL
students in a multicultural setting.
Theorizing literacy instruction in a multicultural setting
The basic domain of literacy concerns variation in knowledge of listening, speaking,
reading, writing and viewing that teachers impart to students in school. While we tend to talk
about literacy instruction as monolithic, the means that teachers use to pass literacy
knowledge to students are wide-ranging. Teachers build different discourses in classrooms,
witness a variety of students’ emergent literacy skills, and engage in a range of literacy
policies, each of which interact with their own previous personal and teaching experience and
with their current teaching context. From a sociocultural perspective, here too theories of

33

	
  
literacy serve to direct this study toward investigating important aspects of literacy instruction
for ESL students in American elementary schools that include policy (Cummins, 1986; Gee,
1999), school context (Au, 1993), negotiation of discourses (Erickson, 1984; Gee, 1992), and
meaning construction (Heath, 1982; Street, 1995). Below, I will describe those aspects that
may contribute to deep investigation of literacy instruction situated in a specific teaching
context, and the impacts of ESL students’ diversity on how teachers construct communities
for literacy learning and assist them with cognitive development.
My understanding of negotiation of discourses in literacy instruction starts with
Freire’s conceptualization of literacy. Freire (1978) defined literacy as an active phenomenon
that involved “read(ing) the word and the world,” and suggested that the power of literacy
could be witnessed not only through people’s skills of reading and writing but also through
their capacity of applying those skills to work and to develop their cultural identity. In terms
of literacy education in school, Erickson (1984) confirmed the power of literacy on shaping
students’ identity. He further pointed out the power negotiation in literacy education due to
different ideologies (or interests) in school and at home. Erickson (1984) suggested:
[Literacy], as knowledge and skill taught and learned in school, is not separable from
the concrete circumstances of its uses inside and outside, nor is it easily separable from
the situation of its acquisition in school as a social form and as a way of life. The
school can be seen as an arena of political negotiation that embodies individual and
group interests and ideologies. It is reasonable to expect that various kinds of literacies
might represent a variety of interests and be embedded in a variety of belief systems (p.
525).
Erickson associated literacy with ideology and ascertained the co-existence of a
variety of literacies in school. Gee’s (1992) notion of primary and secondary discourse
resembles Erickson’s argument and suggests that “literacy is the secondary use of language”
34

	
  
(p. 25). According to Gee, primary discourse refers to oral language that human beings
acquire from their primary culture. Secondary discourses extend the use of language in
primary discourse. However, it is quite possible that language use in secondary discourse(s)
may not be compatible with that in the primary discourse. Indeed, Gee argued that “all these
secondary discourses involve uses of language, either written, oral or both that go beyond our
primary discourse no matter what group we belong to” (Gee, 1992, p. 5). ESL students with
diverse backgrounds may have to rely on their primary discourse when failing to master
language use in secondary discourse. Within the secondary discourse or the school context,
literacy teachers should not only help the students develop basic literacy skills such as
listening, speaking, reading and writing, but also motivate the students “to use reading and
writing to construct meaning from printed text, in ways that meet the requirements of a
particular social context” (Au, 1993, p. 20). Therefore, how teachers help students to construct
meanings in schools is one of the most important aspects as well as ultimate goals of literacy
instruction (Smagorinsky & Lee, 1999). In other words, students’ mastery of language may
not necessarily lead to literacy proficiency, which also depends on their control and secondary
use of language to meet their needs in a particular context.
My employment of sociocultural perspectives takes me toward understanding what
secondary discourse ESL teachers attempt to build, how teachers negotiate the possible
conflicts originating from ESL students’ diverse primary discourses, what use of language is
considered requisite and appropriate in this secondary discourse, and whether and how
teachers help ESL students construct meanings in schools.
Theorizing teacher identity from a sociocultural perspective
Mead (1934) uses the term “self” to refer to the concept of identity, viewing “self” as a
social being and positing that “self” derives from “the process of experience and activity”
(p.135). Blumer (1996) suggests that, during the process of self-construction, a person

35

	
  
responds to things based on the meanings that arise from his social interaction with other
fellows. Indeed, a person modifies his interpretation of meanings and response to things
through “dealing with the things he encounters” (Blumer, 1996, p.21). Accordingly,
educational research demonstrates that teachers construct professional identity through their
understanding of teaching, social (including personal and professional) experience, and
interactions with others (Flores & Day, 2006; Taylor, 1989, 1994; Welmond, 2002; Wenger,
1998). As such, teacher identity cannot be defined as a circumscribed entity. Rather, in this
study, teacher identity refers to: 1) teachers’ understanding of their professional role as
teachers, that is, “the way in which individuals think about themselves as teachers —the
images they have of self-as-teacher” (Knowles, 1992, p.99); and 2) the ongoing and dynamic
process through which teachers modify their interpretations of teaching and adjust their
practice in response to the social, cultural and institutional changes. The definition of teacher
identity enables a more specific understanding of teacher roles. More than this, it opens a
fresh window through which we can see situated teaching practice.
Educators have demonstrated the rich potential of using teacher identity as an analytic
tool for research in education (Gee, 2000; Sfard & Prusak, 2005). Research on teachers’
understanding and development of professional identity affords opportunities for educators to
take an inquiring stance to investigate their teaching practices and gain insights that can
further help teachers advance the effectiveness of their teaching practices, and deal with
changes and implement new practices (Beijaard, Verloop & Vermunt, 2000; Briztman, 2003;
Darling-Hammond, 1996). Gee (2000) proposes four ways to analyze identity in a given
context: nature identity, institutional identity, discourse identity, and affinity identity.
According to Gee (2000), nature identity is biological, which a person has no control over;
institutional identity is assigned by authorities within institutions; discourse identity is not
“something one can achieve all by oneself,” but is mostly determined by “the discourse or

36

	
  
dialogue of other (rational) people” (p. 103). In other words, discourse identity also depends
on how other people in a given context interpret and interact with the person. Affinity identity
refers to “(one’s) allegiance is primarily to a set of common endeavors or practices and
secondarily to other people in terms of shared culture or traits” (p. 105), and affinity identity
“focus(es) on distinctive social practices that create and sustain group affiliations, rather than
on institutions or discourse/dialogue directly” (p.106). Therefore, examining teacher identity
can help address the question concerning “how identity is functioning for a specific person in
a given context or across a set of different contexts” (p. 101).
Building upon Gee’s work, Sfard and Prusak (2005) further suggested the operational
potential of using teacher identity as an analytic tool for research in teacher learning from a
socio-cultural perspective. Unlike Gee’s emphasis on the state of identity in a given context
(or across contexts), Sfard and Prusak focus on the discursive construction and reconstruction
of identity. They argue that identity is “man-made and as constantly created and recreated in
interactions between people” (p. 15), and is a “missing link in…the complex dialectic between
learning and its sociocultural context” (p.16). Equating identity construction to story telling
foregrounds the idea of using identity as analytic tool for educational research. Sfard and
Prusak (2005) posit that analyzing teachers’ narratives (or stories about themselves) may
address the following questions: “why do different individuals act differently in the same
situations? And why, differences notwithstanding, do different individuals' actions often
reveal a distinct family resemblance?” (p. 21). Though it is powerful to address ambiguity and
complexity of teacher experience (Bruner, 1990) and it allows teachers to reflect and
reconstruct their identity (Gill, 2001), narrative can only provide data from the teachers’
viewpoint (e.g., teachers’ own interpretation of their interaction with others). According to
Gee (2000), teacher’s discourse identity depends on others’ (rather than teachers’ own)

37

	
  
interpretation. Thus, narrative can be one of the analytic tools, and the tools that can help to
find out or generate others’ voices should be considered (e.g. interview and observation).
Moreover, Gee (2000) and Sfard and Prusak (2005) agree on the rich potential of
teacher identity as an analytic tool, but they focus on the state of identity or the process of
identity construction respectively. With the notion of teacher identity in relationship with
teachers’ understanding of their professional identity, and teacher’s interaction with others, I
suggest that only through analyzing both teacher identity in a given context and the process of
the discursive identity construction can we gain insight into how teachers learn to modify their
teaching in response to dynamics in a multicultural setting.
Research Questions
With reference to important aspects of literacy instructions in a multicultural setting, I
draw on sociocultural theory to approach my central question: To what extent and how does
English Language Learners’ linguistic and cultural diversity figure in literacy instruction in
ESL classrooms? I see this question as an inquiry into a specific type of literacy instruction by
underscoring the influence of ESL students’ multicultural backgrounds on teachers’
construction of a collaborative learning community for ESL students’ literacy development.
In the review of literacy theories from a sociocultural perspective, I have argued that
the effects of ESL students’ diversity on literacy instruction are not only about building new,
collaborative contexts but also about assisting ESL students to construct meanings in the new
discourse. My conceptualization of literacy instruction in a multicultural setting has convinced
me that understanding the effect of ESL students’ diversity on literacy practices requires
paying attention to how ESL teachers understand the diversity, what kind of secondary
discourse that they intend to develop, and how the strategies that teachers employ have the
potential to promote collaboration and meaning construction in the discourse. I have also
argued for the importance of examining the political and school contexts in which ESL

38

	
  
teachers exercise their agency in a particular school site. I consider this dual focus necessary
to unpack the complexity of the impact of ESL students’ linguistic and cultural diversity on
literacy instruction and as an important complement to previous studies, in the hope that ESL
classes in the elementary school could be a site of investigating the influences of ESL
students’ diversity on ESL teachers’ understandings and design of literacy instruction.
In general, this study is an in-depth examination of literacy instruction in ESL
classrooms that will ultimately benefit three groups. These groups include both pre-service
and in-service teachers who require better preparation for teaching ESL students with diverse
cultural and linguistic backgrounds and expect to develop their teaching repertoire in
multicultural settings, teacher educators who intend to develop more effective professional
programs to help teachers improve ESL programs and ESL literacy instruction, and policy
makers who commit themselves to developing a democratic and equal learning environment
for all students. Ultimately this study aims 1) to document a specific type of literacy
instruction in a culturally and linguistically diverse context; 2) to determine the relative
influence of students’ linguistic and cultural diversity on teachers’ perspectives about literacy
instruction in ESL classrooms, if any; and 3) to provide insights for teacher educators to
develop more effective professional development programs with a commitment to the
improvement of ESL education as well as developing a democratic and equal learning
environment for all students.
To accomplish those goals, I see the central question as an inquiry into a specific type
of literacy instruction through underscoring the influence of ESL students’ multicultural
backgrounds on teachers’ construction of a collaborative learning community for ESL
students’ literacy development. Four sets of sub-questions will be examined to address this
overarching question: To what extent and how does English Language Learners’ linguistic
and cultural diversity figure in literacy instruction in ESL class?

39

	
  
1. How do ESL teachers understand the ESL literacy curriculum in their district and what
is expected of them?
2. How do ESL teachers define linguistic and cultural diversity?
• What do they notice and try to learn about their students?
• What do they think their responsibilities are when teaching literacy to culturally and
linguistically diverse students?
• How do they plan for teaching of literacy to their students?
3. How do ESL teachers describe their lessons and classroom activities in response to their
understanding of ESL students’ linguistic and cultural diversity?
• What teaching strategies do ESL teachers adopt and why?
• What materials and resources do they use and why?
• What routines are used in the classroom to support literacy learning?
4. What preparation have the teachers had to teach ESL students?
• Formal preparation
• Professional development
• Other experiences
This dissertation is organized into six chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the methods and
context for the study. Chapters 3 – 5 present the findings of how ESL teachers describe
diversity and its nuances in ESL class, how they have been prepared to understand the
complexity of diversity issues in ESL class, and how they design and enact literacy and ESL
practices in response to student diversity. Chapter 6 discusses ESL teachers’ responsive
teaching practice, its implication in teacher education that should be further researched, and
the necessity of teaching literacy for diversity.

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CHAPTER 2
METHODS AND CONTEXT
This dissertation is designed as a case study of two experienced, in-service ESL
teachers’ literacy instruction in ESL pull-out-push-in programs in an elementary school
located in a university town in the Midwest. The case study design for education research has
the potential to produce richly detailed descriptions and analyses of teachers’ behaviors and
beliefs, teacher-learner interaction, and classroom practices in multilevel and multicultural
contexts (Gee, 1996).
I introduce this chapter with an overview regarding the research site, participants and
setting. I then describe the process of data collection, and data analysis that focus on the
process of generating themes for this study. Finally, I describe the limitations of the study as
arising from the incomplete nature of cultural analysis.
Sketches of Participants and Setting
I start this section by introducing the school that was selected as research site for this
study. As follows, I describe briefly the pull-out-push-in ESL program that RCES adopted.
Following that, I sketch the background information regarding the participants, along with
overviews of their teaching responsibilities.
Research site
Most research concerning multicultural literacy instruction focuses on teaching in
response to students with specific cultural or linguistic backgrounds while neglecting the
reality that teachers have to teach a group of students with diverse backgrounds—some of
which even conflict with each other—at the same time. What I am interested in is how ESL
teachers design and enact literacy teaching for a group of ESL students with diverse linguistic
habits, cultural interests and learning preferences, and what kind of collaborative learning
community ESL teachers attempt to build to help ESL students develop their literacy
41

	
  
competence. I wonder if one of the reasons that the extant research reports less productive
and superficial interaction might be due to limited opportunities for ESL teachers to intervene
given short class periods (usually thirty minutes per day) and large numbers of culturally- and
linguistically-diverse students and the constraints of the ESL program model itself. Also,
typical in-class collaborations are often restricted to classroom discussion or small projects
where task completion might take precedence over students’ engagement with or
coordination of different cultural interests and linguistic habits. Furthermore, I wonder how
teachers guide instruction and mediate collaboration in ESL classrooms when frequent
variation appears among ESL students, especially in terms of their cultural and linguistic
backgrounds. There is a precedent for research on the literacy learning of students from
diverse backgrounds to inform literacy teaching in a multicultural setting:
Because the school is a mainstream institution, instruction is carried out in ways
following mainstream standards for behavior and reflecting mainstream cultural
values. Students have difficulty learning in school because instruction does not follow
their community’s cultural values and standards for behavior (Au, 1998, p. 302).
By examining the possible effects of ESL students’ diversity on literacy instruction in
ESL classes, I hope to uncover how teachers incorporate different cultural values and
linguistic habits in literacy instruction, and further facilitate collaboration and interaction
among students and between teachers and students in a multicultural setting. Therefore, the
research site is also the object of my study. Accordingly, I selected the research site through
the following three steps. Watson-Gegeo (1988) identified three stages of data collection for
ethnographic research in ESL: comprehensive, topic-oriented, and hypothesis-oriented. In the
comprehensive stage, researchers work on “all theoretically salient aspects of setting…and
conduct a broad spectrum of observations” (Watson-Gegeo, 1988, p. 585). The topic-oriented
stage involves narrowing down the study topic within research interests through semi-

42

	
  
structured interviews, preliminary discourse analysis and topic-oriented observation of
interactions or events in a specific context. Based on the initial hypotheses generated from the
topic-oriented stage, ethnographers, in the hypothesis-oriented stage, further test those
hypotheses and address research questions with structured interviews, in-depth observation
and systematic discourse analysis.
I first started my site search in communities in southeastern part of a state in the
Midwest, due to the convenience of these locations and their diverse student populations. I
did not know any teachers or administrators from those schools in advance, and instead found
their contact information on websites of the respective school districts. After expressing my
research interests in ESL literacy education in multicultural settings through email, I received
warm responses from twenty-three school districts. Then, for the past three and half years
(2010-2013), I worked as a volunteer ESL teacher at the three elementary schools that
provided full-time ESL programs for ESL Students in three communities, and communicated
with district ESL coordinators and ESL teachers on a frequent basis. This process allowed me
to engage in a broad spectrum of observations, and therefore served as the comprehensive
stage that led me to propose my dissertation study. Specifically, I explored rhythms of school
activities, mapped the schools and settings of the ESL classrooms (Dyson & Genishi, 2005),
observed ESL teachers’ classroom teaching, interacted with ESL teachers and ESL students,
and collected official documents (e.g. ESL education policy) from school websites and
administrators. Although differing from each other in terms of ESL program structure,
staffing and demographics of ESL students, all teachers and school administrators suggested
that teaching students with diverse backgrounds is a challenge for schools, classroom and
ESL teachers, and shared their concerns regarding inadequate preparation for literacy
instruction in this newly emerging setting.

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This preliminary site search contributed to my dissertation study in three ways: 1)
familiarizing me with the schools’ contexts, especially the aspects which related to ESL
education in a multicultural setting; 2) clarifying my research interests and formulating
research questions; and 3) acquainting myself with the in-service ESL teachers, which was
useful for strategically selecting participants and research site for my dissertation study.
The preliminary search, along with my academic curiosity and research questions,
further refined my criteria for site selection, and suggested that the research site should have
a diverse ESL student population, provide full-time ESL programs, and employ full-time
ESL teachers for these programs. Therefore, I confined the potential research sites to three
schools in three different school districts. Then, I explored the possibility of conducting my
dissertation in those schools with ESL teachers and school districts respectively, and gained
access to two of them. Since this is a case study with an ultimate goal to document literacy
instruction that could exhibit teachers’ behaviors and beliefs and collaboration among ESL
students guided by mature learners in a multicultural context, I decided to work with River
Cloud Elementary School (RCES) in a city in the Midwestern U.S., which has offered fulltime ESL programs for more than ten years and has a larger, more diverse ESL student
population than other school districts. In the following section, I give a brief introduction to
RCES with a focus on ESL student demographics, ESL staffing, and ESL program structures.
Located next to a large university, RCES offers a number of services and programs to
support ESL students, the most important of which is its pull-out-push-in ESL classes mainly
offered by two full-time ESL teachers. Three part-time parallel professionals provide one-onone support for ESL students if both classroom and ESL teachers think it is necessary. ESL
Students in RCES amount to more than 25 percent of the whole student population. In 2010,
ESL students in RCES came from 56 countries. Among them, Chinese and Koreans occupied
the highest percentages. Since RCES is located in a university town, most ESL students are

44

	
  
the children of faculty, graduate students or staff working or studying at the university. ESL
students at RCES come from families with relatively higher cultural capital (Bourdieu &
Passeron, 1970). Most of their parents speak fluent English, although English is often not
their first language. Most ESL student students’ enrollment and length of study in RCES is
based on their parents’ affiliation with the university. For example, some parents came to the
United States for doctoral studies, and their children may stay at RCES for about four to five
years; some parents pursuing their Master’s degrees will stay only two or three years, and
some visiting scholars only stay in the U.S. for one semester, so their children have to leave
with them in the middle of the year. Therefore, the transient nature of ESL student
populations generally can be easily seen at RCES. This nature along with parents’ high
cultural capital affects the school culture of RCES. On the one hand, teachers and
administrators face the challenge to accommodate ESL students into (mainstream and ESL)
class anytime during the semester. On the other hand, ESL parents, most of whom hold
master’s or higher degrees, highly value education and admit the importance of parental
involvement in children’s schooling. In RCES, we can often see that parents of ESL students
assist teachers to lead and develop cultural activities, and they always respond to teachers’
feedback on their children promptly.
Obviously, the ESL student population at RCES demonstrates their diversity
especially in terms of cultural, linguistic and family backgrounds as well as schooling history.
From a socio-cultural perspective, they bring a wide range of knowledge bases into ESL
classes, which inevitably construct a multicultural setting that can showcase teachers’
understanding of ESL students’ diversity and the influence of diversity on ESL teachers’
designing literacy classes and developing guided, collaborative, interactive instruction.
In sum, my long-term involvement with RCES prepared me well with the knowledge
of this school’s ESL program structures. More importantly, the diverse ESL student

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population and the long history of full-time ESL programs at RCES provided a large amount
of information showcasing ESL literacy instruction responding to ESL students’ linguistic
and cultural diversity in a multicultural setting.
Pull-out-push-in ESL program in RCES
RCES constructs their ESL curriculum under the guidance of the state of Michigan’s
ESL curriculum, and employs the pull-out-push-in instruction model suggested by the
curriculum. Employing a pull-out-push-in model, Deb and Kelly pull ESL students out of
their mainstream classes for 30 minutes on a regular basis (usually once every the other day).
When needed or requested by mainstream classroom teachers, Deb and Kelly push
themselves in the mainstream class and work side-by-side with the ESL student with special
needs. Besides receiving ESL instruction from fulltime ESL teachers, ESL students can also
get help from part-time parallel teachers. Furthermore, ESL students are pulled out from the
regular class for 30 minutes for extensive ESL instruction in an ESL class. After that, the
students are sent back to the regular class. At least once a month, Deb and Kelly go into the
classroom (known as the “push in” feature of the program) and co-teach in the mainstream
classroom with the classroom teacher, offering academic support for ESL students in the
mainstream environment. Deb and Kelly are encouraged to offer help to mainstream teachers,
and to initiate connections with ESL student parents proactively by the school district. These
features of the ESL program in RCES are especially contributive to investigating social
interaction guided by Deb and Kelly for the following reasons: 1) the 30-mintute pull-out
session presents what the learning community looks like in an ESL literacy class through
lenses such as classroom routines, teaching materials, assignments and classroom activities;
and 2) the push-in session further discloses what extra assistance that ESL teachers suggest
that ESL students need outside ESL classes (or in other words, what could not be provided in
ESL classes), how ESL students’ diversity figures in ESL teachers’ decisions for offering

46

	
  
assistance in mainstream classes, how the influence of ESL students’ diversity on ESL
teachers’ teaching in mainstream classes differs from that in ESL classes, and why ESL
teachers choose to work one-on-one with some ESL students instead of others; and 3) the
collaboration between the two ESL teachers (compared with those who work independently)
provide additional channels to reveal their decision of literacy instruction in ESL classes.
Generally speaking, although Deb and Kelly chose the structure of pull-out-push-in at
their own will, they noticed some constraints of this model including limited ESL teaching
time, insistency of content and time conflicts with the mainstream class2.
Participants
Two full-time, in-service ESL teachers from RCES were selected to participate in this
study. In this study, I decided to work with two teachers because I was able to get more than
one perspective regarding ESL literacy teaching in a multicultural context. The low enough
number also allowed me to study teachers’ understanding of diversity issues and their
responding practices in depth. More importantly, the fact that the two ESL teachers worked
as a team in RCES influenced my decision on selecting them as participants of the study.
Through their collaboration and interaction, I was able to gain additional information
regarding their decisions on designing and enacting literacy lessons in ESL class. The
selection of participants was also based on the following criteria: 1) full-time in-service ESL
teachers (rather than parallel ESL teacher, reading specialist working with ESL students); 2)
the ESL student population in ESL classes is culturally and linguistically diverse; and 3) the
ESL teachers indicated a preliminary willingness to participate in this study voluntarily. In
this section, I provide brief sketches of the participants including family and educational

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
2

Sometimes ESL students could not be pulled out from the mainstream class as
scheduled because they did not finish tasks in the mainstream class.
47

	
  
background, teaching history, and responsibilities in RCES. These sketches were generated
from field notes, interviews and artifacts that I collected for this study.
Deb
Deb Clarkson (pseudonym), in her mid 60s, is a Caucasian female who grew up in a
middle-class family that highly valued diversity. For much of her life, she has been living in
neighborhoods full of people coming from all around the world; her parents always hosted an
annual diversity party in their house when Deb was a child. As Deb describes it, she
especially enjoyed life stories that their neighbors shared during the party. While
accompanying her husband who was a commander in the Army and had been moving on
active military duty, Deb offered all kinds of assistance to military wives who could not
speak English; she helped them to apply for their Social Security number, took them for
doctor appointments, taught them how to drive and so on. Very soon, however, Deb realized
that these service members and their wives would benefit more if the wives could master
English. With support of her husband, Deb started offering informal ESL training for these
military wives, and in her words, “to help them become more independent.” Despite her
success and enjoyment of teaching ESL (she initiated the first ESL class in the military base),
Deb initially gained seven endorsements and taught geography, forensics, public speaking,
literature and creative writing for middle and upper schools because of the higher possibility
of finding a job around different military bases. In1985, the summer following her husband’s
return to their hometown, Deb started two part-time jobs as an ESL teacher. She taught ESL
in a prestigious private elementary school, where most ESL students came from Japan. At
night, she worked with adult ESL learners who were mostly Vietnamese refugees. Two years
later, Deb decided to return to school, and gained her Master of Arts degree in TESOL from a
well-known university. Afterwards, Deb accepted the offer from RCES as the first full-time

48

	
  
ESL teacher in the school district. Since then, she has been working in RCES for more than
ten years.
Before Kelly, another full-time ESL teacher, was employed, Deb taught all levels of
ESL classes by herself. The ESL student population then “was not so diverse as it is now,”
and were mainly from South Korea and Japan. With the proliferation of ESL students, RCES
hired more ESL teachers and parallel teachers. Meanwhile, they asked Deb to take more
responsibilities: providing monthly workshops of ESL pedagogy for all ESL teachers in the
school district; leading workshops focused on teaching ESL students for teachers of all
subject matters in RCES at the beginning of each semester; initiating semi-semester meetings
regarding ESL policy and learning expectations with ESL student parents. Besides these
required responsibilities, Deb, collaborating with Kelly, proactively developed several
activities that aimed to arouse multicultural awareness at the school level. For instance, she
designed and organized annual culture festival through which all students had an opportunity
to show their heritage (e.g. music, clothes, and sometime food). Deb also launched a Morning
Ceremony, encouraging ESL students to share knowledge of their native language with
teachers and other students in RCES. Deb was described by those who worked with her as
very knowledgeable, deeply caring, open-minded, and highly reflective. Deb highly valued
all opportunities to explore and understand other cultures, and Kelly characterized Deb’s
strengths as building relationships with ESL students, especially newcomers. Deb proudly
proclaimed herself a “scientist and artist”, who teaches ESL students with “technical skills
like in science” and with “art that (she) finely tunes it to individuals, not just their culture”.
Kelly
Kelly Walker (pseudonym) is another full-time ESL teacher at RCES. Kelly is a
Caucasian female who grew up in a middle class family that highly valued education. Kelly’s
brothers and sisters are all teachers. Kelly entered college as an education major with interest

49

	
  
in language arts. She started her career as a kindergarten teacher, and had about 12 years of
experience of teaching kindergarteners. Though she enjoyed it, she did not see herself as
working with kindergarteners for a long career. A good experience on a church mission trip
of teaching ESL in Kosovo led to her interest to “learn other cultures, ways of learning, (and)
views of world.” Right after coming back to the United States, she involved herself in several
other church missions that focused on offering free ESL services for immigrants of all ages.
Kelly was amazed at “most of the time, how kids from other cultures who come to America
have a love learning.” She then decided to pursue her Master of Arts degree in TESOL
because she liked language teaching and because she enjoyed the opportunity “to teach
children who love to learn.” Kelly first started her job in RCES as a part-time kindergarten
teacher and part-time ESL teacher. One year later, Kelly applied for the full-time ESL teacher
position. Since then, she has been teaching as a full-time ESL teacher in RCES for about six
years. She remarked that other teachers in RCES were dwelling on “how impossible it is to
teach ESL students (content knowledge) when they cannot understand (the teacher)”. She, on
the other hand, was excited, feeling sure that teaching ESL students with diverse backgrounds
was harder than people thought, but was confident that she could handle challenges. Kelly
described teaching culturally diverse students as “jumping into a fish bowl.” Being “openminded, sensitive, and diplomatic” is the key to success. It is hard but possible to “finally
jump into the fish bowl after practices.”
Generally speaking, Deb and Kelly worked as a team. They together designed ESL
lesson plans, developed workshops for teachers of other subject matters and parents of ESL
students, and led multicultural activities. However, Deb and Kelly always split
responsibilities when it comes to two particular areas; Deb, as described by Kelly, has strong
linguistic knowledge of other languages, and therefore Deb is always the one who handle
newcomers who could not speak English; Kelly, on the other hand, is considered as a

50

	
  
technology expert, and mainly takes responsibility for designing and leading technologyassisted ESL classes. For example, when introducing vegetable to ESL students, Kelly
designed a Smartboard-assisted lesson, and led the class with the assistance of Deb. Both Deb
and Kelly found their collaboration is one of the most rewarding parts of their teaching career.
In this study, I present Deb and Kelly as a pair instead of report each individual teacher’s idea
because I feel they are very compatible in their beliefs due to their close working relationship.
After receiving permission from the MSU IRB and the Department of Teacher
Education, I pursued formal consent to participate from those ESL teachers at RCES, and
permission from the school districts for conducting my dissertation study in RCES.
Data Collection
I employed three data collection strategies: non-participant observation, semistructured interviews, and artifact collection. Generally speaking, the study is based mainly
on the following sets of data: 1) artifacts including the ESL curricula and related policies that
guide ESL teaching, professional development materials, and related literacy-learning and teaching materials and other references used in the ESL classrooms; 2) interviews with the
ESL teachers; 3) four-period observations in the ESL classes during the spring semester of
2011 (see Table 1). Table 1 presents the matrix of data that I will collect for the study.
Table 1
Summary of Data Collection
Observations
1. Literacy instruction in 1.
ESL classrooms
•
conducted by full-time •
ESL teachers in each
school site
•
• 2 periods of 1st graders; 2
periods of 3rd graders •
• 30 minutes/period
2.
•

Semi- Structured Interviews
ESL teachers (pre-interview)
Curricula
Understanding of cultural and
linguistic diversity
Descriptions of lesson plans and
classroom activities
Professional development
ESL teachers (post-interview)
Questions about observations and
preliminary pre-interview results

51

Artifacts
1. State/district/school ESL
curricula
2. ESL lesson and unit plans
3. ESL teaching materials
4. Support materials (e.g.
ESL resources on
district/school websites)
5. Observation field notes
6. Handouts

	
  
Interview data was collected from full-time ESL teachers before, during, and at the
end of the data collection period. After receiving permission from the MSU IRB to conduct
the study, I first interviewed the two ESL teachers before the classroom observations to
become familiar with their ESL class structures, teaching context and ESL and literacy
curriculum for the semester (see Appendix A: Interview: ESL Teacher). During the
observation, I explored teachers’ understanding of ESL student diversity through their
description of the ESL student population, their ESL teaching responsibilities, professional
development and so on. In the interviews concerning teachers’ descriptions of ESL curricula
and professional development, I actually looked at those documents with the teachers after
asking interview questions in a more general way. Throughout data collection, I had informal
conversations with the ESL teachers, with the option of formal interviews when it seemed
advantageous. I also conducted individual interviews at the end of the data collection period
to verify the preliminary results that I found about which aspects of the two ESL teachers
resemble and differ from each other in terms of literacy instruction responding to cultural and
linguistic diversity in ESL classrooms.
I observed and took field notes about literacy instruction in ESL classrooms to
identify, in action, how the teachers carried out their practice and compare it to what they
said about their practices. I also kept a journal to record my impressions of what happened
during each session and to reflect on the interactions. I made notes in my journal the same
day as I observed the ESL teachers teach 1st and 3rd graders. The observation data allowed me
to look for consistencies and discrepancies across what teachers did and said, especially their
descriptions of teaching strategies, classroom routines and lesson designs.
Other artifacts such as lesson and unit plans, ESL teaching materials, assignments for
ESL students and handouts for parents were also be collected during the process of
interviews and observations. I discussed those artifacts with teachers after the second and

52

	
  
third interviews (see Appendix B: Interview – ESL teachers (2nd interview, Beliefs of
Cultural and Linguistic Diversity, and Appendix C: Interview – ESL teachers (3nd interview,
Literacy instruction in ESL Classroom), and asked them questions about their design and use
of those materials in a more specific way.
In summary, who did I interview and what did I observe? How did the interviews and
the observations help me address the research questions? To address the first research
question, aiming to understand ESL teachers’ understanding of ESL curricula and the
expectations of those curricula, I needed to interview ESL teachers with a focus on their
interpretations of the ESL curricula, addressing issues of ESL students’ cultural and linguistic
diversity. The artifacts such as state and district curricula offered a good amount of
information about the policies guiding ESL teachers’ understandings of cultural and linguistic
diversity and lesson designs to address the diversity issue (See Table 2). Table 2 also
presents the data I collected for understanding the formal and informal interventions and
professional development that ESL teachers received to better teach culturally- and
linguistically-diverse ESL students. The bulleted items in Table 2 show what I learned from
each source of data, and further identifies the data I collected to address the third research
question: “How do ESL teachers describe their lessons and classroom activities in response to
their understanding of ESL students’ linguistic and cultural diversity?

53

	
  
Table 2
Matrix of Data Collection
Data Collection

Research Questions
1. How do ESL
teachers understand
the ESL literacy
curriculum in their
district and what is
expected of them?

Semi-structured
Interviews

Observations

1. Pre-interview with
ESL teachers (1st
interview)
• Goals of literacy
instruction in ESL
classes
• Educational
experiences of ESL
students
• Assessment of ESL
literacy learning
• Teachers’
involvement in
curriculum
development
2. How do ESL
1. Pre-interview with
teachers define
ESL teachers (2nd
linguistic and cultural interview)
diversity?
• Ideology of ESL
instruction
• Literacy lesson
planning
• Materials used for
different components
of literacy instruction
in ESL classroom
• The differences in
materials used in
literacy instruction
between ESL and
mainstream classes
• The differences in
teaching literacy to
diverse students vs. a
relatively monoethnic student group;
ESL student vs.
American peers
2. Post-interview with
ESL teachers

Artifacts

NONE

1. Federal ESL policy
2. State ESL policy
of Michigan: state
ESL curriculum
3. District/school
ESL curricula
4. ESL lesson plans
distributed by the
district (if any) and
developed by
teachers
5. Schools’ annual
reports

1. General literacy
teaching and learning
process in ESL
classrooms
2. Enactment of
responsibilities as
ESL teachers
described in preinterviews
3. Teachers’ use of
teaching materials
4. Teachers’
interactions with ESL
students
5. ESL teachers’
interactions with ESL
students
6. ESL teachers’
interventions

1. Materials and tools
used in ESL classes
2. Collection of
children’s literature
used in ESL
classrooms
3. Classroom
decorations
4. ESL literacy lesson
plans
5. ESL students’
workbooks
6. Workbooks /
assignments that ESL
teachers prepared for
students
7. Materials
/resources ESL
teachers used to get
to know ESL students

54

	
  
Table 2 (cont’d)
3. How do ESL
teachers describe
their lessons and
classroom activities
in response to their
understanding of ESL
students’ linguistic
and cultural
diversity?

1. Pre-interview with
ESL teachers (3rd
interview)
• Collection of
children’s literature
• Choices of teaching
materials, tools and
contents
• Processes of
lesson/unit design
• Implementation of
class activities
• Basic strategies of
teaching ESL
literacy strategies
for teaching
culturally diverse
students
• Pros and cons of
those strategies
• Pedagogy for
teaching
linguistically- and
culturally-diverse
ESL students
• Understanding of
culturally responsive
pedagogy
• Concerns of
culturally responsive
pedagogy
2. Post-interview
4. What preparation 1. Pre-interview with
have the teachers had ESL teachers (1st
to teach ESL
interview)
students?
• Formal and
informal
preparation
experiences
• Professional
development
• Other experiences

1. General literacy
instruction processes
in ESL classrooms
• Lesson structure and
form
• Organization, task
and activity
• Routine and rule
• Phonemic awareness
• Vocabulary
development
• Spelling and writing
• Reading
comprehension
2. Assessment of ESL
students’ progress

1. Materials and
resources used for
literacy instruction in
ESL classrooms
2. ESL lesson plans
3. Activity materials
(e.g. teaching guide;
tools used to facilitate
instruction, ESL
students’ learning
materials)
4. Materials and tools
used in ESL classes
(required by the state
or school)
5. Field notes of
observation

NONE

1. Professional
development
materials
2. Teachers’ own
readings for
professional
development

55

	
  
Data Analysis
I employed an illustrative case study design for this study. According to Yin (1984), a
case study is particularly valuable for “investigating situations in which the researcher has
little control over the events that occur in the real-life context,” and a case study approach
“encourages sensitivity to changes in the context” (p.5). To construct “cases” of ESL literacy
instruction in a particular school context, I coded artifacts, interview data, and observation
data through three phases.
I initially adopted a coding strategy to generate a “general accounting scheme not
content-specific but that points toward the general domains in which codes will have to be
inductively developed” (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 57). I marked all field notes, interview
transcripts and artifacts that show ESL teachers’ references to ESL students’ language and
cultural diversity. For example, as I read field notes from an observation of an ESL literacy
class, I coded the minutes where ESL students introduced their home languages as StudentLinguistics, meaning the students were showing linguistic diversity. For interviews, if the
teacher illustrated a particular multicultural event, that portion of transcript would be coded
as T-Culture, meaning teachers were enacting a culture-related practice. For artifacts, I coded
based on what and how artifacts reported on. Some artifacts (e.g. materials that were used in
the professional development workshops that teachers participated) were examples of
interventions that teachers experienced and would be coded as PD-ESL teaching strategies.
This initial coded scheme allowed me to group all of a particular type of diversity,
interventions and interaction into one place. I then could look for patterns in those types of
diversity and intervention in relation to literacy instruction.
Then, I determined each ESL teacher’s notion of student diversity by considering
patterns in their interviews and teaching artifacts. I identified certain characteristics of
diversity they mentioned and how those characteristics vary. For example, in an interview, I

56

	
  
coded a portion of the text as “imposed learning styles” when the teacher described how ESL
students displayed a preference for certain learning styles because they were only exposed to
that particular kind of style. This characteristic of diversity was irrelevant to their culture. In
other words, this type of diversity that ESL students exhibited could happen in any culture.
This characteristic of diversity fell under the category of “cross-culture Student Diversity and
Literacy Disciplines” along with two other codes at the same level of hierarchy: “regional
differences” and “diverse choices in daily life”. These characteristics allowed me to see
contrasts among different kinds of diversity and intervention. I compared the teachers’
notions of student diversity and found that they were the same, perhaps because of their longterm collaboration and shared professional development opportunities.
Next, 1.I investigated how the teachers enacted their complex notion of student
diversity in designing and implementing language and literacy instruction, by analyzing
patterns among the data sources, including classroom observations. My theoretical
framework suggested that I would have two sets of “general accounting scheme” codes,
which I did. The first set targeted the information concerning teachers’ perspectives of ESL
students’ literacy skill base (see Figure 2). I coded the field notes, artifacts I collected and
interview transcripts for the kind of statements representing ESL teachers’ perspectives of
ESL students’ language and cultural diversity, the influence of diversity on their design of
literacy instruction and their decisions in choosing teaching materials and instructional
strategies. For example, in an interview, I noticed a portion of text that the teacher described
how some ESL students from China always tended to participate in discussions while some
were quiet all the time, and how unreasonable it was to stick a “shyness” label on all Chinese
students. I coded this portion of text as “human variability,” showing the teacher understood
the complexity of diversity issues and attempted to interpret diversity issues beyond cultural
constraints. The second set aimed at information regarding teachers’ instruction and

57

	
  
promotion of collaboration among ESL students. I coded all three data sets for statements
about how ESL teachers teach, with the focus on teachers’ interaction with students and
contents, and teachers’ intervention of students’ interaction with peers and contents, and their
guidance and promotion of collaboration among students. For example, from the field notes, I
labeled a portion of the text as “Building the relationship between language and object” when
the teacher encouraged all ESL students to share their experience and understanding of
“policeman” before introducing the concept of policeman in an American context. The
second set of data served the study in two other ways: 1) by providing additional information
concerning teachers’ understandings of ESL students’ diversity and their different skill bases
(see Figure 2), and the power of policies for building literacy learning communities for ESL
students with different needs; and 2) by triangulating the first set of data about ESL teachers’
description of diversity through the lens of their choices of instructional strategies and
teaching materials.
Employing the two sets of data, I then compared the shared beliefs about ESL
education within a particular school context with what really happens in the ESL classroom,
and at the same time sought out recurrent themes and statements that represent and construct
differences in teachers’ perspectives of diversity and its influence on literacy instruction
(Dyson & Genishi, 2005). With this elementary coding system, I began to see the influence
of ESL students’ linguistic and cultural diversity on literacy instruction that led to further
pattern identification, and developed assertions about how ESL students’ diversity figures in
literacy instruction in ESL classrooms. For example, in an interview, I coded a portion of the
text as “linguistic features of home language(s)” when the teacher described how the sentence
structure of Japanese was different from that of English and how the differences resulted in
the ESL students from Japan made mistakes in his writing. This type of diversity influenced
teachers’ interpretation of mistakes that ESL students made in literacy learning. In addition, I

58

	
  
sought alternative ways (both visual and text-based) to display data that allowed me to
develop patterns and propositions and connect sets of statements that might be considered
preliminary findings (Miles & Huberman, 1984). These propositions pointed me inductively
toward particular theories or concepts for explaining the data.
Limitations of the Study: Incomplete Nature of Cultural Analysis
In this section, I analyze the nature of cultural analysis that influences the study
design. Intrinsic incompleteness is the nature of cultural analysis (Bruner, 1996; Cole, 1996;
Geertz, 1973; Taylor, 1871). Perceiving the incomplete nature of cultural analysis is
significant for this study for three reasons: 1) the conceptualization determines the
exploratory nature of this study, and suggests that the purpose of the study is not to search for
exhaustive elements of literacy teaching and learning in a particular culture (or school
context); 2) the conceptualization helps me avoid overgeneralizing culture (or standardizing
culture in Geertz’s [1973] words); and 3) admitting this nature helps me to confine the study
to an appropriate scope within which I can manage the study design and address the research
questions.
The incompleteness mainly results from the possibly infinite contexts in which
literacy instruction is situated (Taylor, Anderson, and Au, 2000), the large number of people
(or groups of people) involved in creating, passing down, executing and modifying the
instruction, and the infinite artifacts (such as stories, tools or other symbolic representations)
that contribute to the teachers’ development of secondary discourses. For example, Cole
(1996) argued that “a teacher gives a lesson, which is shaped by the classroom it is a part of,
which in turn is shaped by the kind of school it is in, which in turn is shaped by the
community, and so on” (p.134). Analysis of literacy instruction also involves several other
larger contexts (i.e. school and community). Bruner’s (1996) notion of “intersubjectivity”
resembles Cole’s argument and suggests “human functioning is always situated in a context”

59

	
  
(p.161). To unpack the complexity of classroom instruction, people should first understand
the contexts of teaching and learning, and then the larger context in which teaching and
learning happens (Bruner, 1996). Geertz (1973) explained why cultural analysis is incomplete
and proposed how ethnographers could deal with this unavoidable issue:
Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it
goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its
most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to
intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting
it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse questions, is what
being an ethnographer is like. There are a number of ways to escape this -- turning
culture into folklore and collecting it, turning it into traits and counting it, turning it
into institutions and classifying it, turning it into structures and toying with it. But
they are escapes. The fact is that to commit oneself to a semiotic concept of culture
and an interpretive approach to the study of it is to commit oneself to a view of
ethnographic assertion as . . . essentially contestable. (Geertz, 1973, p. 29)
Geertz argued that cultural analyses are neither used to draw arbitrary conclusions
from a particular culture nor to standardize cultural phenomena. The purpose of examination
and interpretation of a particular type of literacy instruction is not to study school but study in
school (Geertz, 1973, p.22). Ideally, research studies based on cultural analyses are supposed
to be an elaborative venture in thick description, are conducive to broaden people’s
understanding of human discourse, and are in search of others’ meaning in the researchers’
own terms.
Geertz’s argument of cultural analysis laid out a general framework that I used in my
analysis of literacy instruction. In this dissertation, I applied Geertz’s framework to a study
concerning the discursive practices of in-service ESL teachers in RCES. I did not examine
60

	
  
literacy instruction in response to ESL students’ cultural and linguistic diversity simply by
documenting the artifacts (e.g. school policy, educational tools, lesson plans) or observing
teaching and learning process in classrooms. My goal is to better understand and interpret
teachers’ behaviors in a particular school discourse. The thick description of the in-service
ESL teachers from two elementary schools aims to present ESL practices in contexts, and to
make their practices meaningful to outsiders.
Based on the main themes that emerged, I organized my findings to chapters that
represent three main themes. In the next chapter, I report my findings for the first theme:
teachers’ nuanced description of diversity in ESL classes.

61

	
  
CHAPTER 3
TEACHERS’ NUANCED DESCRIPTION OF DIVERSITY ISSUES
As discussed previously in Chapter 1, ESL enrollment in American K-12 schools has
increased rapidly. I also showed that the educational setting in American public schools was
further complicated by ESL students’ birthplaces and schooling history. Seventy-four percent
of ESL students were reported born in the United States but spoke a language (or languages)
other than English at home. Most ESL students started schooling in kindergarten or first
grade in the United States, but twenty-six percent of ESL students coming to the United
States started formal education in American schools at later ages (Batalova, 2006). I also
detailed in Chapter 1 how previous studies recognized linguistic and cultural diversity among
ESL students, and the importance of including students’ cultural references in all aspects of
literacy learning (i.e. instructional strategies, teaching materials and parental involvement).
However, in today’s multicultural classes, teachers are not just attending to ESL
students one by one. In reality, teachers are confronted with a group of students who have
different linguistic and cultural knowledge, diverse (and often incompatible) learning
preferences, and sometimes conflicting learning needs simultaneously. How teachers
understand the complexity of student diversity and its relation to their classroom practices
determines the effectiveness of the guided practices and collaboration among students, and
thus the effectiveness of ESL students’ literacy learning (Vygotsky, 1978). In this chapter, I
draw on Vygotsky’s concept of the skill base to consider diversity issues not as something to
be neglected, thereby unintentionally reducing and negating its impacts on classroom
practices, but as something that is inevitable, and which can be the basis for initiating guided
instruction and collaboration in class. This layer of socio-cultural theory allows us to
purposefully reframe ESL student diversity as an opportunity and foundation for responsive
literacy instruction.
62

	
  
I begin this chapter with a discussion of two ESL teachers’ understandings of student
diversity through underscoring how these understandings are related to students’ intercultural
diversity. Next I describe how teachers’ understanding of diversity moves beyond the
intercultural level, and attempt to discuss and distinguish diversity and its nuances. In the final
section of this chapter, I revisit the issue of ESL student diversity in a multicultural setting and
its potential for being used as a teaching resource.
Intercultural ESL Student Diversity and Literacy Discipline
Both Deb and Kelly suggested that ESL students brought intercultural diversity to
school, including their home language(s), linguistic knowledge, and ESL- and literacylearning experience. Intercultural student diversity was strongly tied to the respective culture
of ESL students’ native countries, and was relatively unchangeable. Under most
circumstances, the teachers were able to incorporate students’ intercultural diversity directly
to classroom practices such as setting up class goals, choosing teaching materials, and
structuring ESL classes with consideration of ESL students’ English and literacy proficiencies.
Home language(s) and dialect(s)
Deb and Kelly suggested that ESL students brought diverse home language(s) into the
ESL class. This aspect of student diversity could be seen through three lenses: what language
or languages and dialects students speak; how proficiently they speak, read and write in those
language(s); and what languages their family members use. Deb and Kelly both pointed out
that language diversity among ESL students was complicated by language policies in their
home countries, and resulted in students’ diverse linguistic skills.
According to students’ enrollment reports in the academic year of 2010-2011, fortyseven languages and dialects were represented in RCES. Kelly argued ESL students’
nationality might not indicate what languages they use at home. In fact, since some countries
have more than one official language (e.g. Canada, India, and South Africa), it can be hard to

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predict ESL students’ home language(s) based on their nationality. Some ESL students might
not necessarily speak their home country’s official language(s) at home. For example, in
RCES, some ESL students from India spoke Punjabi at home. Some students were already
multilingual before learning ESL in the United States. It was quite common that ESL students,
especially those from Africa, were able to speak more than one or two languages besides
English. For example, Deb pointed out that ESL students from Malawi usually spoke three
languages: Chichewa, English and French. While ESL students’ nationalities did provide a
degree of information about their language backgrounds, Deb and Kelly understood that the
information might be misleading or not thorough enough for them to know their students’
complete backgrounds. Deb and Kelly thus carefully identified ESL students’ nationality and
languages. They revised the enrollment form so that it now required ESL students’ parents to
submit more detailed and accurate information regarding their children’s linguistic
backgrounds: what language they used at home, in their home countries, and during previous
informal and formal schooling in both the United States and their home countries. In all levels
of ESL classes, Deb and Kelly asked their students to share their language background with
their peers through oral self-introduction in English. At the same time, students were
encouraged to point out their home countries on the world map. Deb suggested that this was
an important opportunity for ESL teachers to learn students’ language backgrounds from
sources besides the reports of the students’ parents.
In addition to using parent-provided information and students’ self-introductions, Deb
and Kelly were both self-motivated to learn about ESL students’ home languages and argued
that developing linguistic knowledge of foreign countries was critical for them to know ESL
students’ English and literacy proficiency. For example, both teachers felt “amazed” and
“challenged” by teaching an ESL student from Bhutan this academic year. Neither Deb nor
Kelly had ever taught a student from this country before. It was also the first time that they

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learned about this country. Deb and Kelly proactively sought reading materials related to
Bhutan and its language, Dzongkha. Rather than learning how to speak the language, Deb and
Kelly intended to learn about linguistic features of the language. Deb argued that this
linguistic knowledge of the language contributed to her understanding of the mistakes that the
student made in English. Besides acknowledging ESL students’ diverse language backgrounds,
Deb and Kelly also admitted their limited knowledge of foreign languages. Both teachers
agreed on the advantage of knowing foreign languages in teaching ESL students. Deb
expressed her desire for “know[ing] every kid’s language and know[ing] what they want to
learn.” Kelly expressed a similar desire “in a real ideal world, I could speak every language
that the child does.” They want to learn more about many languages, but recognized the
inability to study every language that students brought into ESL classes.
Furthermore, Deb revealed that ESL students came to school with not only diverse
languages but also “dialects that I (the ESL teacher) never heard.” For example, ESL students
from China used (i.e. spoke and wrote) Mandarin in public, but tended to speak different
dialects at home (e.g. Shanghai dialect). Due to the dramatic phonetic differences among
those dialects, ESL students from different parts of China sometimes were not able to
understand each other. For example, Deb pointed out “Cantonese has six tones3, but there are
only four tones in mandarin”. Students’ dialects influenced their pronunciation in English as
well. Kelly suggested that she could understand ESL students from the northern part of China
better than those from the south. Clearly, ESL students’ diverse language and dialect
backgrounds affected communication among students as well as between teachers and
students. Deb and Kelly both noticed the existence of diverse languages and its influence on

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
Theoretically, Guangdong Cantonese has seven tones while there are six tones in
Hong Kong Cantonese.
3

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students’ literacy development, and they tended to rely on their teaching experience to
understand diverse languages that ESL students brought to class.
Linguistic features of home language
Deb and Kelly suggested that one of the main motivations for collecting accurate
information about ESL students’ language backgrounds was to learn the linguistic features of
ESL students’ home languages. Getting to know ESL students’ linguistic backgrounds was a
must for Deb and Kelly to design and deliver ESL and literacy lessons. Deb explained that
her familiarity with linguistic features of ESL students’ heritage language(s) or dialect(s)
helped her better understand what aspects of English language knowledge ESL students need
to “spend more time on.” Deb argued that teachers should be alert to these contrastive
features even when ESL students’ native languages share enormous similarities with English:
Sometimes languages are close enough together that the student doesn't see the
difference and yet the difference is very important (Spanish vs. English, German vs.
English). In some languages, it's placement of words. It could be adjectives and
placements. In some languages, adjectives are modified and in English we don't
modify adjectives. Some of them don't modify verbs. Some of the languages do
modify verbs. So they [ESL students] are always looking for that spot in a sentence to
change. Or some languages are position-tied…English has prepositions, but Japanese
has postpositions. They often put an American preposition after the place where we
would put it before: Not “I go to the store”, (but) “I go to store to.”
Deb suggested that linguistic features of students’ heritage languages led her to design
ESL literacy lessons with particular attention to the linguistic features of English that students
might miss in their native language(s). Additionally, although both had taken linguistics
course during their graduate studies of TESOL, Deb and Kelly demonstrated different levels
of expertise in general linguistic knowledge. Deb suggested that her foreign language
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learning experience contributed to her sensitivity and increasing interest in linguistics. With
relatively limited knowledge of linguistics, Kelly tended to rely on Deb’s expertise, and
acknowledged that she “benefited a lot from Deb’s expertise of foreign languages.”
Accordingly, when dividing the tasks of ESL literacy lessons, Deb always took the lead.
Kelly otherwise took the main responsibility for selecting corresponding teaching materials
and helping ESL students accomplish their tasks. Deb and Kelly’s attentiveness in gathering
additional information about ESL students’ prior language experience was quite applicable to
their lesson design, exposing the invisible interdependence of ESL teaching and the diverse
linguistic skills that students brought into class.
Diverse academic experiences
Educational researchers have paid close attention to ESL students’ academic
experience from different perspectives: ESL students’ interactions with teachers and their
mainstream peers (Frizten, 2011), their experiences of learning different subject matter
(Collier, 1995; Duff, 2001), and the involvement and influence of local communities on ESL
students’ schooling experiences (Perry, 2008). However, most studies focused on ESL
students’ ongoing schooling experiences in the United States while ignoring those in their
native countries. Indeed, researchers suggested that children’s language proficiency in their
first language predicted their development of second language (August & Hakuta, 1997).
Additionally, literacy learning is a process of sociocultural participation, and what and how
ESL students learned literacy in their native countries adversely affected their expectations,
needs and ways of learning literacy in American educational settings (Gay, 2010; Howe,
1999). Deb and Kelly argued that ESL students’ diverse academic experiences were
especially significant in multicultural classrooms, and emphasized the importance of
distinguishing ESL students’ pedagogical experiences from their learning styles. Both ESL
teachers further suggested that ESL students possibly developed certain learning styles

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because they only had access to particular types of pedagogy or learning resources.
Interpreting students’ learning styles with cultural insights might assist teachers to help ESL
students overcome the constraints due to the limitations of their pedagogical experience in
native countries and further achieve their learning potential. The following section illustrates
how Deb and Kelly explored the diverse pedagogical experience among ESL students.
ESL learning experiences
Both Deb and Kelly pointed out that ESL students had diverse English as a Foreign
Language (EFL) learning experiences before they came to the United States. As part of the
enrollment process, ESL students’ parents were required to fill out an “English Language
Student Profile and Language Plan” form, through which Deb and Kelly could get
information such as child’s length of English instruction. Statistically, the forms showed that
the length of time that ESL students received formal EFL (and/or ESL) education varied from
one to four years before they enrolled in RCES. Both ESL teachers relied on this information
as one of the most important guiding principles for grouping ESL students into different
levels of ESL classes. For example, Kelly pointed out that they tended to group ESL students
from countries in East Asia such as China, Korea and Japan into one class because those
students started EFL learning at earlier age and were usually “stronger in English.” In the
meanwhile, RCES also received ESL students from the Middle East, Africa and Haiti who
had very limited or no EFL learning experience before they came to the United States.
Therefore, ESL students’ nationality became an important indicator for Deb and Kelly to start
exploring students’ language and literacy learning experience and ability. They always took
students’ nationality into consideration while grouping them into different levels of ESL
classes. For example, in three entry-level ESL classes, students in Class A were mainly from
China and Taiwan; those in Class B were mostly Indians, Pakistanis and Iranian; the other
class was full of students from South Korea and Japan.

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Besides the diverse length of English language learning experience, Deb suggested
what and how ESL students were previously taught led to their differing academic
achievements and literacy development. In other words, the length of prior EFL education did
not necessarily mean ESL students would reach similar educational outcomes as their
American peers since some of their EFL pedagogical experiences intrinsically differed from
that in an American setting, as Deb described.
Speaking usually develops first, for people who have not been exposed to English, but
many of our students from China have been actually studying (written EFL) since first
grade…I wouldn't call it reading…because they don't necessarily understand what
they're reading, but they can read it very well…they just need time for speaking and
with (constructing) language meaning…because when it is something out of a
textbook, it is not the same as trying to interact with a person.
Reading in English had been much talked about in some ESL students’ native countries, but
little reading instruction aimed to help ESL students construct meanings. ESL students were
taught to read passively and to focus on answering assigned questions on tests. Deb found that
ESL students from Asian countries tended to believe that there was only one correct answer to
a question. This finding is consistent with what Ajay (2008) found, that this group of ESL
students had rarely been taught to interpret English-language reading materials with their own
experience in their native countries.
These examples of ESL students’ English language learning experiences varied
beyond the time that they had invested in EFL learning in their native countries. Their funds
of knowledge of the English language were relevant to what and how they had learned EFL.
Both Deb and Kelly noticed nuances in ESL students’ weaknesses and needs in language
learning. Teachers’ sensitivity to students’ pedagogical experiences provided a new venue for
school administrators to reexamine the enrollment form for collecting information about ESL
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students’ language learning experience. Additionally, students’ diverse pedagogical
experience showed that ESL students came to class not only with diverse levels of English
language knowledge but also diverse foci for ESL learning.
Literacy learning experiences
Similar to ESL students’ EFL learning experiences, Deb and Kelly found that they
learned literacy in diverse ways as well. The factors that influenced their literacy learning
were: the age that they started literacy learning, what literacy knowledge they learned in their
home countries, and how they had been taught literacy. Deb and Kelly found that literacy
instruction in ESL class was further complicated by the strength or weakness of students’
ESL skill base. To ensure that ESL students received and understood teachers’ direction and
instruction correctly, both ESL teachers were forced to scaffold their directional language and
strategies even when ESL students’ literacy ability satisfied grade expectations.
ESL students started their formal literacy learning at different ages, which
complicated their readiness for learning literacy in American schools. Deb summed up the
complexity of ESL students’ literacy learning ages:
Like Finland, children don't start to read until eight or nine years old…their kids made
huge progress though because they have been working on readiness for so long, that
when they read, it goes faster. I've found that true with Russian children as well, they
read at a later age than we do.
To be more specific, Deb argued that the age at which ESL students started to learn
literacy was related to their readiness for developing skills of listening, speaking, reading,
writing, and meaning construction that met the requirements of a particular social context.
Kelly confirmed Deb’s statement and further suggested that even when ESL students started
literacy learning at a similar age as their American peers, the concepts and knowledge of
literacy that they received in their native countries might be different from that in the United
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States. For example, Kelly found that “ESL students from Brazil learn cursive writing at first
grade… A third grader (in my class) literally does not know how to print because they've
taught him cursive (in Brazil).” Realizing ESL students’ diverse literacy learning experiences
made Kelly alert to ESL students’ behaviors in ESL class, even basic things like “their
command with a pencil.” Obviously, ESL students were required to learn how to use what
Cole (1996) referred to as different tools to help them develop their literacy proficiency
including textbooks, school buildings and utilities, computers, and educational tools/software.
Learning literacy at different ages therefore influenced children’s mastery of literacy skills
but also their proficiency with using various tools for literacy learning.
Besides those who learned different concepts and knowledge of literacy in their native
countries, there were students coming to ESL classes with a similar knowledge base of
literacy to their American peers. However, their different levels of ESL proficiency
complicated the literacy instruction process. This diversity led to the urgency of building
vocabulary for ESL students so they could understand teachers’ instruction. Kelly uncovered
her concerns about ESL students’ misunderstanding of instruction: “…sometimes I think they
get it (but) they're like, some of the basic things they don't know what it means. And I have to
backtrack and talk about the vocabulary: what does it mean when the teacher asks you this? ”
Accordingly, both ESL teachers focused their literacy instruction for this group on building
vocabulary. ESL teachers gave directional language instead of content knowledge the higher
priority in their ESL literacy class to satisfy this group’s particular learning needs. As
suggested by Deb, the ultimate goal of this strategy was to help ESL students “function like a
normal grader in their classroom and be able to do everything a normal grader can do.” Deb
and Kelly understood the importance of both “learning language” and “learning through
language” (Halliday, 1987) in terms of ESL students’ whole language development. Their

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experience further showed English language development is one of the most important steps
for ESL students’ literacy development, especially when learning literacy through language.
In addition, both teachers found it challenging to teach ESL students who had no ESL,
literacy or schooling experience in their native countries. Those ESL students mostly came
from refugee families and lacked basic content knowledge of language and literacy. For
example, in the entry-level ESL class for kindergarteners, Deb and Kelly “recruited” a tenyear-old ESL student from Sierra Leone as a helper. Every morning, the child was pulled out
of his fourth-grade class for half a day to develop “basic phonemic awareness and letter
recognition” with kindergarteners. This example shows that ESL students’ diverse schooling
experiences challenge age as the traditional grouping strategy. ESL teachers had to adjust the
structure of the ESL class and carefully choose content knowledge appropriate for ESL
students’ knowledge base instead of their age.
In considering ESL student diversity and its impacts on ESL literacy instruction,
students’ diverse academic experiences were the most complicated aspect. On the one hand,
these differences in experiences impacted ESL literacy instruction in several ways including
choices of teaching materials, structure of ESL classes, assessment of ESL students’
performances, and the use of instructional language. On the other hand, ESL students’ prior
academic experiences were the most hidden and complicated aspect of diversity, which
teachers might easily neglect and which they were not able to easily figure out within a short
time frame.
Diverse choices in daily life
Deb and Kelly understood that ESL students came to school with diverse choices in
clothes, preferences for food and commitment to religion. Both ESL teachers took students’
diverse choices in daily life as the basis for designing literacy lessons, not just because for
ESL students it was possibly what most familiarly framed their school experience, but also

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because it tended to be neglected in multicultural education. This was true whether they were
looking to educational research in order to simply make students feel inclusive in school, or
seeking guidance on how to improve ESL students’ achievement. Merely to identify lists of
ESL students’ sources of knowledge that were historically developed at home – even if the
knowledge indicated students’ specialty – was a bit like cooking a complicated dish with all
of the ingredients available but without the recipe—which is the key to cooking and
reproducing a dish effectively.
Both Deb and Kelly understood that ESL students’ diverse experiences of daily life
varied with the locations where they came from, and this aspect of diversity impacted the
scaffolding process in literacy instruction. Deb argued that the clothes people wore and how
they wore them disclosed information of local weather, crops, and other geographic
characteristics that closely influence ESL students’ daily lives. Kelly described how some
ESL students from Africa might not have seen cold-weather accessories, while other students
had limited experience with fabrics such as silk. Therefore, in the lesson focusing on clothes,
Deb and Kelly brought in different kinds of clothes and displayed them on the classroom
table. ESL students were encouraged to touch the clothes, and even to try on the accessories
such as gloves and scarves. In the intermediate-level class, Deb and Kelly raised a caterpillar
in their classroom for several weeks to teach students vocabulary related to insects. They
required the students to draw pictures of a caterpillar during its development into a butterfly
based on their own observations, and then learn the related vocabulary. In addition, Deb and
Kelly found that even when ESL students and their parents knew the language (words or
expressions) for certain foods, they might not know what the food was since they did not
have any experiences with such food before. So, Deb and Kelly took pictures of the food and
uploaded them to their school website, helping ESL students and their parents understand the
meanings of foods with visual aids. These examples manifested that both teachers understood

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only when a word was associated with an experience (or entity) people were then able to
develop corresponding “thoughts” of the language and then use the word appropriately
(Richard, 1937). They chose pictures as tools to help ESL students gain experience that the
word referred to, and construct meaning for the word.
In addition, Deb suggested that the culture of the American educational setting being
a stark contrast to the cultures of ESL students was not the only reason for them feeling
“being out of control in their life.” The changes in weather and diet, limited access to TV
programs from their native countries, and lack of books in their first languages all might lead
to their experiencing frustration in the new learning environment. Apparently, Deb and Kelly
understood that diversity existed in terms of ESL students’ choices in daily life. They did not
simply ask ESL students to follow mainstream American preferences. Instead, both ESL
teachers attempted to scaffold ESL students’ diverse preferences in daily life and to relate
classroom practices with their preferences. Deb and Kelly’s description further showed
diversity in ESL classes displayed at different levels: ESL students’ values and beliefs
developed in their native countries, and their behaviors learned or modified in the United
States, including how and what they learn, eat and wear in this new country.
In general, Deb and Kelly suggested that they brought intercultural diversity into ESL
classes, and affirmed its impacts on classroom practices of language and literacy. This
intercultural diversity could be seen at three levels (Cole, 1996): the diverse language(s) and
dialect(s) that ESL students used at home, language and literacy policy (regarding both first
language(s) and English), and tools used for language and literacy learning. These examples
show that both ESL teachers used intercultural diversity as teaching and learning resources at
the instructional level through helping ESL students to develop literacy skills that they
missed in home literacy practice, offering more literacy learning experience or opportunities
that were ignored or forbidden in ESL students’ home countries; and providing additional

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tools that assist ESL students to achieve literacy learning goals required in an American
educational context. Both ESL teachers’ understanding of intercultural diversity allowed
them to facilitate literacy instruction through thoughtful cultural translation (Li, 2008).
However, they disclosed that they were confronted with the challenges of getting accurate
information regarding this aspect of diversity, especially students’ prior EFL (and ESL) and
literacy learning experiences. Both Deb and Kelly attempted to employ this aspect of
diversity as an opportunity to analyze students’ behaviors with cultural and linguistic insights,
and further uncover their real learning needs.
Intracultural Student Diversity and Literacy Disciplines
Deb and Kelly found that ESL students had intracultural diversity, including imposed
learning styles, regional differences, socio-economic status and human variability. Although
this category of diversity was tied to ESL students’ home cultures, teachers did not take ESL
students’ respective cultures into account when designing literacy lessons. Under most
circumstances, both teachers tended to respond to this category of diversity by providing ESL
students with more language and literacy learning opportunities or pedagogical experiences.
At the same time, through ESL students’ intracultural diversity, Deb and Kelly realized the
complexity of student diversity and argued that ESL students developed certain learning
styles because they only had access to these types of pedagogy or learning resources.
Interpreting students’ differences in learning styles with collective insights might prevent
teachers from seeing students’ learning potentials, and may lead teachers to overlook
individual variability and regional differences, and the influence of intracultural factors such
as gender and personality.
Imposed learning styles
Learning styles are defined as the ways in which individuals receive, interact with,
and process information (Nieto, 2000; Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer & Bjork, 2009). Some

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previous studies concentrated on cultural, ethnic, and racial differences in ESL students’
learning styles (Ainslie, 1998; Cole, 1996). Although admitting ESL students brought diverse
learning styles and cultural values, Deb and Kelly argued that some ESL students passively
developed certain learning styles regardless of whether or not the learning style was the best
way for them to learn. To be more specific, Deb and Kelly explained that some learning
styles were dictated to and imposed on ESL students by their previous teachers, prescribed
curricula, or standardized tests (in eit her their native countries or the United States). In
general, Deb and Kelly agreed on the diversity of ESL students’ learning styles and further
suggested that expanding the ways of learning was necessary for ESL students to strengthen
their existing learning capacity, to remedy their inadequate knowledge, and to discover their
learning potential.
Deb and Kelly both noticed that some ESL students “did not like reading” because
they had no access to books. Deb showed me ESL students’ reading logs with pride, but she
pointed out that very few ESL students came to borrow books when she and Kelly first built
up their library particularly targeted at ESL students. Both teachers found that on the one
hand ESL students, especially those from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Haiti, did
not have the habit of reading books outside class. On the other hand, Chinese, Korean and
Japanese students wanted to borrow books, but their parents tended to categorize those books
as extracurricular reading that would not benefit their children’s academic learning. Deb and
Kelly then spared no effort to help some ESL students develop learning habits as well as
learn how to select “appropriate and fun books” to read. They also explained to ESL
students’ parents that they carefully selected those books from classic reading programs that
aimed to help their children to meet with the grade expectations of literacy learning. Deb and
Kelly understood ESL students’ limited access to learning resources might lead to their lack
of experience in certain learning styles. Rather than to treat ESL students’ diverse reading

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habits as the way they learned literacy, Deb and Kelly tended to offer more opportunities and
options for students, and have ESL students themselves to decide what would be a
“comfortable and effective” way to develop literacy skills.
Deb and Kelly suggested that ESL students’ limited access to learning tools was
another factor that resulted in their diverse learning preferences. Kelly recalled “Tom
[pseudonym] looked so uncertain and uncomfortable when I first asked him to sit on the
carpet.” Deb explained that ESL students like Tom used to be taught in a teacher-centered
manner in China, and they did not know what to do “once they became the center of
learning.” Similar to Tom, Shalani from India also had problems learning while sitting on the
carpet. Deb found the little girl could not stop touching the carpet. The little girl told Deb that
she was not allowed to sit on the classroom floor and would be punished for doing it. Deb
and Kelly had to explain to her that sitting on the floor in a circle would be convenient for
teachers to see every student. Both teachers also encouraged Shalani to “learn how to interact
with teachers and students when sitting on the carpet.” Kelly further pointed out that some
ESL students were disadvantaged because “they were never taught that way.” For example,
Kelly explained that some Chinese students seemed “too shy to express their ideas in public”
because they were not encouraged to do so: in their previous schools, some had to gain
permission before expressing their ideas; some were warned of the importance of
“practice[ing]” before delivering a public conversation; some were not allowed to “challenge
teachers” in class. Deb argued that those principles deprived ESL students of learning power
and thus constrained their learning potential.
In addition, Deb and Kelly pointed out that even some ESL students’ parents realized
the limitation of their children’s previous English learning experiences. They proactively
urged teachers to extend their children’s learning styles through focusing on different aspects
of language learning. For example, some Chinese parents asked Deb and Kelly to help their

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children “to learn as much oral language as they possibly can.” Chinese parents preferred
their children to be less focused on the reading and writing because “they understand the
deficiency of their child in really communicating in that language.” Deb also explained that
Chinese students were not tested on listening and speaking skills in their major exams in
China, and thus most of them received very limited instruction on developing those two skills.
Obviously, the standardized tests forced this group of ESL students to develop test-taking
skills at the expense of their whole-language development. Both Deb and Kelly noticed the
impacts of mandated tests on ESL students’ development of learning styles, and attempted to
extend their focus of language learning.
In general, both teachers understood that ESL students favored different ways of
learning, and Deb and Kelly showed their appreciation for students’ multiple intelligences. At
the same time, both teachers shared their concerns of those learning styles’ effectiveness, and
argued, as did Ladson-Billings (1994), that presenting more learning styles and resources to
students and encouraging them to explore the most effective way of learning were significant
for empowering students in class. Through empowering ESL students’ learning, Deb and
Kelly intended to help them to develop a broader socio-cultural consciousness that allowed
them to reflect on and critique their existing learning habits.
Regional differences
One of the most consistent, and least expected, aspects of student diversity that Deb
and Kelly noticed were regional differences that existed among ESL students from the same
country or ethnic group. Kelly pointed out that regional differences were mostly an invisible
diversity with which ESL students maintained resemblance and variety. Both Deb and Kelly
conceded that it took “way longer” for them to recognize the existence of regional differences
among ESL students. However, this “diversity within a culture,” as defined by Deb,

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constantly challenged the effectiveness of the teachers’ design and enactment of literacy
practices with collective insights.
Deb and Kelly talked about ESL students’ regional diversity in a number of ways.
The most contrastive difference was the fact that ESL students from the same country spoke
different languages and dialects in different regions. For example, Kelly was “confused”
when seeing that some Chinese students talked to each other while others seemed “quiet and
intimidated to join their conversation.” Kelly then asked me to help her figure out what was
happening among those students. Through observing those students’ conversations, I found
students from Shanghai (China) preferred to speak in the Shanghai dialect instead of
Mandarin, and students from other regions of China could not communicate with them
because they did not understand the Shanghai dialect. Deb also noticed that Mexican students
from less developed areas usually spoke indigenous languages such as Nahuatl and Yucatec
Maya. Therefore, when attempting to understand the influence of ESL students’ native
languages on their English language development, Deb and Kelly focused on their regional
languages, and suggested that simply analyzing ESL students’ national languages might lead
them in “a wrong direction.”
Another regional difference that Deb and Kelly found was exposed as the imbalances
in regional development including unequal distribution of educational resources and different
grade expectations. In an entry-level ESL class for first graders, students displayed different
interests in Kelly’s description of birds, although this group of ESL students came from
South Africa. Kelly found that one student kept playing with the plush stuffed red robin,
while other students paid close attention to how Deb and Kelly structured the description of
the bird. After class, Kelly started a serious conversation with the boy with the question “why
were you interested in the stuffed bird?” The boy suggested that he was amazed by the color
of the bird and the sound “a toy could make.” Kelly then realized that the boy had never

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played with stuffed animal and the colorful bird distracted his attention. As Deb suggested,
most ESL students from South Africa came from English-speaking families, who were
usually categorized as middle or upper class. In recent years, RCES has been receiving ESL
students from all regions of South Africa due to the development of their governmentsponsored study abroad program. Deb found that ESL students from South Africa “received
different instruction” in terms of their learning materials, student-teacher ratios, and even
“different expectations on their achievement.” Similar to the United States, most other
countries have had imbalanced development in different regions. It would not then be
surprising to see “ESL students from China who had studied in the same grade did not sustain
similar grade achievements,” according to Kelly. Deb and Kelly’s birds experience showed
their accumulated knowledge of regional differences helped them clarify a confusing event
that could not be simply addressed with collective insights at the national level. Both teachers
further suggested that this aspect of diversity made them determined to promote equal
learning opportunities among all ESL students, “at least during their [ESL students’] stay[s]
in the U.S.” as suggested by Deb.
These examples illustrate that the increasing and rapidly changing ESL student
population from all around the world expanded Deb and Kelly’s understandings of diversity
in the ESL classroom. With increasing diversity among ESL students from the same country
or ethnic group, both teachers realized factors other than cultural values influenced ESL
students’ learning preferences or achievements equally or even more than what was
previously thought, including regional differences and imbalanced development within the
same country. Deb and Kelly’s observation affirmed Nieto’s (2000) findings that economic
factors overpowered cultural values in terms of students’ learning:
…the working class may differ from the middle class not only in particular values and
practices but also in economic resources. The reasoning behind the hypothesis that

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social class is a more important influence on learning than ethnicity is that the
intellectual environment and socialization of children in the home may be due more to
economic resources than cultural resources (p.142-143).
ESL students’ learning preferences and needs varied with their access to economic
resources. In other words, Deb and Kelly’s view of student diversity went beyond cultural
constraints and was complicated by the social and economic factors within a culture.
Accordingly, analyzing ESL students’ learning only with cultural and collective insights did
not help Deb and Kelly identify students’ needs, and might possibly result in
misinterpretation of students’ behaviors. In addition, the pull-out-push-in model in which
Deb and Kelly tended to group ESL students from the same country in one class sometimes
seemed to prevent them from seeing the hidden differences. However, both teachers’
continuous efforts to explore intracultural diversity among ESL students contributed to
revealing the hidden curriculum, avoiding stereotypical judgment on students’ behaviors, and
providing equal learning opportunities for all students.
Human Variability
As discussed previously in Chapter 1, to prepare teachers for working with a diverse
student population, three primary lines of educational inquiry have emerged: linguistic
studies investigating children’s second language acquisition and development (Cummins,
1996; Freeman, 1998); educational studies analyzing specific cultural models and learning
needs and styles of ESL students with specific cultural backgrounds (Genishi & Dyson, 2009;
Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 2000); and studies focusing on content-based English
language teaching and learning (Au, 1994, 1998; Fradd & Lee, 1999; Stoddart, Pinal &
Canaday, 2002). All of these inquiries emphasized ESL students’ particular cultural or ethnic
backgrounds. The findings were widely advocated in professional development programs and
resource books (Karabenick & Clemens Noda, 2004; Peregoy & Boyle, 2005). Deb and Kelly
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found these studies especially helpful when they had very limited knowledge of ESL students
from a particular ethnic group. However, they always noticed exceptions to those findings in
their ESL classes.
Deb and Kelly considered ESL students as individuals who developed their own ways,
needs and preferences for learning that interacted with their previous and current learning
contexts. Both teachers suggested the diversity reflected ESL students’ differences as human
beings, and emphasized the importance of literacy practices responding to students’
individual ability. Deb described literacy practices in response to student diversity as the
combination of art and science:
It’s an art and a science. There are technical skills like in science that need to be in
place, it is also an art that you have to finely tune it to that individual, not just their
culture. No blanket methods apply to everyone. Sometimes your science is faulty
…more and more, art is required.
Kelly also used the metaphor of jumping into a fish bowl to suggest the necessity of
considering individual factors:
It's like jumping into the fish bowl from a high place. Meaning that it is harder than
people think. It's hard but not impossible. There's so many cultures and so many
different ideas and so many ways of looking at it and you have to be open minded and
sensitive and diplomatic.
When designing ESL and literacy lessons, both teachers tended to respond to ESL
students’ individual diversity through differentiating classroom practices based on their
personal language literacy learning needs. Deb and Kelly thus argued that teaching ESL
students should be intrinsically similar to teaching American students, attending to their
individual variability rather than culture-related diversity (regardless of intercultural or
intracultural diversity).
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The PD they experienced provided stereotypes that the teachers did not embrace. Deb
and Kelly broke down those stereotypes by paying close attention to the learning needs of
their students. Learning from some professional development programs and readings, Deb
and Kelly knew that African students often had stronger auditory skills because they had
been living story-telling communities. Asian students were usually categorized as good
readers and writers, but needed more speaking and listening practices in English. However,
one contrastive case that Kelly described was about a Japanese boy who had phenomenal
auditory skills but needed more practice for reading and writing: “I had a Japanese student
last year, and his auditory skills were phenomenal. You could tell him things. You read him
things and he could tell you everything about it. But if you asked him to read it or write it, he
could just not do that very well.” Deb also pointed out that not all Chinese students are good
at math. Some students from South Africa demonstrated excellent mathematical skills when
doing an “item exchange” game in ESL class. Deb and Kelly revealed that identifying the
knowledge and skills that ESL students culturally developed alone would not lead to
substantive improvement in designing effective literacy lessons for ESL students, if such
information was not accompanied by profound changes “in what we (teachers) believe
students deserve and are capable of learning” (Nieto, 2000, p. 245).
Conclusion: Using ESL Students’ Diversity as Literacy Instruction Resources
Both ESL teachers demonstrated their tolerance and respect for student diversity. Like
Alexander (2001), who found that “caring was expressed overtly in the language and behavior
of most of the American teachers, and their discourse was peppered with terms of affection,
especially with the young English children” (p. 361), I too saw that Deb and Kelly attempted
to build up a caring learning environment for ESL students, sometimes effectively and
sometimes not as expected. The caring nature was not particularly surprising given the
structure of the pull-out-push-in model. For all ESL students, they were pulled out to attend an

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ESL class that was designed as a buffering zone for them to get extra assistance with language
and cultural knowledge. Both ESL teachers purposefully created a more relaxing learning
experience for ESL students, thus providing them with more time and space to get ready for
mainstream classes.
In addition, Vygotsky’s thesis that the forces of history, culture and social context
impacted human activities and led to very different consequent skills that children brought to
school was supported by Deb and Kelly’s descriptions of ESL student diversity from the
three levels that I have investigated so far: intercultural and intracultural diversity and human
variability. Deb and Kelly affirmed that ESL students’ cultural diversity played a decisive
part in teachers’ enforcement of multicultural awareness at the school level, and in selecting
teaching materials, setting up literacy learning goals and interpreting mistakes. At the same
time, both teachers felt challenged by their lack of knowledge of ESL students’ home
language(s) and the culture of their home countries. Their limited knowledge prevented them
from communicating with ESL students and getting to know their learning needs and habits
as thoroughly as they would have liked. Intercultural diversity, especially linguistic diversity,
impacted communication between teachers and students and their parents, their foci of
language and literacy learning in school, and collaboration among students. Highly regarding
the knowledge of ESL students’ language backgrounds would contribute to teachers’
interpretation of the mistakes ESL students made with linguistic insights as well as designing
linguistically responsive lessons.
However, ESL students’ intercultural diversity was neither unitary nor monolithic, and
intracultural diversity such as socio-economic power could significantly moderate or even
counteract cultural control. Both teachers suggested that understanding diversity issues only
with collective insights might lead teachers to overestimate the influence of culture on literacy
teaching and learning. Students from the same ethnic group sometimes might demonstrate

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similar learning styles, but they were not necessarily the best ways for them to learn. In
addition, knowledge of intercultural diversity of ESL students from a particular ethnic group
was necessary to help teachers design responsive activities, especially when teachers had
limited knowledge of ESL students’ backgrounds, but insufficient conditions for effective
ESL student learning. Teachers were expected to tailor activities to meet students’ individual
preferences, needs and talents. When applying research-based strategies to classroom
instruction, both teachers cautiously took human variability into consideration. Deb and Kelly
agreed that it is human variability rather than intercultural or intracultural diversity that
matters in their design of ESL literacy lessons. Both teachers’ highlighting of ESL students’
individual differences also demonstrates that effective instruction should not only be
collectively responsive but also individually responsive. In short, responsive ESL instruction
calls for us to look beyond ESL students’ cultural and linguistic diversity and draw upon
students’ individual sources of knowledge.

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CHAPTER 4
TOWARD EXPLORING THE COMPLEXITY OF DIVERSITY ISSUES
With increasing numbers of ESL students enrolled in American elementary schools,
teachers’ awareness of diversity issues receives intensive scholarly attention. In most teacher
education programs nowadays, pre-service teachers are required to take multicultural
coursework that aims to prepare them for teaching diverse student populations (Gorski, 2009;
McNeal, 2005; Sleeter & Owuor, 2011). A wide range of professional development
opportunities is also provided to extend in-service teachers’ understandings of diversity
issues (Harper & de Jong, 2004; Knight & Wiseman, 2006; Minaya-Rowe, 2004; Ray 2009;
Reyes 2002; Saunders & Goldenberg, 2010). However, the notion that the majority of
teachers are unprepared for teaching students with diverse backgrounds is a prevalent one in
the United States (Florio-Ruane, 2001; NCES, 2002a, 2002b; Nieto, 1992, 2010; Sleeter,
2001), and it is linked with the perception that elementary teachers in the United States come
from relatively homogeneous linguistic and cultural backgrounds and need to learn more
about knowledge of other cultures (Sleeter, 2001). Researchers further pointed out that most
teachers’ attitudes toward and responses to ESL students’ “inappropriateness” are quite
similar especially when students’ behavior goes against teachers’ expectations or mainstream
norms, although students come to school with all kinds of diversity (Cuban, 1989a; Kliebard,
1986; Lee, 2004; Shultz, Florio & Erickson, 1982). These views complicate the assumptions
behind teacher homogeneity and student diversity in American schools (Ducharme, 1993),
and suggest that teachers do not pay attention to ESL students as unique individuals (Fu,
2010) but focus “on multiculturalism more generally” (Kiger and Manning, 1997, p. 641).
Indeed, researchers have demonstrated that teachers’ knowledge of teaching diverse student
populations is still in the formative stages (Jiménez, 1997). Even more critical is the fact that

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teachers’ increased awareness of diversity issues might not necessarily lead to (proactive)
changes in language and literacy instruction (Guillaume, Zuniga-Hill, & Yee, 1998).
In addition, previous research on teachers’ awareness of student diversity focused
nearly exclusively on their knowledge of other cultures (Castro, 2010), than how to unravel
the complexity of diversity issues in class. As the previous chapter showed, from Deb and
Kelly’s point of view, three layers of student diversity including intercultural diversity,
intracultural diversity and human variability were interrelated with each other and impacted
ESL literacy instruction together. Certainly knowledge of other cultures played a profound
role in helping teachers to work with diverse student populations, but it seems unlikely that
this was the only issue at play. Thus, teachers’ inability to unpack the complexities of student
diversity would severely hamper their ability to apply their knowledge of diversity to
classroom practices. Yet it was of particular interest that previous studies did not draw
attention to how teachers tended to explore the complexity of student diversity.
In this chapter, I investigate both ESL teachers’ recollections of, reflections upon, and
implicit theories about their prior explorations of student diversity. I also document the formal
interventions explicitly intended to help them understand and teach diverse student
populations. The goal of this chapter is to identify and clarify common difficulties ESL
teachers, in particular, face when getting to know diversity issues in terms of their exploration
of ESL students’ diversity, interventions of the local community, and involvement of ESL
students’ parents. This chapter also aims to determine the relative influence of ESL student
diversity on ESL literacy instruction, and to provide insights for teacher educators to develop
more effective professional development programs committed to deepening teachers’
understanding of diversity issues as well as developing a responsive, democratic, and equal
learning environment for all students.

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Starting Point of ESL Student Diversity Exploration
Deb and Kelly used enrollment surveys that they collected from ESL students’
parents before classes began as the main reference for their preliminary exploration of ESL
student diversity. ESL students’ performances on federally and state-mandated assessments
(e.g. ELPA) together with district curricula and general Grade Level Standards provided
additional information to guide both teachers’ explorations of ESL student diversity,
especially ESL students’ English language and literacy proficiency. This following of scripts
varied with teachers’ experiences or familiarity with ESL students’ cultural and linguistic
backgrounds in general. Sometimes Deb and Kelly relied heavily on assessment reports, ESL
policies and state curricula, and whatever information ESL students’ parents spelled out in
the survey (e.g., students’ language proficiencies, intensity of using English at home, and
schooling experiences in their home countries and/or in the United States), and then used the
information as a guide to group students into appropriate ESL classes and design literacy
lessons accordingly. Sometimes Deb and Kelly referred to their own linguistic and cultural
knowledge, and reevaluated ESL students’ assessment results and the enrollment information
provided by their parents, especially when they were familiar with a certain culture or
language that ESL students brought to class. In either case, the teachers suggested that district
curricula and Grade Level Standards were the baseline for them to determine whether they
should extend their exploration of student diversity. It is quite obvious that policy has
determined the depth of Deb and Kelly’s exploration of student diversity although both
teachers realized the complexity and importance of student diversity in literacy instruction.
ESL student profile and language plan
Deb and Kelly’s exploration of ESL student diversity in RCES often started with the
English Language Student Profile and Language Plan form that ESL students’ parents were
required to fill out before their children’s enrollment (see Appendix D). A number of sections

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in the form were designed to help Deb and Kelly explore ESL students’ literacy-related
diversity, which included students’ ESL and EFL learning history, schooling experiences in
the United States and their home country, and background information about family members
currently living with ESL students (e.g. their nationality, language(s) spoken at home, level of
English proficiency). Through the enrollment form, Deb and Kelly were able to sketch a
picture of ESL student diversity in RCES. However, both teachers disclosed that they were
very cautious about and suspicious of the information that ESL students’ parents provided,
and further argued the importance of critically analyzing the information for drawing pictures
that were able to reflect ESL student diversity as it actually was in RCES.
Deb and Kelly often noticed that parents of ESL students tended to misinterpret the
purposes of the form, which led them to share invalid, inaccurate and sometimes false
information about their children’s academic history. For example, as part of the form, ESL
students’ parents, upon their children’s enrollment, were required to report how long their
children had studied ESL (and/or EFL) and how proficiently they were able to speak, read
and write in English (i.e. barely, good, and fluent). Deb and Kelly regarded this information
as one of the most important criteria for grouping students into appropriate ESL classes. At
the beginning of ESL students’ enrollment, Deb and Kelly had to rely on parents’
descriptions to ascertain ESL students’ language proficiency because the school (and school
district) only provided language and literacy assessments twice every academic year. ESL
students whose enrollment in RCES depended upon and varied with their parents’ date of
arrival in the United States often missed the fixed assessment dates. Deb and Kelly noticed
the constraints of the standardized assessment and parents’ report became the main (and
mostly the only) resource for them to evaluate students’ language and literacy proficiency.
However, both teachers later found out that parents’ descriptions sometimes failed to reflect
ESL students’ real language and literacy proficiency. Some ESL students who were grouped

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into advanced-level ESL class could barely follow teachers’ instructions. Kelly suggested
that these parents obviously did not share authentic information with the school. After
cautious communication with the parents, Kelly was shocked to find out some of them
reported misleading information on purpose. Some parents were concerned that teachers
would look down on their children if they had relatively low ESL proficiency. Some parents,
in light of their experiences in their native countries, misinterpreted advanced-level ESL
classes as those only targeting talented students. They assumed their children would be
treated as “good students” and receive “better instruction” as well as “more intensive
language support” in the advanced class. As a result, parents’ misunderstanding of the
concept of advanced-level classes led teachers to misplace ESL students, and thus inevitably
impeded the students’ language learning progress. Deb and Kelly were forced to take the
section regarding “students’ ESL proficiency” off the form. Accordingly, they then grouped
ESL students based on parents’ reports about their children’s formal language, literacy and
schooling history. Deb and Kelly’s reaction demonstrated their critical reflection during the
process of exploring student diversity. It also disclosed the constraints and inflexibility of
mandated tests.
In addition, Deb and Kelly pointed out that the form might conceal the complexity of
ESL students’ linguistic backgrounds. Deb argued that ESL students’ nationality might not
disclose the information about what languages ESL students used at home. In fact, since
some countries have more than one official language (e.g., Canada, India, South Africa), it
can be hard to predict ESL students’ language choice in light of their nationalities: some ESL
students might not necessarily speak any of their country’s official languages at home. For
example, ESL students from India might speak Hindi, Punjabi or English at home. Some
students in RCES were already multilingual before learning English in the United States. It is
quite common that ESL students, especially those from Africa, are able to speak more than

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one or two languages besides English. For instance, Deb pointed out ESL students from
Malawi usually spoke three languages: Chichewa, English and French. While nationalities, to
a certain degree, provide information about ESL students’ linguistic backgrounds, Deb and
Kelly argued that this kind of information might be misleading and sometimes was not
thorough enough for them to get a complete picture of ESL students’ linguistic backgrounds.
Deb and Kelly thus carefully distinguished ESL students’ nationalities from languages. They
revised the enrollment form so that it now requires ESL parents to submit more detailed and
accurate information regarding their children’s linguistic backgrounds, including what
language(s) they use at home now, in their home countries and during previous informal and
formal schooling (in both the United States and their home countries). Understanding the
complexity of ESL students’ linguistic backgrounds led both teachers to reflect on existing
enrollment forms, and take further action to improve the process of collecting information
about ESL students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Deb and Kelly’s care in gathering
additional information about students’ language experiences, and efforts they made to extend
their exploration of student diversity in ESL class, demonstrates their awareness of the
complexity of linguistic diversity. In the meantime, Deb and Kelly, with their cautious and
reflective investigation of students’ linguistic backgrounds, became actively involved in
revising existing administrative materials related to ESL education at RCES.
Guidance of educational policy
Both Deb and Kelly reported that federal ESL education regulations, state policies for
teaching ESL students, and district curricula guided their understandings of student diversity.
They suggested that for ESL student diversity it would not matter whether the student was of
Chinese or Korean or Mexican or German origin, and indeed, because of mandated
requirements of grade expectations for ESL students’ achievements, it would be impossible
for either teacher to make distinctions regarding ESL student diversity. While complaining

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about certain constraints of policies (e.g. report cards, inflexible test dates), Deb and Kelly
argued that school district curricula play a key role in teaching (or showing) them how to deal
with ESL students, especially when they themselves had limited knowledge of students’
cultural (or linguistic) backgrounds. In the meantime, as will be discussed below, Kelly was
confused about her role as part of diversity that had been intentionally ignored by policies.
Therefore, she was forced to conceal her own religious beliefs when exploring her students’
diversity.
Deb and Kelly argued that mandated policies set up boundaries for their explorations
of ESL student diversity. Both teachers proactively explored ESL students’ diverse
expectations about language and literacy learning when students’ expectations accorded with
mandated policies or advanced their learning to achieve grade expectations. Under these
circumstances, Deb suggested that she had responsibility to bridge the gap between the
requirements of the ESL curriculum and the students’ diverse needs.
At first, Deb did not equate ESL students’ literacy learning needs to their American
peers’. She tended to leave spaces for them to explore their own interests and needs while
prescriptively explaining her own and the school’s expectations to both ESL students and
their parents. For example, in a parent meeting, a parent from Taiwan felt anxious about her
child’s integrity. Whenever the child was asked about afterschool assignments, he mostly
said that teachers did not assign any homework. The mother was worried that the child was
lying to her because in Taiwan elementary students spent three hours on average doing
homework after school. Deb explained to the mother that in the United States teachers
seldom assigned afterschool homework for elementary students. However, the mother was
not relieved by this explanation. Instead, she suggested homework was important since
students need more practice for their academic achievement, and parents could also learn
what and how their children had been doing in school. Deb seriously considered the parent’s

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advice and adjusted students’ homework assignments. Afterwards, ESL students were
required to read the books they created in class to their parents to complete their in-class
activity. In addition, Deb set up a small library in her class, where students could borrow
books, tapes, CDs and even board games for the purpose of English language learning.
Besides filling out public checkout forms, Deb and Kelly required ESL students to develop
their own reading catalogue and record what books they borrowed from the library, and to
share the catalogue with their parents on a regular basis. Parents were then able to track their
kids’ reading activities through the catalogue.
These examples show that ESL students and their parents had various expectations of
teachers and the educational system in the United States. Although admitting the importance
of satisfying ESL students’ respective learning needs, Deb argued that helping ESL students
make progress towards grade expectations was “the No.1 task and responsibility for [an] ESL
teacher.” Kelly shared a similar viewpoint with Deb, and further argued that ESL teachers
should give ESL students’ academic achievement the highest priority:
So our basis of understanding is going to be learning English because everybody has
to know that…they have to know what is socially correct. They have to know what
they need to know to stay in that grade level, and [to] be able to perform. There are so
many things they have to know, so we really have to decide what's most important at
that point for that student's needs. And for all of the students, they need to learn
English. They have to, or they are not going to survive in the classroom. That's our
job, to get them to be able to survive [until they do] not need our help anymore, [and]
are able to stay in that classroom and learn all the things the other students will be
learning.
When both teachers thought about student diversity in relation to language and
literacy learning, student achievement came to them more readily than responsive instruction.
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Deb and Kelly’s responses to interview questions signaled that language and literacy were
foundational for learning in all content areas. Therefore, if ESL students did not gain or
achieve adequate proficiency in English to learn academic content, the teachers would not be
doing their job. Deb and Kelly were, after all, very aware of how policies shaped their
understanding toward ESL student diversity. When faced with divergence of views on
education, both teachers gave language and literacy learning, grade expectations and survival
skills the highest priority. Both ESL teachers emphasized the importance of helping students
achieve curriculum requirements, and such understanding served as their boundaries for
exploring diversity issues among ESL students. Deb and Kelly’s descriptions reaffirmed the
compelling arguments of previous studies in favor of the guiding roles of policies in
classroom instruction (Agee, 2006; Kjaer, 2004). Teachers conducted classroom practices
based on their own understanding of teaching, and tended to develop hybrids of their own
sense of effective practices and required policies (Florio-Ruane, 2002; Kersten & Pardo,
2007; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Deb and Kelly’s literacy practices in response to the guidance
of ESL policy also demonstrated their accountability in the process of school governance, but
they tended to avoid sharing their voices in the input (i.e. participating in choosing
appropriate assessment tools) and output (i.e. revising existing ESL program structure) of the
ESL education governance (Kjar, 2004)
Teachers’ critical reflection on ESL education
When reflecting on their language and literacy teaching history, Deb and Kelly found
political continuities mirrored a many-layered presence in schools. Often such layers
reflected waves of immigrants, the multicultural working environment of the United States,
and changing educational settings. Both teachers agreed that the changing demographics of
the ESL student population had been the rule, especially in the past decade in RCES. In the

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last ten years, Deb and Kelly have been faced not only with groups of ESL students with
diverse backgrounds, but also changing diversity among ESL students.
The demographics of ESL students enrolled in RCES had varied almost every year
recently. In the academic year of 2010-2011, ESL students from forty-seven countries on five
continents attended RCES. Among them, ESL students from China and Brazil were greatest
in numbers. Chinese ESL students accounted for 11 percent of the ESL student population.
Deb suggested that the composition of the ESL student population had been varying with
immigrant waves to the United States as well as the outreach programs of Midwest
Universities in their state. When Deb first started teaching ESL in the 1970s, most ESL
students came from Vietnam, and then Poland. ESL students from Pakistan comprised the
largest percentage of ESL student population in the 1980s through the beginning of the 1990s.
ESL students from South Korea were the largest group of ESL students in the early middle
1990s; by the year of 2000, though, Deb found that students from South Korea were no
longer the largest ELL population although their numbers had been stable since the mid1990s. Ten years ago no Chinese students studied in RCES unless they came from (or
through) Hong Kong and Taiwan. In the past five years, however, a large number of ESL
students from Mainland China had enrolled in RCES.
Another significant fact concerning ESL students’ demographics is that the ESL
student population in RCES now is much more diverse than that of ten years ago. Deb found
that collaborations among universities and research centers worldwide brought students and
scholars to Midwest University from all around the world. Due to the strong affiliation of
RCES with the University, the ESL student population accordingly grew larger and more
diverse. In addition, according to Kelly, some ESL students in RCES nowadays possess dual
citizenship due to the dramatic increase in global immigration in past decade (Castles &
Miller, 2009; De Haas, 2010; Portes & Rumbaut, 2006). Additionally, although Deb and

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Kelly both noticed the changing demographics among ESL students, Deb apparently knew
more detail of the changes in the past fifteen years than Kelly, due to her longer ESL teaching
history in RCES.
Teachers’ multicultural experience with ESL students
Deb and Kelly’s multicultural experiences and formal and informal ESL teaching
experiences profoundly shaped their exploration of diversity issues in ESL class. Their
similar experiences such as living in multiracial neighborhoods, traveling around the world,
assisting ESL learners of different ages for a wide range of purposes, and teaching ESL
courses in K-12 schools, church or the continuing education center, were factors that resulted
in their history and current nature of caring about ESL students, curiosity about different
cultures, sensitivity to ESL students’ diverse (academic and life) needs, and willingness to
learn about new languages and cultures. Conspicuously absent from the list was any mention
of the religious diversity that Kelly herself brought into ESL class.
Deb proclaimed herself as a lifelong learner of cultures, and displayed a disposition
toward thoughtfulness and reflection that led to her openness to diversity and motivated her
to adjust classroom practices. Deb’s interests in others’ cultures could be traced to her work
with military wives forty years ago:
I think I first came in contact with a multitude of second language learners when my
husband was in the military and I was asked to help [foreign-born] Navy wives make
adjustments or become more self-sufficient so that their husbands would be freed up.
And in the beginning, I worked with some wives who needed to get a driver's license
or needed to find the doctor or dentist in the community and they came from you
know, the Philippines or Asia or other countries where they had met their husbands. I
think that was a contact I enjoyed.

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This experience drove Deb to realize that ESL learners’ educational backgrounds
were diverse “in every possible way” and she “had to make great adjustments in teaching” at
times. It was also true that Deb displayed a high degree of “sympathy for the struggles of
ESL learners.” That tendency continued in her ESL teaching in formal educational settings.
That is, making every ESL learner feel safe, comfortable and protected was crucial in her
definition of a successful ESL class, and a caring learning community was significant to
effective ESL learning.
Deb conceded that cultural learning contributed to her professional growth and made
it possible that personal enjoyment occurred at the same time. She pointed out that learning
from ESL students was not a burden but a benefit for ESL teachers. Through working with
ESL students, she was able to “meet people from all over the world and learn about their
culture firsthand,” and enjoy “traveling without the hassle of packing a suitcase.” This
opportunity ensured that Deb could enhance her understanding of ESL student diversity in
situated context in an enjoyable and meaningful manner.
Similar to Deb, Kelly had numerous opportunities for helping new immigrants in the
neighborhood where she grew up, teaching one-on-one ESL courses for refugees in church
and teaching EFL courses for adult learners while she was living in Kosovo. However,
compared to Deb’s experience with ESL learners in a variety of educational settings, Kelly
mostly gained her multicultural experience from church missions besides her formal ESL
teaching in elementary schools. Kelly’s extensive personal and professional experience in
multicultural settings generally prepared her to develop a wide range of pedagogical
approaches for teaching diverse students. It was true, however, that Kelly brought a necessary
element of diversity into the school, but most schools had not found a way to benefit from her
presence as part of diversity. In spite of the fact that school curriculum promoted
multicultural education for ESL students at personal, instructional and institutional levels,

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Kelly felt she was left out as part of diversity in the school. Kelly stated that policy prevented
her from talking about or doing anything related to her religion. Teaching from the
perspective of her religion was completely forbidden in RECS or any other schools that Kelly
had worked at. Kelly was confused and disappointed that her religious beliefs (and other
teachers’ religious beliefs) were excluded from multicultural education. As Kelly explained:
…We are learning about all of these cultures and leaving mine behind…I'm a
Christian, and I feel like my values are being left out because we have to learn about
everyone else's. You know, we're learning about Muslims, we're learning about
Hanukkah and we're learning about Kwanzaa. Whatever happened to the birth of
Christ is going away. And that's what I grew up under. I feel like it's taken a full circle
and now we're not allowed to talk about Christ. Yet the Muslims and the Jewish can
share theirs. And the Africans can share theirs. Christians…is going to a place that
nobody knows anymore because we're learning about all of these other ones. And I'm
not saying we shouldn't learn about other people's cultures. It's just I have one too.
Apart from understanding divergence and respecting for diversity among ESL
students, Kelly pointed out the extent to which she could share her culture and religious
beliefs “mattered to [me].” She thought everyone being sensitive to each other’s culture and
religion was the basis of “an equal society.” However, she was not allowed to share her
beliefs in class. She was warned by her colleagues if she did so or even “said these things”
she would be criticized for “pouring out personal agenda to teach [ESL students] her way of
thinking.” For the Christmas unit, Kelly was not allowed to decorate her class with a
Christmas tree or any ornaments related to Jesus. She could only teach ESL students about
Christmas traditions such as food, colors and some songs. Kelly argued that Christmas was
mentioned everywhere including TV commercials, and she was confused why she was not
allowed to celebrate the holiday or share knowledge of Christmas with ESL students from a

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Christian perspective. She also suggested that Christmas was originally a religious holiday,
and her sharing would provide ESL students with “authentic knowledge of Christmas.”
Kelly’s description showed the perplexity of teacher as a cultural member in a multicultural
setting. She was suspected of carrying out religious acts in a secular educational setting – this
in spite of the fact that her students were encouraged to share and commit to their religious
beliefs in school. Although sharing strong similarities in understanding diversity issues in a
multicultural educational setting, Deb and Kelly seemingly held different attitudes toward the
fact that they were part of diversity in the class. To be more specific, when talking about her
own diversity, Kelly focused on religious beliefs while Deb seemed unaware of the diversity
that she brought into the ESL class.
Like the students, teachers brought their own unique linguistic, cultural, and religious
backgrounds to their classes, but their input of this knowledge was restricted by the school
policy. As with Gee (2000), I found that teachers’ understandings of themselves as members
of the multicultural classroom were assigned by authorities within institutions and depended
on how other people in a given context interpreted and interacted with them. In this case,
policies also guided Kelly’s understanding of diversity issues, and constrained their further
exploration of herself as part of diversity in multicultural settings. Because ESL teachers also
came to class with “historically accumulated and culturally developed” backgrounds and
knowledge as ESL students did, they were part of the diversity in ESL classes. But most
schools did not find a way to deal with teachers’ diversity. Teachers’ cultural (and/or
religious) presence was excluded on purpose from the inclusive, multicultural community
that the school intended to build.
Ongoing Exploration of Diversity Issues
Deb and Kelly relied heavily on scripts (e.g. language profile, assessment results) to
explore diversity issues when teaching new ESL students. After interacting with students for

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a while, both teachers started to adopt new strategies to extend their exploration of diversity
issues. However, both teachers still faithfully tried to help ESL students to meet Grade Level
Standards, as prescribed in the district curriculum for mainstream students. Policies and ESL
students’ performances toward the Grade Level Standards served as boundaries for ESL
teachers’ exploration of diversity issues. Mainstream teachers and ESL students’ parents
reinforced this message. Under the pressure of educational policies, Deb and Kelly favored
teaching strategies to improve ESL students’ academic performance over means to further
their exploration of diversity issues.
During this ongoing process, Deb and Kelly’s philosophies of seeking deeper
understandings of diversity issues began to diverge. Deb, who called herself a “surgeon,” still
relied heavily on her own linguistic and cultural knowledge or attempted to learn new
knowledge when she was not familiar with the linguistic or cultural backgrounds that certain
students brought into ESL class. She believed that teaching ESL students with diverse
backgrounds was like doing brain surgery. According to Deb, the brain is the most
complicated and delicate organ of a human being, and brain surgery required doctors to have
extensive knowledge of the brain as well as exquisite surgical skills. Likewise, Deb suggested
that it was important for teachers to gain as much linguistic and cultural knowledge about
ESL students as possible. When applying the knowledge to ESL classroom practices,
teachers, as emphasized by Deb, should be alert to the nuances of the knowledge under
different contexts. In contrast, Kelly described exploring ESL student diversity as “jumping
into a fish bowl,” which was not impossible but took repeated practice, including things such
as adjusting “jumping angles” and “starting points.” Kelly emphasized the importance of
trying out different strategies and reflecting on each trial. Kelly further argued that teachers
should not expect to find one “best practice for all ESL students” since the shape or size of
each bowl usually differed from the others. Only after analyzing and understanding the

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relationship among the factors leading to each success were teachers able to find a way to
jump into fish bowls of different sizes. Although Deb and Kelly used different metaphors to
describe the complexities of ESL student diversity and responsive instruction, they both
agreed that exploring student diversity was an ongoing process. They used quite similar
strategies to explore and unpack the complexities of diversity in ESL classes and keep
themselves updated with diversity issues in multicultural settings that included
communication and collaboration with ESL students’ parents, learning from ESL students,
participation in various professional development activities and reading extensively.
Collaboration with ESL student parents
Just as a number of factors can ease or impede teachers’ exploration of diversity
issues in ESL class, parents’ interventions also play a significant role. At the top of the list
are parents’ initiatives to communicate with teachers. The relative absence of parents’
initiatives had been linked to teachers’ misinterpretations of ESL students’ learning needs
and progress and parents’ hidden expectations of schools. By the same token, parental
involvement had long been regarded to be a key resource for teachers to explore diversity
issues across cultures, to communicate with students especially when they had limited
knowledge of English, and to extend knowledge regarding ESL students’ diverse learning
needs. However, both ESL teachers found that, coupled with their reluctance to share, ESL
student parents’ misinterpretations of American educational norms complicated teachers’
exploration of diversity issues among ESL students.
Deb and Kelly paid close attention to parents’ understandings and expectations of
literacy teaching and learning. As Deb pointed out, ESL literacy was a result of “a joint
consult with the ESL teacher, the classroom teacher and the parents.” However, both ESL
teachers found that, similar to their children, ESL students’ parents also tended to interpret
literacy education in light of their own experiences. For example, in a meeting with parents

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from Taiwan, Deb and Kelly shared their observations of the student’s progress. Kelly told
the parents “Rick has been making good progress in writing…we are requesting a reading
specialist for him [to gain extra assistance with his reading development].” The parents
nodded and showed their appreciation for Deb and Kelly’s “care” about their son’s progress.
However, the following morning, Deb and Kelly received an email from the father who was
deeply worried about his son’s progress because he was assuming that only students with low
IQs needed extra help from reading specialists. Both ESL teachers were surprised at the
parents’ misinterpretation, and initiated another meeting with the parents. After discussing
the concept of “reading specialist” with Deb and Kelly, the parents finally understood that the
purpose of the reading specialist was not to categorize their son into a low-performance
group but to offer more intense reading assistance for improving their child’s literacy
performance. Although the parents’ different understanding and interpretations of literacy
education resulted in unnecessary worries about their children’s learning progress, Deb and
Kelly afterwards showed their appreciation of the parents’ proactive intervention, and
considered it as a reliable resource to reflect parents’ (and quite possibly children’s)
understanding of and responses to literacy teaching.
Deb and Kelly further suggested that parents’ intervention was critical for them to
discover parents’ expectations for literacy teaching and learning. For example, Deb and Kelly
suggested that parents’ expectations varied with the length of their intended stay in the
United States. ESL teachers could not possibly predict parents’ expectations for literacy
instruction if they failed to disclose them, as reported by Kelly:
Sometimes Chinese parents come for a year and they want their children to learn as
much oral language as they possibly can, and are less focused on the reading and
writing because they understand the deficiency of their child in really communicating

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in that language, versus a parent of a child who has come here to live forever, they
really have to catch up on their reading and writing and to progress through the grades.
It was quite obvious that parents’ expectations were not necessarily in accordance
with those of schools. Only with parents’ input were ESL teachers able to recognize ESL
students’ diverse learning needs. Kelly argued that knowing “what ESL students and their
parents wanted [from American schools]” was especially important for exploring diversity
issues among ESL students who intended to stay in the United States for only a short term.
Deb pointed out that this group of ESL students aimed to learn academic knowledge and,
more importantly, to gain more extensive life experience through studying abroad. Deb and
Kelly’s joint description of parents’ involvement showed that educational expectations went
beyond cultural boundaries, and teachers could explore territories other than cultures for
student diversity related to language and literacy education. Obviously, ESL students brought
both diverse learning styles and new learning needs and expectations. Unfortunately, Deb and
Kelly both pointed out that the school did not offer any assistance for them to deal with the
changing and complicated expectations.
In addition, parents’ interventions not only contributed to Deb and Kelly’s familiarity
with a particular culture or group of ESL students, but also to motivating them to analyze
diversity issues across cultures. Kelly referred ESL teaching as “an exchange of knowledge,”
and suggested that she had learned extensive cultural knowledge as well as diverse
worldviews from ESL students’ parents. Kelly was amazed at how differently people lived
around the world, and her view of ESL teaching changed as her knowledge of other cultures
expanded. Therefore, when she noticed that ESL students did not respond to her teaching as
expected, Kelly did not jump to a quick conclusion. Instead, she first applied the knowledge
that she learned from the parents to the current case, analyzing and listing possible reasons
for and solutions to the issue. For example, at the beginning of this semester, a Pakistani girl

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enrolled in RCES and started her first class with Deb and Kelly. Before the class, the girl’s
parents kindly reminded Kelly that their daughter might not have good manners sometimes,
and she tended to ignore others when being greeted or talked to. The parents were frustrated
because they had tried every means they could think of to correct their child’s behavior, but
in vain. Kelly observed the little girl for several classes, and found she was polite, well
behaved and mostly productive when required to finish the task independently. The girl did
not seem collaborative or responsive when doing team projects. Based on Kelly’s previous
experience, Asian girls were usually more comfortable working with other girls, so Kelly
grouped the Pakistani girl with other girls. However, the new grouping did not work out as
usual. In this circumstance, Kelly did not give up or jump to the same judgment as the parents.
On the contrary, she kept seeking other possibilities while encouraging other students to play
with this girl. Unfortunately, the girl still seemed subject to changing moods and did not
show too much progress in courtesy. One day, when Kelly happened to talk about the health
system in Pakistan with another ESL student’s parent, she was surprised to learn that most
infants did not go through a hearing screening test when they were born. Kelly then asked the
girl’s parents’ permission and took the girl for a hearing test. It was discovered that the girl
had lost 80 percent of her hearing in one ear and 40 percent in the other. The little girl got her
first pair of hearing aids, and her “courtesy problem” was accordingly resolved. Since then,
ESL parents were asked to report their children’s health history as part of the enrollment
process.
Inviting parents’ intervention was a fundamental strategy for exploring diversity
issues as other than peripheral. It is hardly a coincidence that parental involvement has been a
resource center for teachers to get to know ESL students. It was not implausible to suggest
that teachers develop knowledge of student diversity through viewing parents’ responses to
the imperatives of forms in the realm of education. In addition, both teachers’ analyses of

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parental involvement showed that they were able to apply knowledge of a particular culture
to the exploration of others that might share relatively similar features or symbolism in their
cultural (or social) behaviors.
Learning from ESL students
Deb and Kelly admitted that active interaction with ESL students led to increasing
sensitivity to diversity issues in RCES. In spite of showing excitement and proactive
involvement as culture learners, both teachers expressed their frustration with being alienated
from the learning community and losing power as authority figures due to their limited or
lack of knowledge of ESL students’ first languages. Deb and Kelly further showed their
desire for learning more foreign languages to communicate with ESL students and intervene
in student-student communication and interaction in a more effective way. Deb and Kelly
suggested that they were able to receive firsthand information of student diversity through
communicating with ESL students. However, language obstacles sometime impeded the
channel of information exchange between ESL students and teachers.
Under these circumstances, Deb referred to herself as an “outsider” in the class: ESL
students with similar linguistic backgrounds in the same ESL class talked with each other in
their first language, and the teachers were not able to decode what they were talking about.
For example, both Deb and Kelly established an English-only policy in their ESL class. They
allowed an exception only when an ESL student could not express themselves in English, and
the student was then allowed to ask their peers for help in their first language. Deb and Kelly
regarded the exception as an opportunity for using ESL students’ first language to help their
second language development. In several classes, I witnessed some ESL students abusing this
policy, but neither teacher noticed the students’ misbehavior. For example, in an advanced
ESL class, when five Chinese students, two boys and three girls, were independently working
on their essays with the given topic “my school”, one boy did not know how to express “课外

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活动时间 （kè wài huó dòng shí jiān, break or recess)” in English. He asked Deb whether he
could ask his peers for help. Instead of giving permission immediately, Deb took out the
boy’s vocabulary book4, and suggested that he look for the vocabulary in the book first. The
boy searched in the book for a while, but still could not figure out the right expression. Then,
Deb allowed the boy to ask his peers in Chinese. The boy asked one of the girls about the
expression for “课间活动时时间.” The little girl then asked the boy whether he referred to
shorter or longer breaks. The boy was confused because in his hometown, the length of the
breaks between classes was the same. The girl came from a metropolitan city in China. In her
school, they had ten-minute break between two classes, and after two consecutive classes,
they usually had a twenty-five minute recess. The differences suddenly grabbed the interest
of all of the Chinese ESL students, and they started to debate issues concerning regional and
educational discrimination in China. Deb did not notice that the discussion among Chinese
ESL students had gone off on a tangent at first because she had limited knowledge of Chinese.
She did not intervene in their discussion until she noticed the boy raised his voice. Deb was
disappointed that this group of ESL students violated the English-only policy in her class, and
argued that she could manage the class better if she knew more Chinese. In this small
learning group, ESL students with more advanced English proficiency temporarily took over
the responsibility of guiding their peers without teachers’ intervention. Deb (and Kelly)
automatically became passive witnesses to interaction among ESL students. Obviously, the
language barrier prevented Deb from effectively participating in the learning community with
her ESL students (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Vygotsky (1978) argued that students construct
sophisticated and effective learning through interaction with mature learners. Deb understood
the importance of her intervention in ESL students’ cognitive development, and felt
uncomfortable that she was an illiterate outsider who lost the guidance role in ESL class.
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
4

Every ELL in RCES is required to make a vocabulary book for their ESL class.
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In addition to being challenged in their role as the guide (or authority) in ESL class,
Deb and Kelly found language barriers between themselves and ESL students led to their
struggles with the complexity of diversity issues in many ways, including how to address
ESL students’ diverse responses to instructions, how to communicate with ESL students who
had zero knowledge of conversational and academic English, and how to encourage ESL
students with limited English knowledge to express ideas in class. Kelly suggested that these
issues were strikingly salient, especially when teaching newcomers. For example, Kelly read
the book My Valentine’s Day to five ESL students in an entry-level ESL class. During the
reading, Kelly looked at a Mexican student from time to time, intending to make sure that the
boy followed the story. Most of the time, the boy looked into Kelly’s eyes while nodding his
head politely. In light of the boy’s body gesture, Kelly assumed that he understood the story.
However, when asked about the popular colors for valentines, the boy looked confused, and
could not understand the question. Kelly then realized that the boy’s body gesture conveyed
the wrong message, and teachers should not judge a student’s comprehension “simply
through their body gesture or response to yes-no questions.” Due to teachers’ limited
knowledge of ESL students’ native languages, the teacher had to be cautious about reading
ESL students through their body gestures. Under the circumstances, since language could not
be used as a communication medium, achieving mutual understanding between teacher and
ESL students called for other interventions5.
Confronted with the challenges of language barriers, Deb expressed her desire for
“know[ing] every kid’s language and know[ing] what they want to learn.” Kelly expressed a
similar desire “in a real ideal world, I could speak every language that the child does.” Deb
and Kelly felt English language lost its power in terms of transferring knowledge, exchanging
ideas, and building relationships in a multilingual class. In general, both teachers exhibited a
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
5

The interventions and procedures will be discussed in the Instruction section.
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strong desire to become speakers of minority languages, and suggested that the most effective
way to communicate with ESL students was through using their own languages. Nevertheless,
this means of diversity exploration disclosed both teachers’ “frustration” and “lack of
confidence” especially when they felt incompetent to serve ESL students (USDE, 2012).
Professional development opportunities
As ESL teachers, Deb and Kelly were required to participate in a series of
professional development activities. In those workshops, many assumed that teachers had
very limited knowledge of ESL education policy, multicultural education, and ESL
assessment. Although generally holding positive attitudes toward professional development
activities, Deb and Kelly suggested that those workshops were typically less approachable or
helpful than others. On the contrary, they showed their particular interests in workshops
focusing on differentiated instruction and designing language and literacy learning materials.
Both ESL teachers’ preferences for particular types of professional development activities
suggested they needed not only assistance in exploring diversity issues but also with practical
teaching strategies that could be adapted to use in multicultural classes.
Deb and Kelly suggested that knowledge of ESL assessment methods, culturallyresponsive pedagogy, and other cultures and languages was crucial for ESL and literacy
teaching in a multicultural setting, but the aforementioned knowledge was insufficient for
exploring diversity issues. Both teachers believed that ESL students, regardless of their
cultural backgrounds, were similar to mainstream students in the United States in that they
had multiple intelligences, learning demands and curves, as well as varying responses to
different teaching strategies. Holding the belief that American students’ backgrounds (e.g.,
family socioeconomic status) were as diverse as their ESL peers, Deb and Kelly suggested
that workshops regarding how to design, initiate and conduct differentiated instruction were
helpful for them to learn how to identify, and thus respond to, ESL students’ diverse needs.

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Deb pointed out that the most inspiring and pragmatic workshops were those that helped her
with selecting and creating language and literacy teaching materials that could be used for
any student population. Those workshops seemed particularly helpful for Deb to start with
new ESL students as regards their diversity. For example, Deb learned from a workshop
about how to encourage ESL students to express their ideas through other means besides
speaking and writing. As described by Deb, ESL students could draw, sing, read aloud, or
write their responses in ESL class. In other words, the workshop inspired Deb to seek a wide
range of opportunities for communicating with ESL students.
Furthermore, both teachers noticed that ESL students came to class with multiple
issues, and wanted professional development opportunities that helped them to unpack the
complexity of diversity issues. On the one hand, Kelly was eager to participate in workshops
that guided her to “figure out exactly what those issues might be” and to “put resources
behind it [those issues]”. On the other hand, Deb had a strong desire to learn what kind of
diversity ESL students brought to school as well as how to get access to student diversity:
I would like to attend a workshop that helps us sort it [the complexity of student
diversity] out. (If the) student doesn't acquire it at this time, what is the reason? … If
they're not picking up on shapes of letters, is it spatial? Is it a language-processing
problem? Is it a dyslexic problem? How do we address that? Without attaching labels,
it can sometimes be difficult to find the right resources. Unless you hate to over-label
because that sometimes prohibits broader thinking.
Although emphasizing learning practical teaching strategies, Deb and Kelly understood that
there was no one best practice for teaching all ESL students. They were therefore interested
in learning teaching strategies that could be tried out in their ESL classes, and understood the
importance of contextualizing those strategies.

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Moreover, Deb and Kelly pointed out that experiential learning opportunities
deepened their understanding of diversity issues, especially of other cultures and ESL
students’ unexpected behaviors. Kelly shared how teaching abroad in China nurtured her
sensitivity to ESL student diversity and led her to reflect on her role as a white American
teacher. Kelly joined a university-sponsored ESL/EFL teaching program in China for two
months, and described it as the most eye-opening experience of her life. Before teaching EFL
in a Chinese college, Kelly participated in a six-week long workshop on Chinese culture
offered by Midwest University. The workshop was intended to enrich teachers’ knowledge of
China including Chinese history, culture, language, and the Chinese educational system.
Kelly said that this workshop was helpful in “painting a big picture of China” but she could
not understand some parts of the picture until she actually started teaching in China. For
example, Kelly first assumed that the workshop instructor was exaggerating Chinese people’s
enthusiasm for learning a foreign language when stating China was the largest Englishspeaking country in the world. However, after teaching and living in China for a while, Kelly
discovered that English was a required course in most Chinese universities. College students
in China were under great pressure to pass the College English Test (CET), the result of
which determined whether undergraduates, regardless of their majors, were qualified to
obtain a bachelor’s degree. Besides being amazed by the popularity of English in China,
Kelly was also surprised to find that EFL teaching and learning in China is focused on skills
to pass English tests rather than the communicative functions of English. Kelly’s observation
motivated her to advocate rich communication and interaction in English for Chinese ESL
learners in RCES. Moreover, such acts illustrated Kelly’s continual and reflective exploration
of ESL student diversity and its influence on her design of ESL literacy lessons. Kelly’s
successful experience in China further inspired her to proactively seek other international

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experiences. In the past few years, Kelly had participated in three teaching abroad programs,
and taught adults EFL in China, Kosovo and South Korea.
Unlike Kelly, Deb did not attend any study abroad programs for professional purposes.
However, she has extensive multicultural and international experience. Deb emphasized that
her traveling experience was the most important factor for helping her to understand and
explore diversity issues in RCES, and suggested that living in other cultures was more
powerful than learning knowledge from print sources. Through activities such as trying
exotic foods and communicating with local people, Deb was able to gain first-hand
information of the culture and then interpret ESL students’ behaviors in the local context. In
addition, Deb pointed out that learning from print sometimes led her to misinterpret ESL
students’ behaviors based on her own experience and beliefs while being disconnected from
students’ reality. Deb’s experiences in other countries not only extended her understanding of
other cultures but also motivated her to reflect on her existing knowledge of other cultures.
Personal readings
Deb and Kelly considered personal reading as a main resource to help them “stay
current” on diversity issues. These readings included but were not limited to refereed journal
articles, news, and novels. Deb and Kelly tended to extend their understanding through an
interdisciplinary system that viewed diversity issues in relation to theories of second
language development, knowledge of cultures, and foreign language learning. Eventually, the
readings evolved into discussions with other teachers, collaborations with people in the local
community, and communications with parents. These post-reading activities added powerful
ways of enhancing teachers’ understandings of diversity issues: critical reflection on readings
followed by possible adaptation of theories to local classrooms. In light of this on-going,
reflective activity, Deb and Kelly’s exploration of diversity issues continued to be opportune
with respect to ESL literacy instruction.

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Compared with Kelly, however, Deb was a critical reader. Deb was particularly
suspicious about culture books written by authors not coming from the area being discussed,
and thought “it's the white man's idea of what that culture is and sometimes it's not an
accurate portrayal.” Therefore, Deb joined a multicultural book club that was initiated by
local K-12 teachers and supported by the University. Every month, the book club assigned a
book about a certain culture to both teachers and people “from that area.” In the monthly
meeting, teachers had opportunities to discuss the authenticity of the book with an invited
speaker. For example, since I am Chinese, I was invited to read the book Where the Mountain
Meets the Moon, share my viewpoint on the book, and respond to teachers’ questions. During
the meeting, Deb raised several questions including how little girls were treated in China,
whether a character such as the Old Man of Moon existed in Chinese culture, and what
symbols in the illustrations were mostly used in Chinese children’s literature. When
describing the importance of finding out the book’s authenticity, Deb argued that gaining
knowledge of a certain culture or ethnic group merely from books would lead to biases: “I
think that some of the books that I grew up with, like Seven Chinese Brothers, and books like
that, are really cultural stereotypes. And if that's what you grew up with, you maybe haven't
examined it as carefully as you should.” Deb therefore argued that culture stereotypes would
prevent teachers “exploring further.” Introduced by Deb, Kelly also joined the book club.
Since the student population in RCES was quite diverse, Deb and Kelly often invited ESL
students’ parents to the meeting as volunteer speakers, which offered additional means of
promoting communication between ESL teachers and parents. According to Deb, parents
benefited from their participation through interacting with American teachers directly. More
importantly, Deb and Kelly suggested that parents’ participation played a key role in
discussing readings with reference to their children’s learning experience and concerns. Deb
and Kelly’s positive experience in the multicultural book club affirmed the results of previous

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studies which argued that that effective professional development should be ongoing,
collaborative and related to teachers’ own experiences (Buysse, Castro & Peisner-Feinberg,
2010; Minaya-Rowe, 2004).
In addition, Deb and Kelly emphasized the impact of extensive reading on
understanding diversity issues related to ESL and literacy instruction. Compared with Kelly,
Deb presented a more detailed description of useful readings. In exploring different aspects
of diversity issues in ESL classes, Deb highlighted the research-based articles on topics such
as second language development, foreign language education, and instructional practices that
were promoted in countries outside the United States. Deb argued that these readings
advanced her knowledge of what and how her students might have learned a foreign language.
In light of those readings, Deb was able to learn some new language-teaching strategies and
to keep herself updated with “the best language teaching practices around the world [not just
those promoted by American researchers].” Similar to Deb, Kelly also noted that “staying up
with world news is helpful because then you know what's going on in other countries at this
time.” Accordingly, Deb and Kelly read many types of materials, “not just professional
journals.” For example, Deb subscribes to magazines such as the New Yorker and the
Smithsonian Magazine. Deb and Kelly both like to watch international TV programs like
NHK World and CBC News. Kelly argued that all those activities contributed to advancing
her knowledge of diversity and keeping her up to date with current educational settings. As
Kelly said:
TV programs, domestic and international news, and magazines…helped us look at the
world today and what it is going to be when our students grow up in twenty, forty,
sixty years. What skills will we need for the future? And when you look at where the
world is going and the skills that you need, it's not always the skills that I have or was
taught.

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Apparently, the power of extensive reading is its ability to move teachers out of a
cycle of outdated knowledge without systematic and detailed training or study of new
information. Deb and Kelly’s extensive readings exploring diversity issues were akin to
applying a catalyst that sped up changes in instructional contents and practices.
Conclusion
Deb and Kelly’s explorations of diversity issues were in many ways unique to their
personal and professional experiences and religious beliefs, although they collaboratively
teach the same groups of ESL students in the same school. Despite those idiosyncrasies,
similar patterns of diversity exploration, the factors that complicated their preliminary
explorations of diversity issues, and the ways that they sought deeper understanding of
diversity issues existed for both teachers.
Deb and Kelly’s preliminary explorations of diversity issues started with the ESL
Student Language Proficiency Plan, the guidance of the required language and literacy
policies, and critical reviews of the changing demographics of ESL students in RCES,
coupled with their multicultural and ESL teaching experiences. However, Deb and Kelly’s
first impressions were often at odds with the reality of ESL student diversity. This mismatch
was evident in the discrepancy between ESL students’ language proficiency as reported by
their parents and their actual academic performance. In many cases, ESL students’ parents
failed to report vital information regarding their children’s language proficiency. In addition,
due to the inflexible dates of the semi-annual ESL screening assessment (e.g. ELPA, MEAP)
and students’ unpredictable enrollment dates, it was not unusual to see that ESL teachers had
to group students into different levels of ESL classes based on their length of prior ESL study
(as reported by their parents) instead of their actual language proficiency. The inaccurate
information about ESL students’ diverse linguistic backgrounds inspired Deb and Kelly to
seek other means to explore the complexity of linguistic diversity among ESL students. In

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like manner, policies including grade expectations of literacy and district curriculum rarely
suggested that ESL students differed from their American peers, and this fact helped explain
why Deb and Kelly tended to rely on the same grade expectations for mainstream students as
a baseline for exploring ESL student diversity.
Despite those constraints, Deb and Kelly’s personal and professional experiences with
ESL learners, immigrants and other foreigners registered their understanding of ESL student
diversity: caring, sensitivity to diversity, and intension to use student diversity as teaching
resources. While understanding the importance of student diversity, Kelly was confused by
the diversity that she herself brought into the multicultural settings. She did not receive any
assistance for addressing her confusion. Accordingly, when exploring diversity-related issues
and teaching in response to diversity, Kelly felt she had to purposefully ignore her own
diversity, especially religious choices, at both school and class levels. Unlike Kelly, Deb did
not pay close attention to and seemingly ignored the diversity that she brought into class.
In general, Deb and Kelly’s experience showcased that teachers’ positive and
proactive attitudes were critical in exploring diversity issues (Manyak, 2007; Saunders &
Goldenberg, 2010; Ray, 2009). Although Nieto (2010) suggested that in-service teachers,
especially those who had not acquired training to deal with diverse student populations in
teacher preparation programs, seek professional opportunities such as attending language and
literacy conferences, reading multicultural materials, and taking graduate courses, providing
teachers with authentic contexts for exploring diversity issues outside ESL classes is key to
successful professional development. In the following chapter, I will present Deb and Kelly’s
own nuanced description of diversity issues in relation to literacy practices in their ESL
classes.

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CHAPTER 5
RESPONSIVE ESL LITERACY INSTRUCTION IN ESL CLASS
The key principle of literacy education, from a socio-cultural perspective, is that
regardless of students’ backgrounds, their literacy learning process is intrinsically and
profoundly social (Au, 1998; Cummins, 1994; Delpit, 1988; Duff, 2001; Genishi & Dyson,
2009; Miller, 2000). Acknowledging the importance of literacy education responding to
students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds, some educators have further proposed
culturally responsive pedagogy for teaching students with diverse backgrounds, and
suggested creating student-centered and equitable learning environments that identify, respect
and nurture the different cultures that students bring into classrooms (Banks, 2001; Gay,
2000; Ladson-Billings, 1992, Lipman, 1995). Teachers are expected to initiate “instruction
consistent with the values of students’ own cultures and aimed at improving academic
learning” (Au, 1993, p.13). Indeed, some researchers attribute ESL students’ poor literacy
achievement to the exclusion or limited use of their native language and culture in classroom,
and to the enforcement of ESL language, and mainstream behaviors and interactions that
prevail in American society (Au, 1998; Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2005).
However, as discussed in Chapter 1, in today’s multicultural classes, teachers are not
just attending to ESL students one by one. They are confronted with a group of students who
have different linguistic and cultural knowledge, diverse (and often incompatible) learning
preferences, and sometimes conflicting learning needs, and unique personality
simultaneously. Very few studies have examined how ESL teachers designed and
implemented literacy instruction for ESL students coming from more than one ethnic group.
In addition, there is reason to believe that possible mismatches (and sometimes conflicts) of
interests do occur in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms due to ESL students’
diverse preferences for learning. How teachers deal with student diversity determines the

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effectiveness of the guided practices and collaboration among students, and thus the
effectiveness of ESL students’ literacy learning (Vygotsky, 1978). In this chapter, I consider
student diversity not as something to be neglected, thereby unintentionally reducing and
neglecting its impacts on classroom practices, but as something that is inevitable, and which
can be the basis for initiating guided instruction and collaboration in class. This layer of
socio-cultural theory allowed us to purposefully reframe ESL student diversity as an
opportunity and foundation for responsive literacy instruction.
I continue the analysis of the impact of student diversity on literacy instruction by
shifting my attention to instructional practices and strategies in a multicultural classroom. I
begin this chapter with a discussion of specific instructional practices that Deb and Kelly
have designed and employed to help ESL students develop basic literacy skills. Next I
describe how instruction in meaning construction goes beyond the ESL class, and what
strategies Deb and Kelly use to teach ESL students to construct appropriate meanings in an
American context. In the final section of this chapter, I revisit pedagogy for teaching students
with diverse backgrounds and the potential of using student diversity as a teaching resource
in a multicultural educational setting.
Basic Literacy Skills
As discussed in Chapter 4, ESL students often have diverse prior language, literacy
and general learning experiences, multiple intelligences and different personalities. Therefore,
with regard to instruction of basic literacy skills in a multicultural classroom, Deb and Kelly
especially struggled with issues such as how to teach students with diverse ESL proficiencies,
how to incorporate ESL students’ diverse educational experiences, preferences and
proficiencies, how to ensure ESL students understand teachers’ directions, instructions and
demonstrations, and how to motivate them to speak out and share opinions in class. In their
attempts to deal with these issues, Deb and Kelly developed many different strategies for

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enacting discursive literacy instruction in response to the dynamics of diversity in their ESL
classes. In general, both teachers adopted the following activities to help ESL students
develop basic literacy skills: student books, entrance and exit oral surveys, and scaffolding
instructional language. Through repurposing these traditional activities, Deb and Kelly
invited all students to participate actively in literacy practices, and taught literacy with
student diversity.
Using student book
Deb and Kelly created a series of student books that motivate students to develop
basic language and literacy skills such as phonemic awareness, writing and speaking. Deb
and Kelly always selected topics from the Grade Level Standards as the themes of student
books, including the weather, shapes, plants, animals, festivals and life history. Regardless of
ESL students’ English language proficiency or grade level, all student books consist of three
parts: sentences or short paragraphs (with blanks), spaces for drawing pictures, and an
audience signature page. ESL students are expected to finish each student book in three steps:
filling in the blanks with appropriate vocabulary, drawing pictures to further share their
understanding of the sentences or paragraphs, and reading the book they have finished to
others in or out of school.
First, ESL students are expected to fill in the missing words in the book. The activity
of filling in the blanks involves ESL students’ skills of phonemic awareness, spelling, reading
and writing, comprehension of the sentences (or paragraphs) and applying knowledge of
vocabulary and syntax to a particular context. Vocabulary development is considered to be a
cornerstone in literacy learning (Proctor, Carlo, August & Snow, 2005). Deb and Kelly
suggested that it is particularly important to offer ESL students additional opportunities to
practice at developing their vocabulary to an appropriate level because of their diverse
experiences of phonemic awareness, and knowledge of phonological and spelling rules of

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their first or other languages (instead of English). When filling in the blanks with appropriate
vocabulary, Deb and Kelly can confirm students’ mastery of the focal vocabulary and
grammar. For example, in the student book Clothes (See Figure 3). Deb and Kelly intend to
help students learn vocabulary of clothing and accessories. While doing the student book
exercises, ESL students have opportunities to practice singular and plural forms of nouns and
verb tenses and changes. In addition, Deb and Kelly actively collaborate with mainstream
teachers, and carefully select book themes that are simultaneously taught in mainstream
classes. Thus, ESL students are able to receive more explicit instruction on the same content
they are studying in their other classes, have opportunities to interact with the content in both
mainstream and ESL literacy class, and practice vocabulary in a variety of contexts. The
process of thoughtfully choosing possible topics for student books also strengthens
collaboration between mainstream and ESL teachers, and further contributes to developing a
collaborative school culture in RCES. However, both Deb and Kelly pointed out that the
collaboration in this activity was usually initiated by ESL teachers, while mainstream
teachers only passively shared when requested.

Figure 3. Student Book Example: Clothes.

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Then, Deb and Kelly ask ESL students to draw pictures to show their understanding
of the sentences or paragraphs in each book. Deb suggests that drawing is a universal
language beyond words, and uses it as a stimulus for students to express their understanding
of the texts in a non-verbal way. Drawing became especially important when ESL students
had limited knowledge of English and were not able to report their progress to the teachers
verbally. Through students’ drawings, Deb and Kelly could identify whether they simply
recognized the words or understood the meaning of the print. For example, Deb and Kelly
created the book My Five Little Valentines for first graders. The book aimed to help ESL
students to learn vocabulary of colors, numbers, and adjectives of emotion. Upon completing
the first page of the book, students should know how to count to five, and how to spell
numbers from one to five (See Figure 4). On the second page, Deb and Kelly did not leave
any blanks in the sentences. Students were instructed to color the valentines according to the
description (See Figure 5). On the third page, all adjectives were left out. Students had to use
the valentines’ facial expressions as clues and fill the blanks with appropriate adjectives from
those that they had just learned (See Figure 6).

Figure 4. My Five Little Valentines: Page One.
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Figure 5. My Five Little Valentines: Page Two.

Figure 6. My Five Little Valentines: Page Three (For interpretation of the references to color
in this and all other figures, the reader is referred to the electronic version of this dissertation)
Deb and Kelly encourage students to make both verbal and non-verbal connection
with the reading materials. Visual formats such as drawing and coloring were justified as
evidence of students’ comprehension of reading materials, and were significant tools for Deb
and Kelly to assess ESL students’ learning, especially when students lacked the necessary
language knowledge to report their progress verbally. For example, when checking ESL
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students’ coloring the faces of little valentines on the second page, Deb and Kelly found that
some students failed to relate the word “pink” to the correct color. Instead, they colored the
valentines in orange. Through checking ESL students’ non-verbal responses, Deb and Kelly
were able to discover that some of them only mastered the spelling of the word and still
needed assistance to comprehend its meaning.
After filling in the blanks and drawing pictures, ESL students were required to read
their books to ten different people. ESL students were allowed free will to choose their
audiences. For example, possible audiences might be ESL teachers, other ESL students,
American peers in mainstream classes, classroom teachers, school administrators and staff
(e.g. janitors), and students’ family members. This task guided ESL students to practice
academic speaking skills through reading the student book aloud repeatedly. They also had
an opportunity for improving conversation skills since they were required to ask people to
listen to their reading and to sign their books. In addition, parents were invited (by their own
children) to be listeners for students’ books, thus monitoring their children’s learning
progress on a regular basis. Therefore, besides developing speaking skills, ESL students,
under the guidance of ESL teachers, expanded their literacy instruction boundaries to the
school and community levels, and they were able to get access to guided literacy practice
outside of the ESL classroom. However, as long as ESL students read the book to the
audience verbally, they would be considered to have finished the task. Deb and Kelly did not
give out any (verbal or written) guidance for the audience including how to give feedback to
the student’s reading (besides signing the book).
In sum, Deb and Kelly’s design of student books and their related assignments
obviously responded to their concerns of student diversity, and was rooted in three primary
components: explicit instruction in vocabulary in terms of spelling, phonemic awareness, and
phonological rules, careful assessment of ESL students’ vocabulary development through

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both verbal and non-verbal means, and building inclusive learning communities that
encourage ESL students to share their writing verbally with others. Deb and Kelly repurposed
the traditional literacy practices (i.e. drawing and reading to others) to help ESL students to
overcome new learning curves in a multicultural setting such as the mismatch between
vocabulary and objects (Richards, 1937) and communicative skills in English. Deb and Kelly
emphasized that ESL students’ literacy development was not driven by memorization of
language rules or vocabulary but led by their initiative to use those language and literacy
skills and willingness to connect with bigger community (e.g. mainstream class, school and
neighborhood). In addition to helping ESL students develop basic language skills such as
reading, speaking and writing, Deb and Kelly used the student book to scaffold the content
that ESL students learned in mainstream class, assess their understanding through means
other than language, involve parents in literacy instruction, and build up an inclusive learning
community in RCES. The inclusion only stayed at the stage that aimed to make ESL students
feel comfortable to share their work in a larger community. In this activity, neither Deb nor
Kelly spent efforts to develop an inclusive community critically responding to ESL students’
literacy performance.
Oral survey as routine activity
Deb and Kelly found that some ESL students did not have the opportunity to express
their ideas in either mainstream or ESL classes for a variety of reasons (e.g. limited English,
individual personality differences and large student-to-teacher ratios). However, some
mainstream teachers tended to consider ESL students’ lack of participation only as a culturerelated preference (Palmer, Chen, Chang & Leclere, 2006). Deb and Kelly pointed out that
culture is not the only reason that leads to ESL students’ less frequent in-class participation.
In general, ESL students are less motivated to participate due to individual personality
characteristics, lack of language to express their ideas (or understanding of the instructions),

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and relatively less sharing time granted by the mainstream teacher. In addition, Deb and
Kelly argued that teachers’ misassumption of students’ lack of sharing would significantly
impact ESL students’ language and literacy development in terms of effectively tracking
students’ learning, gaining feedback from students, involving students of all levels of ESL
proficiency in literacy learning, and identifying ESL students’ real learning concerns.
Therefore, Deb and Kelly designed and conducted oral entrance and exit surveys as routine
activities in their ESL classes. However, in this activity, Deb and Kelly managed student
differences by creating stable ability groups based on assessments of language proficiency
but not literacy knowledge and skills. The strong focus on sharing time offered relatively
equal learning opportunity for ESL students. It also resulted in Deb and Kelly paying less
attention to student diversity, or in other words, not teaching in response to student diversity.
Before every ESL class, Deb or Kelly would go to the mainstream classes to pick up
every ESL student. Guided by Deb or Kelly, ESL students lined up and walked together
toward the ESL class. The other teacher usually waited for the group beside the classroom
door, and greeted each ESL student one by one:
Student: “Good morning/afternoon, Ms. ***. Thank you for preparing for the class.”
Teacher: “Good morning/afternoon, ***. Thanks for being ready for the class.”
The teacher then asked students theme-based routine questions that varied with each group’s
English proficiency level. The theme-based questions for ESL students with entry-level,
intermediate level and advanced level English proficiency were respectively about: date and
time, weather and how they were feeling. For example, in an intermediate-level class, after
greeting Kenny (a third grader), Deb started to ask him about weather.
Deb: “What’s the weather like today?”
Kenny: “It’s sunny.”
Deb: “What was the weather like yesterday?”

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Kenny: “It was sunny, too.”
Deb: “Thank you, Kenny!”
In an entry-level class, ESL students were allowed to respond to Deb or Kelly’s questions
with the help of calendar or the paper clock standing in the corner of ESL classroom.
Kelly: “Good morning, Tom.”
Tom: “Good morning, Ms. Kelly.”
Kelly: “What day is today?”
Tom: “It is Monday.”
Kelly: “Thank you.”
At the same time, Tom pointed at the date on the calendar, and was then allowed to walk into
ESL class. Kelly then proceeded to ask Emily the question about time.
Kelly: “Good morning, Emily.”
Emily: “Good morning, Ms. Kelly.”
Kelly: “What time is it now?”
Emily: “It is 9:30 in the morning.”
Kelly: “Thank you.”
Emily then adjusted the paper clock to nine thirty, and then walked toward her seat. Ali was
then greeted by Kelly and asked what day tomorrow is. Although ESL students attending the
same ESL class would be asked questions around the same theme (i.e. date and time), the
questions were different from each other. Deb and Kelly’s strategy of involving a variety of
theme-based sentences in an oral survey not only offered all ESL students opportunity to
express ideas but also exposed different contexts to specify the conversation. In addition, the
questions of the oral entrance survey were relatively easy. ESL students would not be
“intimidated by those easy questions,” according to Deb. Given a particular amount of time
speaking with teachers, ESL students would not avoid participating in the activity or be
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worried about being interrupted by other ESL students. Furthermore, Deb and Kelly were
able to monitor every ESL student’s learning progress through their performance in this
activity. As the semester went on, the routine questions became more and more difficult, and
required of higher levels of vocabulary and more sophisticated sentence structure from the
students. Deb and Kelly also regarded the oral entrance surveys as an incentive for students
to review and share what they had already learned in ESL class with the teacher and other
ESL students in a public setting. Deb argued that most ESL students did not have any
opportunity to show what they had learned because of the larger student-teacher ratio in
mainstream classes. ESL teachers should make full use of smaller class sizes and encourage
ESL students to join the learning community in a proactive way.
Although sharing similarities with the entrance survey, the oral exit survey mainly
focused on the assessment of ESL students’ ongoing literacy learning. Five (or fewer)
minutes before the class ended, Deb and Kelly required the students to line up behind the
door, and then asked every ESL student a simple question related to the contents that they
had just learned. If students were able to address the question, they remained in the same
position in the line. If they were unable to respond satisfactorily, they were required to move
to the end of the line, and prepare to answer a new question. For example, by the end of an
advanced class focusing on the children’s book Mama, Where Are You From?, Deb and
Kelly asked the five ESL students to form a line, and asked them questions one by one.
Deb: “Kevin, which book did we read today?”
Kevin: “Mama, Where Are You From?”
Deb: “Thanks, Kevin. Lily, How many people are there in Mama’s family?”
Lily: “Five. Mom, dad, two brothers and a younger sister”
Deb: “Thanks, Lily. Abu, how does Mama tell you where she came from?”
Abu: “She described food, chores and family reunion.”

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Deb: “Thanks, Abu. Sarah, how did Mama keep food fresh?”
Sarah: “Sorry…”
Deb: “Johnny, can you help Sarah with this question?” (indicating Sarah should move
to the end of the line)
Johnny: “In the old fridge.”
Deb: “Thanks, Johnny. Sarah, what did Mama like to do as a child?”
Sarah: “[She liked] reading to the stuffed animal, skating, and playing with tadpole.”
Deb: “Thanks, Sarah.”
After all ESL students succeeded in answering a question, Kelly commented on their
performance and then introduced the plan for next class: “Thank you for being such great
learners. I’m very impressed by your attention to details and curiosity about other cultures.
We are going to learn more about your cultures tomorrow.” Deb and Kelly wrapped up the
class with comments on the students’ performances and a preview of the next class. Kelly
emphasized the importance of contextualizing and specifying compliments for ESL students.
Deb further pointed out that compliments were a significant part of instruction. ESL students
should know “what specific areas they made progress [in].” According to Deb, telling ESL
students that they did a good job in general does not help them construct meanings out of
compliments.
Deb and Kelly employed entrance and exit oral surveys as listening and speaking
exercises. ESL students were given equal opportunity to participate in the learning
community (Lave & Wenger, 1991). They were able to practice language and literacy skills
with teachers’ guided questions and the assistance from advanced learners (Vygotsky, 1978).
These activities also helped ESL teachers to assess students’ learning based on their real-time
responses, and to design or adjust following lessons based on these assessments that focus
primarily on basic comprehension questions. In light of ESL students’ oral sharing, Deb and

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Kelly avoided possible mistaken assumptions about their learning progress. However, most
questions that Deb and Kelly asked in a both entrance and exit surveys were those that aimed
to help ESL students develop language skills rather than literacy skills with which ESL
students were able to relate the questions to their person feelings or experiences.
Scaffolding how to use language to learn
Deb and Kelly both noticed that ESL students brought diverse linguistic and literacy
competencies to ESL class. ESL students’ diverse proficiency levels in English, development
of first language skills, and literacy knowledge complicated the process of teachers
conveying directions for tasks to the class. Deb and Kelly found that some students lacked
basic vocabulary to understand the directions; some knew the vocabulary but still did not
understand where to start with the task. Therefore, Deb and Kelly considered scaffolding the
language of task directions as an important activity for literacy instruction. They adopted
three main strategies to scaffold language that provides directions for completing tasks:
interpreting the directions with easy words and questions, inviting students to reiterate the
directions, and modeling tasks right after description.
Deb and Kelly found some ESL students were not able to finish a task because they
did not understand the task rules. According to Kelly, some ESL students knew “what
teachers were saying, but they didn’t understand what to do.” For example, in an advanced
class, Deb and Kelly asked ESL students to write about “something that happened during
Christmas break.” However, some ESL students came back to Deb and Kelly with confusion:
their family did not celebrate Christmas and “nothing happened in Christmas break.” Deb and
Kelly decided to break the prompt down. Kelly asked the students “you had two weeks off
from school, you must have done something.” However, some ESL students insisted that they
did not go anywhere and nothing happened. Deb and Kelly then broke the question down
“even more.” Deb and Kelly asked those ESL students a series of questions: “What is a

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moment that happened last week that you could put on paper? What did you do at that
moment? Who else was there at that moment?” Guided by Deb and Kelly’s questions,
students started “writing something in response to those questions.” Adopting the strategy of
“breaking it [the prompt] down again and again into small chunks until they [ESL students]
can handle bigger ones,” Deb and Kelly succeeded in guiding ESL students to produce
writing products related to their own experience.
In addition to breaking down task directions with easy words and questions, Deb and
Kelly always invited ESL students, especially relatively advanced learners in the class, to
explain the directions to their peers. In all ESL classes, Deb and Kelly allowed advanced ESL
learners to explain the directions to their peers in their native languages. When doing group
assignments (e.g. role play), teachers always asked the assigned group leader to repeat the
task requirements to his/her group members first. Deb and Kelly also encouraged all students
to reiterate the directions with guiding questions. For example, to help ESL students build
vocabulary about animals, Deb and Kelly created a vocabulary matching card game. There
were twelve cards in total, and each card was printed with an animal word that the students
had just learned. Deb and Kelly held another set of twelve cards on which were printed
images of the same animals. Deb first explained the game rules to the class:
Let’s play a card game. I will give you twelve cards. You will shuffle the cards by
yourselves. Then, I will show you a card with an animal’s image. You find the correct
word to match the image and show me the card. Let’s see who can find the most
matching cards.
Although most students nodded their heads and seemed to have understood Deb’s instruction,
Deb and Kelly did not start the game right away. Instead, Kelly attempted to check students’
understanding with several questions:
Kelly: “Danny, do you know how to shuffle the cards?”

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Danny: “No.” (while shaking his head)
Kelly: “Does anyone know how to shuffle the cards?”
Amy raised her hand, and volunteered to demonstrate. Kelly handed her the cards. Amy
showed the class how to shuffle the cards. While watching Amy’s demonstration, Danny
turned to me and murmured in Chinese: “I knew how to shuffle cards.” Obviously, Danny
was confused by the word “shuffle,” not how to do the action. Kelly then asked another
volunteer, Sharon, to model the game for the class. Kelly picked up an image card, and
Sharon succeeded finding the matching word card. Afterwards, Kelly asked the whole class
whether they understood the game rules. After getting positive feedback from all students,
Deb and Kelly started the real game. With the assistance of advanced learners in ESL classes,
Deb and Kelly enabled ESL students “to solve a task or achieve a goal that would be beyond
his unassisted efforts” (Wood, Bruner & Ross 1976, p. 90). The example also demonstrated
that ESL students’ language and literacy development were heterogeneous. Their language
proficiency did not necessarily predict their literacy proficiency, and vice versa.
As with Rodgers and Rodgers (2004), Deb and Kelly found that scaffolding literacy
instruction was important to student learning. For language and literacy instruction in ESL
classes, scaffolding the process of how to learn language was as important as how to use
language to learn because ESL students had different literacy learning experiences and might
not be familiar with the expectations of literacy tasks besides language barriers. In other
words, ESL students’ zones of proximal language and literacy development are dynamic and
diverse. Deb and Kelly revealed that scaffolding language used in providing directions for
tasks helped ESL students to build up new vocabulary and academic expressions, and to
make meaning out of sentences. In addition, when scaffolding task directions, Deb and Kelly
were able to assess ESL students’ learning in a more accurate manner, and to avoid
misinterpreting their learning curves.

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Meaning Construction
Deb and Kelly described literacy instruction in ESL class as a continuous process that
went beyond the basic literacy skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. The ultimate
goal of literacy instruction was to help ESL students use language and literacy skills to
construct meanings out of texts in school, at home and in larger community (Baker & Brown,
1984a, 1984b; Dyson & Genishi, 2011; Smagorinsky & Lee, 1999). Deb and Kelly pointed
out that two broad sets of ESL students’ diversity complicated their development of literacy
instructional strategies in terms of helping ESL student construct meanings in different
contexts: 1) ESL students attempting to use the same expression to indicate different objects;
and 2) students understanding the words but not being able to make appropriate meanings in
American contexts. Both ESL teachers respected students’ diversity of needs in their daily
lives, and considered it also to be a multicultural learning opportunity for them. However,
ESL students’ diverse interpretation of common concepts challenged literacy instruction in
ESL class in terms of scaffolding common concepts that most American students learned at
home, identifying common concepts that ESL students held different understandings of, and
helping them develop understandings of common concepts in American context.
Building the relationship between language and object
As previously discussed in Chapter 3, Deb and Kelly pointed out that ESL student
diversity could be found in their daily lives including differences in food, choice of clothes
and commitment to religious beliefs. This diversity led to language barriers in their
understandings of some common concepts in American daily life such as food and clothes.
However, these common concepts were mostly ignored in the school curriculum and Grade
Level Standards of literacy. Deb and Kelly decided to integrate content regarding daily life
into literacy instruction, to help ESL students to build concepts of daily life, and then to guide
them to relate language with experience.

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Deb and Kelly noticed that most ESL students’ life experiences were different from
their American peers, and that they lacked basic language knowledge of daily life. This lack
of experience also led to failure in using the language, constructing meanings, or
communicating with their American peers. To address this problem, Deb and Kelly attempted
to integrate language and literacy knowledge concerning American daily life into ESL classes.
Besides printed materials, several other sources were used to make language and literacy
learning of daily life more “meaningful, functional and useful,” according to Deb. For
example, Deb and Kelly designed a student book In the Snow to teach plural forms of nouns
and the concept of changes in the verb “to be” such as “’isn’t’ and ‘are’ in a concrete way.”
Before introducing the book to the class, Deb and Kelly laid out a variety of winter clothes
and accessories on the table: gloves, mittens, jackets, coats, scarves and sweaters. ESL
students were encouraged to touch and even try on accessories such as gloves and scarves.
Kelly pointed out that some ESL students had never seen snow or worn clothes such as coats
or jackets before. Deb considered this activity to be an opportunity to “relate [ESL students’]
language learning with authentic experience” and “to “prepare some ESL students for winter
that they had never had.” Winter clothes were displayed on the table throughout the week that
was focused on the concept of plural and singular. Students had easy access to the clothes
when they entered the ESL classroom, and were encouraged to practice the sentence pattern
of “this is…” and “these are…” with either teacher’s guidance:
… then I brought the clothing out and said, “What do you say?” “This is the sweater I
wear in the snow.” Someone else would have to pick up and they'd notice a glove on
the table, so they'd say “This is the glove I wear in the snow,” or ”These are the
mittens I wear in the snow.” So they have to use it…
Deb argued that language learning was just a pointless grammar activity if ESL
students did not know how to relate what they learned to the real world. In addition to

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clothing, Deb and Kelly found that most ESL students still had traditional food at home and
mostly lacked experience of American food. The ignorance of American food led to ESL
students’ confusion when they attempted to order lunch food at home and when reading some
children’s books. Therefore, Deb and Kelly took pictures of lunch food and uploaded them to
the ESL class website. They attempted to help ESL students construct experience of
American food with the assistance of pictures and description of the food (see Figure 7).

Figure 7. Snapshot of Online Lunch Menu at RCES.
These examples demonstrated that both Deb and Kelly understood that only when
language was associated with an experience (or object) were ESL students able to develop
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corresponding comprehension of the expression and then use the language (Richard, 1937).
In many cases, ESL students’ diverse experiences in daily life had disconnected them from
some common concepts in American life. Deb and Kelly strove to help ESL students build
experience with these concepts, and incorporated these concepts as important content into
ESL literacy instruction. Both ESL teachers adopted strategies such as practicing real-world
tasks and utilizing visual aids to engage ESL students in learning language related to
American daily life. Through these activities, ESL students not only had opportunities to
learn new vocabulary but also to gain access to social knowledge about American daily life
that they were not familiar with from other sources.
Reconstructing meanings in American context
Deb and Kelly found that ESL students interpreted school and class rules as well as
other social concepts in light of their experiences in their mother countries. Some
misinterpretations inevitably resulted in classroom management issues, ESL students’
confusion about teachers’ feedback, and their misbehavior in an American context. When
confronted with ESL students “reading the world” in an inappropriate way (Friere &
Marcedo, 1987, p.25), Deb and Kelly always deconstructed ESL students’ assumptions first,
and then helped them to construct meanings in the new context.
Through critically reflecting on students’ learning histories, Deb and Kelly succeeded
in helping ESL students understand their classroom teacher’s expectations. For example, a
classroom teacher felt very disappointed by a Pakistani boy’s misbehaviors. She tried to talk
with him several times in vain, and then asked the ESL teachers for help. In the parent
meeting, Deb and Kelly shared their concerns with the boy’s parents. They found that the
student used to be taught by male teacher in a boys’ school. When conveying messages to the
class, the male teacher always did it with stern face. If students did not obey the order, they
would be punished physically. On the contrary, American teachers usually explained rules to

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the student kindly with smiles, and the boy then thought the teacher was “playing a game”
with him. The mismatching images of teacher authority and explanation led to
miscommunication between the boy and his teacher, and made classroom management
unpredictable and ineffective. Deb and Kelly analyzed the student’s educational background.
Apart from making use of this analysis to help the student understand new learning courtesy
in the U.S., Deb and Kelly helped mainstream teachers dig out the real reasons for the
student’s misbehaviors.
This example also showcases the teacher collaboration in RCES. Student diversity
prevailed in every mainstream class. Unlike loose collaboration among mainstream teachers
(Goddard, Goddard, Tschannen-Moran, 2007), classroom teachers proactively sought help
from ESL teachers, and often consulted them with ESL students’ “courtesy” and behavior
issues. At the beginning of every academic year, Deb and Kelly were always asked to deliver
a workshop concerning ESL students to all mainstream teachers in RCES.
Furthermore, Deb and Kelly pointed out that ESL students’ diverse interpretations of
social concepts outside the classroom led to inappropriate behaviors in an American context.
For example, both teachers pointed out that ESL students had different experiences of using
bathrooms. Kelly described an ESL student from Sudan who thought “it was okay to use the
bathroom outside in the recess playground.” Since some girls from China only had
experience with squat toilets, they did not know how to use standard American sitting toilets.
Deb had to teach them two things: first, when using the toilet, people should sit instead of
putting feet on it; second, it was safe to use the toilet. Although disagreeing on some ESL
students’ behaviors that were inappropriate in an American context and even embarrassed [in
front of?] their American peers, Deb and Kelly did not rush to judge ESL students. Instead,
they adopted the strategy of explicitly explaining the meaning of social concepts in the
American context. Kelly argued that teaching ESL students about the meaning of social

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concepts was important. Only when ESL students knew what would be “awkward” to their
American classmates, and why it was awkward, and how to do “appropriate things,” would
ESL students feel comfortable and “included,” and then would be willing to “be part of the
school.”
Additionally, Deb and Kelly found that ESL students had diverse interpretations of
social concepts at the community level, and made efforts to identify ESL students’
misinterpretations of common concepts outside of school. Both ESL teachers argued that
these misunderstandings resulted in ESL students’ slow adjustment to the local community.
We have to teach different attitudes towards police…. In some countries, [they] are
very afraid of the police… They tell me about the canings and the smacking…. We
don't hit, but we do have expectations. We may say no with a smile, but we're serious.
We don't play around. So we also try to teach different attitudes towards authority.
Deb and Kelly noticed ESL students had diverse understandings of some common
concepts and attempted to construct meanings of those concepts in light of their experiences
in their native countries. Although disappointed at their corresponding behaviors, both
teachers understood the importance of helping ESL students reconstruct meanings of the
concepts in the American context. The reconstruction was a must to establish an inclusive
and comfortable learning community for ESL students.
In addition, ESL students’ diverse interpretations of some common concepts not only
challenged interaction between ESL students and their American peers and teachers, but also
led to tension among ESL students themselves. Deb and Kelly found some tensions derived
from historical and cultural factors in students’ home countries. For example, Deb found that
sometimes Korean and Japanese students disliked each other because of the Japanese
occupation of Korea decades ago. A similar relationship could be found among students from
India and Pakistan, and between Muslims and Christians. Moreover, ESL students’ lack of

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experience with diversity also led them to hold prejudices. In an entry-level ESL class, Deb
was short of book and asked a Chinese girl to share the book with her classmate from
Tanzania. The Chinese girl refused to do so because her Tanzanian classmate was too black.
Deb did not criticize the Chinese girl. On the contrary, she made use of this event as an
opportunity to explain why people had different colors of skin, how people would feel if they
were treated differently because of their skin color and how people should respect each
other’s differences. Afterwards, Deb and Kelly purposefully pushed various kinds of
collaboration between those two girls, who finally ended up as very close friends. Kelly
suggested that ESL students should be alerted that they were also part of diversity although
they brought diversity into school. Deb and Kelly used conflicts of student diversity as an
opportunity to help students reflect on their own prejudices, promoting mutual understanding
among ESL students.
No doubt linguistic, life and learning diversity among ESL students complicated Deb
and Kelly’s literacy instruction. Yet the issue was not simply with ESL students’ first
language or English language proficiency or familiarity with social concepts, but with how to
relate the English they were learning with the concepts in an American context. Even if ESL
students knew how to read, spell and write these words, they were not necessarily able to
comprehend the word, make meanings out of the concept (Lee & Smagorinsky, 1999), or
construct appropriate meanings in a particular context. Deb and Kelly included common
concepts as important contents of literacy instruction. Such content or activities were rarely
introduced in literacy class for mainstream students. Both teachers valued the diversity ESL
students brought to class but pointed out the importance of understanding concepts in
American contexts.
In light of their extensive experience of working with ESL students, Deb and Kelly
listed the concepts that ESL students were most likely to make misassumptions about, and

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always tended to expose and explicitly explain these common concepts to them. Similar to
ethnographers’ attempt to “make the familiar strange” (Erickson, 1986, p.121), Deb and
Kelly strove to awaken students and teachers’ minds to the visible but easily neglected
cultural symbols in daily life. This also demonstrates that both ESL teachers not only paid
attention to ESL students’ diversity at an ideological level (Cole, 1996) but also recognized
that literacy learning was not merely a cognitive progress but also a social practice (Lave &
Wenger, 1991). The practice required ESL students to perceive, analyze, relate and construct
a language output in a new social context (Naiman, Fröhlich, Stern & Todesco, 1978).
ESL Students’ Ownership of Literacy
From a socio-cultural perspective, literacy learning and development occurs only
when students participate in activities in their communities (Rogoff, 1994; Smagorinsky &
Lee, 2000). The ultimate goal of literacy education is to help students gain literacy ownership,
(Genishi & Dyson, 2011), developing a positive attitude and good habit of practicing literacy
in school or other contexts (Norton & Toohey, 2001; Valencia, Au, Scheu & Kawakami,
1990). Deb and Kelly also agreed that ESL students’ literacy development relied on their will
to practice literacy in addition to mastery of basic literacy skills. They used four significant
strategies to help ESL students develop positive attitudes and a strong will to use literacy: 1)
recognizing and exploiting ESL students’ language and cultural heritages at instructional and
institutional levels; 2) using ESL students’ (as well as their parents’) diversity as a learning
resource for all students; 3) taking an active approach to seek parent involvement; and 4)
building and maintaining a friendly and inclusive reading environment in school.
Highlighting ESL students’ diversity
Deb and Kelly pointed out that the first step in motivating ESL students to practice
ESL literacy on their own was encouraging them to start with subjects that they were familiar
with. Therefore, Deb and Kelly designed a series of activities that aimed to establish an

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approachable setting for ESL students to use language or other tools (or media) to present
their heritage to teachers and other American peers in RCES.
Deb and Kelly initiated morning ceremonies in RCES. Every morning before the
regular school day began, all students gathered in the school gym and learned how to greet
each other in a foreign language from an ESL student. The ceremonies motivated ESL
students to use English literacy skills to explain and share their heritage language with
teachers and other ESL and American students. It offered an opportunity for ESL students to
practice ESL literacy skills with something they were familiar with and made them feel
valued in the school. Meanwhile, teachers, American students and ESL students from other
countries all participated in the ceremonies as learners. For example, every morning, they
gathered in the gym and learn how to say basic greetings in different languages from their
schoolmates such “hello,” “good morning,” and “thank you.” (This event will be described
in greater detail below.)
Another school activity that Deb and Kelly initiated in RCES was an Annual Festival
of World Cultures. The festival offered ESL students an opportunity to share their cultural
heritage. Deb and Kelly noticed that most ESL students wore clothes similar to other
American kids, but some ESL students wore clothes symbolizing their religious beliefs. For
example, Kelly noticed that almost all Muslim girls wore hijab at school. In addition, Deb
suggested that clothing contained large amount of information about local cultural,
geographic and weather features. Accordingly, during the Festival, all students (including
American students) were encouraged to wear their traditional clothes and have a parade to
display their heritages. Through the parade, students and teachers in RCES could “watch a
world fashion show without traveling all around the world,” according to Deb. What clothes
ESL students wore and how they wore clothes were usually ignored, although clothes were
visible symbols of culture (Britzman, 2003). Deb and Kelly noticed ESL students’ diverse

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cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and succeeded in transforming the diversity into an
educational opportunity for advancing teachers’ and American students’ cultural sensitivity.
Hill (1991) argued:
Conversations of respect between diverse communities…are the ones in which the
participants expect to learn from each other, expect to learn non-incidental things,
expect to change at least intellectually as a result of the encounter… In such
conversations, one participant does not presume that the relationship is one of teacher
to student (in any traditional sense of that relationship), or parent to child, of
developed to underdeveloped. The participants are co-learners. (p. 284)
In RCES, neither teachers nor American students seemed to chafe at this expectation
or feel constrained or challenged when learning foreign languages and cultures from ESL
students. Both ESL teachers disclosed their respect for diverse cultures, desire for gaining
diverse cultural knowledge for both professional growth and personal good, and intention to
develop an inclusive learning community through exchanging cultural knowledge with ESL
students.
Kelly further pointed out the diversity of the ESL student population as a
representation of “what’s happening in the world.” Kelly argued that diversity was not only
what American students were encountering in school, and but also would be a reality for their
future work. School administration working with Deb and Kelly spared no efforts to manifest
diverse learning (and working) environments for students (both American and ESL) and
mainstream teachers through visual representations of students’ diverse nationalities. In front
of the main entrance of RCES, a Peace Pole was dedicated, welcoming all to the school with
the message, “Peace to all who enter here,” in eight major languages that were most
commonly spoken by non-American students in RCES: Arabic, Chinese, English, Hindi,
Korean, Spanish, Swahili and Urdu. Alongside the hallway, national flags of 47 countries,

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which were home countries to current students, with their English names underneath were
hung on the wall. On the homepage of RCES’ official website, the link on the national flag
would direct visitors to the corresponding wiki for the country which provides people with
more detailed knowledge of other countries and raises multicultural awareness at the
community level. Clearly, both teachers had been making conscious efforts to recognize ESL
students’ diverse nationalities and to share this knowledge with the larger community.
Deb and Kelly suggested ESL students were assets for RCES. “They [ESL students]
bring out things you wouldn't believe, [and] an average American child wouldn't think about.
They've never been there. They don't know what it's like”, Deb argued. Both teachers
attempted to help ESL students to identify and show their strengths and uniqueness at
personal, instructional and institutional levels (Richards, Brown, & Forde, 2004). In such a
diversity-supportive learning community, ESL students felt safe and proud to express their
ideas with the ESL literacy skills they learned.
Encouraging parents to take literacy ownership
Research shows that ESL students’ literacy practices at home differ from literacy
practices that are favored in school (Shultz, Florio & Erickson, 1982; Suarez-Orozco, 2000).
ESL students’ attitudes toward literacy practices and willingness to use literacy in different
contexts are strongly influenced by their parents’ behaviors (Edwards & McMillon, 2008).
Deb and Kelly found the same phenomenon in their ESL classes. Both ESL teachers pointed
out that encouraging ESL students’ parents to take literacy ownership had been helpful in
signaling patterns of home literacy practice. Moreover, the parents of RCES’ ESL students
mostly held undergraduate or higher degrees, and had relatively advanced English
proficiency. With parents’ proactive sharing, Deb and Kelly were able to identify ESL
students’ learning needs and progress. Therefore, to encourage parents to take literacy
ownership, Deb and Kelly provided opportunities for ESL students’ parents to develop basic

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ESL literacy skills in a friendly and inclusive communicative community, to participate in
designing and leading classroom and school activities (e.g. the daily cultural ceremonies),
and to communicate about their children’s life and academic performance with teachers on a
regular basis.
Deb and Kelly, collaborating with the administration of RCES, built a friendly
communicative setting for parents. For example, the school slowed down the speed of the
electronic notice on the billboard outside the school building in order to help ESL students’
parents read the messages more easily. Although they sent parents hard copies of letters or
notices in English, Deb and Kelly always uploaded an electronic version to the ESL class
website, and added the link of Google Translate beside the document in case parents needed
translation services for understanding the notice. Besides these general initiatives that helped
parents to read in English, Deb and Kelly also initiated one-on-one conferences with ESL
students’ parents every month. Before and during the meeting, Deb and Kelly “carefully
choose words [in English], and make sure that the parents could understand them [the
teachers] correctly.” More importantly, Deb revealed the careful choice of language could
prevent ESL students’ parents from misunderstanding their children’s learning progress and
behavior in school. Deb and Kelly understood that parents, similar to their children, also
tended to construct meanings for some common concepts based on experiences in their native
countries. Deb and Kelly applied their observation of ESL students’ literacy practices to the
children’s parents. Deb and Kelly’s careful attention to ESL students’ parents’
understandings of educational concepts and efforts to help parents construct meanings of the
concepts in an American context showed both teachers’ beliefs in the importance of parent
involvement in ESL students’ education (Schecter & Cummins, 2003). Their responses
further demonstrated that the two-way parent involvement could benefit ESL students’
learning in a more effective fashion. On the one hand, both teachers took advantage of

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parents’ contributions and collaboration through traditional institutionalized methods such as
parent-teacher conferences, newsletters or parents’ report forms (Edwards, 2004), and then
discovered students’ real concerns and needs. On the other hand, teachers’ generosity in
sharing knowledge regarding educational concepts in the United States helped ESL students’
parents interpret their children’s school performances with the consideration of their current
learning context, and further initiated more effective action at home to collaborate with the
teachers, including providing authentic and accurate information.
Deb and Kelly also regarded ESL parents’ diverse linguistic backgrounds as great
resources to raise multicultural awareness in RCES. One of the most important multicultural
activities in RCES was called the Daily Morning Celebration. Every morning, with all
students gathered in the school gym, American students first read the Pledge of Allegiance.
Following this, an ESL student from one country was selected, and was asked to show the
group their national flag. Then, all students listened to that country’s anthem before the ESL
student taught the whole school (including teachers, American students and other ESL
students) how to say “hello” (and other phrases – good morning, thank you…) in his/her
native language. Usually it was the parents instead of the ESL students who provided Deb
and Kelly with the language knowledge. One week before each country was selected, ESL
teachers worked closely with ESL students’ parents and assured that the ESL student from
the particular country used his/her language correctly. Deb suggested that ESL students’
parents were more likely to have advanced knowledge of their native languages than their
kids, and were able to provide accurate knowledge and appropriate use of the language.
Meanwhile, this activity opened a venue for parents, especially those who felt left out of their
children’s learning process because of their low English proficiency, to get involved in
school activities. Obviously, rather than ignoring students’ parents’ diverse linguistic
backgrounds or simply regarding those backgrounds as barriers, both ESL teachers

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understood the importance of parent involvement in students’ learning and further took
initiatives to make use of parents’ language diversity as resources to arouse multicultural
awareness at school level (Gay, 2000).
Respecting ESL students’ own choices in literacy learning
As made apparent through many examples shared thus far, Deb and Kelly disclosed
that ESL students brought diverse literacy learning needs to school. They pointed out that
ESL students’ learning needs referred to not only what aspects of literacy skills ESL students
needed to improve, but also what they wanted to learn and what kind of literacy they were
expected to learn and use in their own community. Respecting ESL students’ choices in
literacy learning materials was critical to further motivate them to develop good reading
habits, to practice their literacy skills, and more importantly, to promote a more equal and
democratic learning setting for all students. Therefore, Deb and Kelly spared no efforts in
collecting possible reading materials that might engage ESL students in reading, to present
them with choices rather than force them to accept particular books, and to find out parents’
expectations on literacy development. In ESL literacy class, Deb and Kelly always
encouraged ESL students to choose “what they want to read” for the class. For example, at
the very beginning of each unit, Deb and Kelly presented ESL students with several choices
of children’s books focusing on the same theme that are usually taught in mainstream literacy
class (e.g. weather, school life, festivals), and then asked them to vote for their favorite book.
Although ESL students only had a limited number of choices, Deb explained that the voting
process was important for ESL students to develop a “sense of democracy.” The voting
activity also allowed all ESL students, regardless of their competence, to participate in the
literacy learning community (Lave & Wenger, 1991). ESL students were then guided to
develop the habit of speaking out about their own opinions (in English) in class.

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As previously mentioned in Chapter 4, Deb and Kelly both noticed that some ESL
students “did not like reading” for various reasons. For example, some ESL students,
especially those from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam and Haiti, had very limited access to
books and did not develop reading habits at home. Other ESL students, including Chinese,
Korean and Japanese students wanted to read children’s literature after school, but their
parents tended to categorize those books as extracurricular reading that would not benefit
their children’s academic learning. Deb and Kelly set up a library targeting all ESL students
regardless of their level of English proficiency. They even collected books in ESL students’
native languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. Deb and Kelly understood
first language development has a significant impact on second language learning (Freeman,
1998). Deb further pointed out that book diversity and how to select “appropriate and fun
books” were the keys to the library because the main purpose of setting up the library was to
motivate ESL students to read after school. Books in their native languages made reading
more accessible and enjoyable to ESL students. It also made it possible that students’ parents
who had limited knowledge of English could be involved in ESL students’ afterschool
reading activities.
Conclusion
Deb and Kelly’s literacy instruction for ESL students involves three phases:
development of basic literacy skills, meaning construction and ESL students’ literacy
ownership. Throughout the three phases, Deb and Kelly strive to implement instruction based
on ESL students’ learning strengths, facilitate literacy instruction with skillful cultural
translations, collaborate with ESL students’ parents, and give and receive authentic feedback
on instructional interactions. Obviously, Deb and Kelly understand the complexity of ESL
student diversity, value ESL students’ multi-intelligence, appreciate communicative
flexibility of literacy learning (Genishi & Dyson, 2009), and emphasize cross-cultural

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understanding among all students (including mainstream students). They always analyze the
mistakes that ESL students make in literacy learning with linguistic insight (Gee, 1990), and
tend to “reserve the errors as an interpretation of the last resort” (Honer, Lu, Royster and
Trimbur, 2011, p.304). While valuing ESL students’ individual talents, Deb and Kelly attend
to ESL students’ personal learning and life histories. They attempt to engage ESL students’
attention with experiences besides print (e.g., the clothing exhibition), scaffold student
participation in learning activities, explore the meaning of concepts in the American context,
and encourage family involvement in literacy activities. Deb and Kelly consider student
diversity as a resource for literacy practices at the institutional, collegial, instructional and
community levels, and use student diversity to bridge communication among different
cultures, establish school-family collaboration, awaken multicultural awareness at the
institutional level, revive teacher collaboration, and identify students’ real learning needs.
In general, through analyzing Deb and Kelly’s literacy instruction in ESL classes, I
found that although both teachers regarded students’ differences as a resource for teaching
and learning, and had the goal of teaching for, as well as with, diversity, they did not achieve
their goal. This occurred for following three reasons: 1) they had a complex but static notion
of study diversity; 2) they did not frequently assess students’ language and literacy learning,
or use a variety of formal and informal assessments; and 3) they tended to simplify or
Americanize literacy practice in ESL class. The teachers operated from a complex
understanding of student diversity, and developed ways to repurpose traditional activities and
assessments to encourage a diverse class of ELL students to participate actively in language
and literacy learning. However, I also pointed to ways in which the teachers’ culturally
responsive instructional practices became classroom routines that did not change in response
to student learning. While the teachers taught with (rather than against) student diversity,
adapting curricular materials to engage students’ complex identities, they did not teach for

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student diversity; in general, the teachers did not search for evidence of ways in which
student performances might challenge and exceed their expectations.

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CHAPTER 6
RESPONSIVE LITERACY EDUCATION: TEACHING FOR DIVERSITY
The preceding chapters indicate that the diversity issue is complicated in Deb and
Kelly’s ESL classes. Deb and Kelly’s design and enactment of responsive literacy practices
demonstrate their cautious examination of diversity issues and thorough understanding of the
impacts of student diversity on literacy teaching and learning. The issue that most American
elementary teachers, teacher educators and policy makers are confronted with is that diversity
has become the norm nowadays but the body of evidence on effective practices in response to
student diversity remains relatively small. This study presents a comprehensive example of
how to help teachers understand, examine, and make use of student diversity as a resource for
responsive literacy instruction. The experiences of the two teachers who are the focus of this
study, Deb and Kelly, should encourage other teachers to do likewise. This chapter presents
several ideas collected from the discussions in Chapters 3-5, which provide ideas from Deb
and Kelly’s own exploration and experimentation that are worthy of further study in relation
to implementing responsive literacy instruction and building a community that aims to teach
for diversity.
Studying Diversity Issues: Lessons from In-Service ESL Teachers
Embracing the complexity of diversity in ESL literacy instruction
The two ESL teachers’ exhibited a complex perspective on student diversity, and
considered their own cultural backgrounds as a part of classroom diversity. However, the
teachers did not regard classroom diversity as dynamic, and further created inflexible, and
somewhat inappropriate ability groups for their ELL students, which were based their
instruction on static and limited notions of each group’s zone of proximal development.
While admitting the complex nature of student diversity and its influence on ESL
literacy instruction, Deb and Kelly’s nuanced description of diversity issues and responsive
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literacy practices demonstrates their tolerance, respect and close attention to student diversity
in ESL classes. The complex nature of student diversity is not particularly surprising given
the increasing numbers of the ESL student population, the homogeneity of teachers and their
limited experience with other cultures, and the incomplete nature of culture(s). In previous
chapters, we have seen that Deb and Kelly believe in the importance of incorporating ESL
students’ diverse language and literacy skills when designing responsive ESL literacy
practices. However, one of the most recalcitrant obstacles for Deb and Kelly is how to avoid
simplifying diversity issues in class. An important step for future studies is to investigate
ways to help teachers recognize and analyze the complexity of diversity issues at the
instructional, institutional, collegial and larger community levels.
Historically, literacy education has focused on basic aspects including listening,
speaking, reading and writing that can be applied within and across schools. However, from a
socio-cultural perspective, researchers have pointed out the importance of social context in
human development, and argued that effective literacy learning happens and develops in a
collaborative, educational setting (Vygotsky, 1976). Surrounding teachers are reminders of
language and literacy policies at the federal, state and school levels. In addition, there are
matters of daily negotiation of language and literacy practices in increasingly complex ways
both in school and at home.
Through listening, speaking, reading and writing, ESL students construct meanings
from printed text to satisfy the requirements of a particular context. Although having
attempted to maintain the balance of students’ literacy achievement in school and their
literacy practice in other communities (e.g. home, larger community and potential work
environments), schools have not bridged the gap between standardized literacy instruction in
school and changing (and diverse) demands for literacy skills outside school. This is
unfortunate, as various social changes (e.g. globalization, increasing diversity in schools and

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local communities, the demands for different literacy practices in school and at home) have
increased the need for respecting and including a wider range of texts, different features of
oral, written and visual communication and presentations, and diverse views of the world
inside and outside school. These changes impose urgent demands on literacy instruction in
terms of what we should teach as part of literacy for both mainstream and ESL students to
help them satisfy the needs of literacy practices in school and in other larger communities
(e.g. home, native county and global contexts). But it goes beyond that.
As shown in Chapter Three, ESL students have diverse pedagogical experiences of
literacy. They have learned literacy differently from their American peers in terms of the
contents, foci and instructional strategies that their previous literacy teachers preferred to use.
Traditional efforts to support literacy development by reinforcing ESL students’ learning in
the way that American teachers have been taught are ineffective with regard to ESL students’
transition to the new literacy learning context, adaption to new instructional practices, and
American teachers’ interpretations of their performances based on standards required in
American educational settings. Therefore, understanding the complexity of diversity issues
requires further investigation of pedagogical gaps among communities in which ESL students
apply existing literacy skills and develop new ones.
Deb and Kelly also admitted they need assistance to understand the diverse skills that
students bring into ESL classes. From a socio-cultural perspective, students come to class
with different levels of cognitive development, skill bases and home practices which interact
with teachers’ personal and professional experiences in the current learning context
(Vygotsky, 1976; Taylor, Anderson, Au & Raphael, 2000). Connecting teaching practices,
curricula and literacy with students’ skill bases is vital to teachers’ effective conveyance of
knowledge. Effective learning depends on how teachers understand the knowledge that
students bring into class (Barton & Tan, 2009), and how teachers make use of student’s

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sources of knowledge that were historically accumulated and culturally developed in
students’ household (Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzalez, 2001). Teachers are expected to
understand and utilize the students’ psychological principles (Cole, 1996; Dewey, 1932) and
knowledge resources (Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzalez, 1992), and then to cultivate the
students by relating abstract knowledge with the experience they have accumulated outside
school. However, Deb and Kelly have grown up in similar backgrounds to most American
teachers, and have been labeled as “white, middle class, female.” As the composition of the
ESL student population becomes more diverse, Deb and Kelly feel it is hard to understand or
know well about every ESL student’s experiences at home. In general, the differences in
teachers’ and students’ life experiences, and teachers’ limited knowledge about students’
lives, can possibly prevent them from initiating effective instruction to stimulate students’
learning. These realities suggest two broad issues to explore. How can teachers help ESL
students learn through life experience when they are not equipped with enough knowledge
about the students’ lives? Or, how can they “fit [the instruction] in the dominant mode of
growth in child” (Barton & Tan, 2009, p. 129)? This study demonstrates that these two issues
have become the main barriers for Deb and Kelly to be able to understand and address
diversity issues in literacy instruction, and require further investigation in future research.
In addition, in this study Deb and Kelly have shown that mainstream teachers’ and
students’ attitudes exert powerful influence on their further examination of diversity issues
related to literacy instruction in ESL classes. Deb and Kelly have suggested that emphasizing
ESL student diversity at the school level helps mainstream teachers and students to
understand diversity issues in a concrete way, and it also promotes an inclusive literacy
learning community for ESL students in the school. However, mainstream teachers and
students have rarely appreciated efforts such as those put forth by Deb and Kelly’s to
introduce better understandings of cultural and social diversity. As described in Chapter Five,

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Deb and Kelly have attempted to build morning Foreign Language Ceremonies as a routine
activity in RCES and integrate multicultural literature into RCES’ literacy curriculum.
According to Deb and Kelly, these activities serve two purposes: helping ESL students better
understand themselves, and broadening mainstream teachers’ and students’ knowledge of
other cultures. However, the study shows that mainstream teachers are also interested in
having Deb and Kelly address their immediate concerns with ESL students’ in-class learning
(e.g. unwillingness in class participation, failure to follow teachers’ directions) while
appreciating the multicultural events that aimed to arouse multicultural awareness at school
level. In addition, throughout Chapters Three, Four, and Five, we can see that Deb and
Kelly’s collaborations with mainstream teachers influenced learning opportunities in ESL
classes. Therefore, studying how to involve mainstream teachers in helping ESL teachers to
explore diversity issues is not only necessary but also requires examination in future studies
to understand more fully about how collaboration between mainstream and ESL steachers
will contribute to both parties’ understanding of diversity issues, and how the collaboration
will enhence responsive instruction in both mainstream and ESL class.
Diagnosing intercultural and intracultural diversity and human variability
Chapter Four presented Deb and Kelly’s three suggested categories of student
diversity that impact their design and enactment of responsive literacy practices: intercultural
diversity, intracultural diversity and human variability. They affirmed that ESL students’
intercultural diversity played a decisive part in their enforcement of multicultural awareness
at the school level, in their selection of teaching materials, in their creation of ESL learning
goals and in the interpretation of students’ mistakes. According to Deb and Kelly,
understanding intercultural diversity among ESL students is necessary for teachers to design
responsive activities, especially when teachers have limited knowledge of ESL students’
linguistic or cultural backgrounds. After all, the foundations of human existence can be

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understood by “the development of a general, closed, abstract, formalistic science of thought,
a universal grammar of the intellect” (Geertz, 1973, p.350). By applying linguistics and
generalizations of culture as a moral basis to analyze discourse such as schools, teachers may
demonstrate more understanding about and respect for differences among students from
various cultural groups. However, mere knowledge of culture-oriented diversity alone will
not lead to effective literacy practices.
In addition, it is dangerous to analyze ESL students’ behaviors on such a structuralist
basis. Deb and Kelly’s nuanced descriptions of diversity issues demonstrate that ESL
students have difficulties developing English language and literacy skills in an American
context, and even those from the same ethnic group need different types of assistance in
language and literacy learning. For example, some ESL students are fluent in daily
communication in English but fail to perform well in academic English (e.g. children of
refugees); others may do well in school, though they seldom communicate with teachers or
their peers because they lack cultural knowledge and are afraid to “say something
inappropriate or wrong.” Therefore, it is quite possible that merely focusing on cultureoriented diversity to analyze diversity issues (especially in school settings) would mislead
teachers to another extreme – attributing the students’ different behaviors (especially
inappropriate behaviors) and learning deficiencies to the same causes while neglecting each
student’s unique background (or experiences) as well as his or her special needs. In other
words, ascribing all of ESL students’ diversity to culture will inevitably result in teachers’
forming standardized and over-generalized judgments of student behaviors. For example,
cross-cultural diversity such as socio-economic power could significantly moderate or even
counteract cultural control. Students from the same ethnic group might sometimes
demonstrate similar learning styles, but these are not necessarily the best ways for them to
learn. So, this study demonstrates that understanding diversity issues with only cultural (and

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linguistic) insights could lead teachers to overestimate the power of culture on language and
literacy learning while neglecting other possibilities that can result in ESL students’ low
achievement.
In addition, through Deb and Kelly’s design and enactment of responsive literacy
instruction, we can see that they give human variety the highest priority. They start with
intercultural and intracultural diversity to unpack the complexity of diversity issues,
identifying possible learning needs or preferences of ESL students. Then, both teachers
continue tailoring class activities to meet students’ individual preferences, needs and talents.
When applying research-based strategies to literacy practices in ESL classes, both teachers
cautiously take human variability into consideration. What I see in Deb and Kelly’s literacy
practices makes me think that effective literacy instruction should not only be linguistically
and culturally responsive, but also individually responsive. In short, responsive ESL
instruction calls for us to look beyond ESL students’ cultural and linguistic diversity and
draw upon students’ individual knowledge, skills, needs and talents. Lessons from Deb and
Kelly’s experiences suggest the need for further study of this issue with larger numbers of
teaching in varied contexts.
Possible Attempts: Preparing Teachers for Diversity Issues in Literacy Instruction
Advancing responsive literacy instruction requires changes to elementary schools in
the designing of ESL literacy curricula and in the preparing, hiring and training of in-service
teachers. At the very least, it requires making good long-term calls for giving in-service
teachers professional development training in better understanding and addressing diversity
issues in ESL and literacy teaching. More ambitiously, it may well involve greater
collaboration with other subject matter teachers in schools and greater attention to the
problem of simplifying or over-generalizing diversity issues in schools. Moreover, insights
from Deb and Kelly’s experiences will benefit other in-service teachers in terms of helping

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them to develop greater understandings of the complexity of diversity issues and further
designing responsive literacy practices. Teacher educators need to be more serious about, and
more ambitious in making use of, what is now all too often treated as a token multicultural
education requirement for in-service teachers. The challenge is to incorporate more linguistic,
macro-sociological, comparative and international education research into professional
development activities to help in-service teachers to deal with diversity issues and to develop
a deeper sense of professional identity as ESL teacher. In short, new work, in which many inservice teachers and teacher educators cannot yet claim expertise, will be demanded of both
teachers and their ESL students. That is the challenge of embracing responsive literacy
instruction, and its promise: the necessity of working on literacy development with our ESL
students, subject matter teachers, ESL students’ parents, policy makers and those who can
become contributors amid the realities of an inclusive world in which diversity is becoming
the norm (Genishi & Dyson, 2009).
As a means toward advancing collective efforts to articulate and enact responsive
approaches to literacy, I include here selected activities from Deb and Kelly’ literacy
practices in ESL class that I have found helpful in preparing in-service teachers for diversity
issues and suggest are worthy of further study in professional development programs. I share
John-Steiner-and-Mahn’s view that successful literacy practices are “distributed, interactive,
contextual, and the result of the learners’ participation in a community of practice” (JohnSteiner & Mahn, 1996, p. 205), and believe a socio-cultural point of view provides a deeper
understanding of and contemporary concern for literacy instruction, especially the impacts of
multicultural communities on students’ learning. Indeed, schools are part of a larger society
in which ESL students’ learning activities are situated. The dynamics and interdependence of
individual development and social contexts further demonstrate the importance of looking at
the impacts of social changes at both the macro and micro levels of student learning.

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Therefore, with a socio-cultural stand, I believe that proposals for substantially improving
ESL students’ literacy achievements have to consider political, economic, and social (at both
local and global levels) factors. Central to the aim of this section is conceiving of my work as
a starting point for local reform initiatives in literacy education rather than as isolated
activities that teacher education programs and schools may adopt to prepare teachers for
simply working with ESL students with linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds.
Judging ESL students’ literacy achievement
In light of the complexities of ESL students’ literacy proficiency, Deb and Kelly have
begun to rethink how to judge students’ literacy achievement in the American context.
According to Deb and Kelly, judging ESL students’ literacy proficiency is especially
important. It determines how to divide students into appropriate ESL class levels (or
groupings), how to identify their ESL literacy learning needs, and how to continuously follow
up on their literacy development. Over the last several years, research has focused on using
standardized literacy and ESL assessment tools to evaluate ESL students’ literacy
achievements. Such tools are important, because they support teachers in evaluating and
understanding ESL students’ literacy proficiencies in light of American standards. Yet these
tools may not reflect ESL students’ real literacy achievements, and may not necessarily help
teachers to develop appropriate and responsive literacy practices.
As reported in Chapter Four, Deb and Kelly have suggested that standardized tests
such as those used in their state have been reinforced as the main tool in RCES to judge
students’ ESL and literacy performance. They both have negative attitudes toward the tests,
and have pointed out that the tests’ validity has been undermined due to its inflexible testing
date (compared to ESL students’ dynamic enrollment dates), complicated directional
language in each test section, and narrow focus on basic language skills such as spelling,
vocabulary and grammar rather than meaning construction. In the meantime, students’

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relatively low ESL proficiencies have prevented them from demonstrating their real literacy
achievements on standardized tests. Consequently, Deb and Kelly’s experiences suggest that
teachers may need more opportunities to develop new understandings of and insights into
ESL students’ literacy achievements by joining standardized literacy assessments and Grade
Level Standards with their own professional judgment. In this study, we saw that Deb and
Kelly also relied on their more than ten- years of ESL teaching experience, living experiences
in multicultural communities, experiences of studying abroad, and knowledge of EFL
pedagogy prevailing in other non-English speaking countries to judge ESL students’ literacy
achievement. Deb and Kelly’s descriptions and literacy practices fit with the literature of
judgment from a macro-sociological perspective. Deb and Kelly’s experiences demonstrate
that it is necessary for professional development to include training in the school literacy
practices of other countries. Such opportunities may enhance teachers’ understanding of ESL
students’ literacy proficiencies and learning needs, help teachers to develop differentiated
pedagogical content practices and diversity-responsive skills and to investigate ESL students’
literacy development in American educational settings.
To be more specific, looking at Deb and Kelly’s instructional practices of ESL
literacy, I find their actions fit in Alexander’s (2001) notion of judgment from a macrosociological perspective. According to Alexander, two judgments exist in a classroom
regardless of the country (or culture): differentiation and assessment. Differentiation refers to
“the process of identifying differences in children as a basis for making decisions about
where, what and how they should be taught” (Alexander, 2001, p. 356). As reported in
Chapters Four and Five, Deb and Kelly followed the general guidance and practices of
differentiation to group students into ESL classes of different levels, and to select appropriate
teaching materials and activities for each class. They have also indicated that the workshop
focusing on differentiated instruction was the most practical and contributive one for them for

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understanding and teaching students with diverse language and literacy proficiencies in an
effective way. However, after closer investigation of the issue of differentiation in a
multicultural class, I find differentiated instruction in Deb and Kelly’s class has been
complicated by the fact that ESL students usually come to school with unique experiences of
differentiated learning. For example, as suggested by Alexander (2001), teachers usually
differentiate students by their age, ability, special educational needs, behavior, gender, and
height. In most countries, teachers employ similar means to realize differentiation in class:
time focused on certain students, attention that students received, and frequency of teachers’
interactions with students. However, teachers from a particular country also have their own
unique means to realize differentiation: subject and task (e.g. England), outcomes (also
England), seating or grouping (e.g. India). In contrast to facile differentiation that leads to a
limited recognition of “students’ varying background knowledge, readiness, language and
preferences in learning and interests” (Hall, Strangman & Meyer, 2011, p.2), differentiation
with a macro-sociological viewpoint that involves sustained international and multicultural
endeavors becomes a constituent part of responsive literacy practices that leads to the
flexibility of literacy and ESL students’ ownership of literacy. For example, teachers should
be alert to what literacy skills students are expected to develop in other countries.
Understanding differentiation from a macro-sociological perspective will contribute to
building ability group in response to the complexity of ESL student diversity rather than
merely basing grouping on their language proficiency. I would also suggest that future
studies investigate how teachers might create more flexible ability groups in ELL classes.
Besides differentiation, both teachers also used formative and evaluative assessment
tools including standardized tests, class projects and after-school homework as a follow-up to
judge and improve ESL students’ literacy achievement. Deb and Kelly have suggested that
compared with formative assessment, evaluative assessment such as a standardized test is a

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more judgmental assessment tool that consists of compliments or criticism. The result of
evaluative assessment usually does not contain information that will improve students’
understanding of their performance. In a multicultural class, interpreting the result of
evaluative assessment becomes more complicated. For example, according to Alexander
(2001, p. 370), teachers in America, England, India, France, and Russia interpret the
following terms in their assessment differently: “development,” “potential,” “ability,”
“efforts” and “attainment.” As reported in Chapter Four, Deb and Kelly also find that ESL
students and their parents tend to confuse advanced ESL classes with classes in which ESL
students will receive more attention than other ones (e.g. entry-level and intermediate level
classes). The study again shows that Deb and Kelly have a macro-sociological view when
judging ESL students’ literacy development. I suggest we can include judgment from a
macro-sociological perspective in professional development projects. Three questions that we
can learn from Alexander (2001, p. 373) and use to help literacy teachers and teacher
educators to closely examine accountability of judgment include: “What form does the
assessment take? Who does the assessing? [And] what judgmental criteria are used?”
Understanding literacy practices in the context of globalization
Deb and Kelly’s experiences suggest that in the past ten years of their ESL teaching in
RCES and other elementary schools, they have witnessed social changes such as proliferation
and diversification of the composition of ESL student population, and considerable fluidity
and uneven demographics among ESL students in different regions. Although emphasizing
the overwhelming impacts of ESL and literacy policies on their instructional practices, they
also point out the issue of “how the [educational] systems gave ways to the social changes”
(Kjaer, 2004, p.13). As suggested by Deb and Kelly, globalization is the root of all these
social changes that bring new dynamics and challenges to the design and enactment of their
literacy practices.

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Deb and Kelly’s reflections on the impacts of globalization on literacy instruction fit
the literature of education and globalization. For example, from a macro-sociological
perspective, Stromquist and Monkman (2000, p. 4) argue that globalization enforces
“dissemination of democratic norms,” “privatization of industrial production” and “high
respect for industry and technology.” These changes radically affect people’s attitudes toward
knowledge and education. They have further pointed out that globalization brings about both
changes and challenges to old learning models, and that new learning and economic models
attracted more “knowledge seeker[s]” (p. 11) to pursue their own personal good, while
ignoring the public good, in a continuously-speeding-up knowledge cycle. Even worse, the
state, under the force of globalization, began caring more about the coherence of the market
and production than citizens’ welfare or stark social inequalities. Accordingly, as a main
source for helping students to realize their “economic well-being and competitiveness,”
educational systems have responded to these changes by shifting their focus from childcentered curricula to economy-centered vocational training, by directing the goal of formal
schooling from serving the public good to chasing marketable commodities.
While admitting the importance of economic prosperity and technological innovation,
researchers of international education also show their worries about the diminishing
democratic spirit in education. As Deb and Kelly have described in Chapters Three and Four,
due to globalization, more and more ESL students from a wider range of countries have come
to study in RCES for different reasons. They and their parents hold diverse expectations on
literacy learning in RCES. According to ESL students’ parents, their children’s literacy
development should satisfy both Grade Level Standards and the particular literacy learning
needs in each ESL student’s motherland or local community.
Understanding literacy instruction in the context of globalization has the potential to
contribute to teachers’ insights on the complexity of diversity issues, possible mismatches

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between traditional literacy practices and students’ new urges for literacy learning, and
further designs for responsive literacy practices. My study suggests that future studies
regarding the influence of educational policy on literacy instruction should also consider
social changes such as globalization that have not received adequate attention in educational
policy thus far, and should investigate how might different professional development
opportunities contribute to teachers’ understanding of student diversity in a rapidly changing
educational environment.
Examining teacher accountability in education governance
In my study, I find Deb and Kelly’s accountability has been overemphasized at the
instructional level but neglected at the institutional and policy levels. For example, ESL
students in RCES have multiple resources that they can rely on to develop their language and
literacy learning. The school provides them with libraries, computer laboratories, literacy
consultants, and parallel teachers. In terms of resources, students seemingly have adequate
opportunities and means to realize literacy development. However, in almost all these areas,
professional groups and support staff including administrators, parallel teachers and parent
teachers surround ESL students. Through three practical tools such as routine, rule and ritual
(Alexander, 2001), Deb and Kelly also play dominant roles (or serve as head authority) in the
governance of ESL classes as well as during the process of guiding ESL students to seek
additional assistance with literacy development. As described in Chapter Five, routine is the
governance that Deb and Kelly have enforced through habits in class. Once routine has been
established, Deb and Kelly further the governance of ESL class by granting routine with
explicit direction, which then become classroom rules. Students are expected (or required) to
obey the rules. If they do not meet the expectations (or requirements), students will be
punished. Ritual is the continuum of rule, and it stands for “a prescribed and established
ceremony” (Alexander, 2001, p. 381). Eventually, as in the example of the Morning Culture

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Ceremonies discussed in Chapter Four, rituals result in new routines in the classroom. This
practice suggests an important question worthy of further inquiry. Will this kind of structure
lead to the development of an inclusive and responsive learning environment? Indeed, in an
inclusive learning community, ESL students are supposed to play more active, proactive, and
participatory roles during the process of learning.
Furthermore, I find Deb and Kelly’s teacher accountability has been challenged and
even neglected by educational policy at the institutional level. For example, Kelly, in Chapter
Five, suggested that she is forbidden to share their religious beliefs in ESL class. I can see in
Kelly’s account that her accountability has been constrained by her contract (or the
responsibilities spelled out in policy). In addition, Deb and Kelly prefer to use traditional
methods to develop teaching activities; they take Grade Level Standards with the highest
priority, and try to help ESL students meet these with literacy requirements. However,
American public schools nowadays are faced with rapidly changing student populations.
Teachers are expected to take more active roles to provide equal and dialogic learning
opportunities for all students rather than reproduce the old type of learning community.
Unfortunately, related ESL and literacy policy prescribed Deb and Kelly’s responsibilities.
This constraint blinds researchers’ and policymakers’ attention to teachers’ accountability in
the process of educational governance, and sometimes stops teachers from exploring the
complexity of diversity issues in multicultural classes. The neglect of teachers’ voices also
undermines the democratic accountability of governance (or effectiveness of educational
reforms). Therefore, further research is needed to investigate how to help teachers become
more active in policymaking, and to develop stronger voices in governance (and/or reform).
Developing teacher identity in a multicultural setting
Educators generally agree on the pivotal roles of teacher identity in learning to teach
(Barton & Tan, 2008; Cochran-Smith, 2004; Richardson, 1996). The case of Deb and Kelly

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also demonstrates that how they understand their professional identity as ESL teachers
determines their learning to teach students with diverse backgrounds. For example, Deb and
Kelly firmly believe that being open-minded, caring, and proactive in communication and
interaction with other people in a multicultural context is a precondition for building a safe,
inclusive learning community, which is linked directly with the effectiveness of student
learning and central to developing strong relationships with ESL students. In Chapter Five, I
reported that Deb emphasized the importance of valuing “ESL students’ ownership of
literacy.” Being able to do this helped both teachers gain a sustained advantage of exploring
ESL students’ literacy learning needs and preferences, and facilitating students’ emotional
and academic development. Obviously, neither teacher considers herself as the only authority
in literacy instruction. Both of them have been dedicated to establishing a “dialogic
discourse” (Britzman, 1991, p.223) with other people, from which more opportunities for
them to learn and explore diversity issues spring.
In addition, Deb and Kelly willingly learned from ESL students and their parents and
mainstream teachers as a way to ensure deeper understanding of diversity issues and its
complexity. It also shows, as I argued in Chapter 1, how their construction of professional
development is not a static but dynamic process (Knowels, 1992). As reported in Chapters 3
and 5, they understand their responsibilities to help other people in the context, including
ESL students and their American peers, mainstream teachers and parents, to develop
multicultural awareness. Their attempts to involving these people in ESL literacy practices
further demonstrates their strong desire and commitment to building an inclusive learning
community at classroom, institutional and communal levels. For example, as described in
Chapter Five, Deb and Kelly required ESL students to read their writing to ten audiences as
part of their writing project. This activity, on the one hand, encouraged ESL students to build
relationships with other people in the community. On the other hand, it offered an additional

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channel for mainstream teachers and ESL student parents to keep updated with ESL students’
literacy learning progress. All these examples show promise that developing a discourse
identity in a multicultural setting prepares teachers for the complexity of diversity issues, the
establishment of an inclusive learning community, and the responsiveness of literacy
instruction. Clearly, relationships with others and their actions in building this kind of
relationship in the context, which is labeled as discourse identity by Gee (2000), is important
for Deb and Kelly to develop their self-image as teachers. Based on my study, I suggest we
should take initiatives to foster more interaction and collaboration between ESL teachers and
other people in the context.
Richardson (1996) suggests that the intervention of a teacher education (or
professional development) program is relatively weak in helping teachers to develop
professional identity because teachers’ beliefs about teaching arise from their life history and
student teaching. However, the case of Deb and Kelly shows their urgent needs of
intervention in identity construction. For example, Kelly, in Chapters 4 and 5, expresses her
frustration that she is not allowed to share her religious beliefs when teaching students about
Christmas. Deb described, in Chapter 3, that they need a “more detailed, prescriptive” ESL
curriculum to guide to what extent they can share American culture. Through these examples,
I have noticed Deb and Kelly’s struggles with “institutional identity” (Gee, 2002, p. 103).
What I see makes me think it is necessary for future research and professional development
programs to address the question about how ESL teachers understand the diversity that they
bring to multicultural classrooms. In other words, how might teachers address themselves as
part of classroom, school, and community diversity? How might different professional
development opportunities contribute to teachers’ understanding of diversity and possible
ways to teach for diversity?

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Final Thoughts: Teaching Literacy for Diversity
Confronting conventions of literacy education
To conduct effective literacy instruction in a multicultural setting, teachers need to
take initiatives to challenge longstanding conventions and beliefs about literacy education
and existing literacy practices for ESL students with diverse backgrounds. Although most
pedagogical assumptions of literacy do not consciously or intentionally ignore diversity
issues, nevertheless these issues are ignored. They are deeply embedded in the hidden
curriculum (Synder, 1973). While these assumptions and practices have been demonstrated to
be effective for mainstream American students regarding their literacy achievement, they can
be powerful obstacles to developing a more effective, responsive, collaborative and
democratic learning community for all students, especially underachieving ESL students with
diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. What I saw in Deb and Kelly’s literacy practices
in their ESL classroom makes me think that the speculations based on these two cases would
require further inquiry to verify: In what ways and to what extent should in-service teachers
deconstruct and transform longstanding conventions of literacy education such as overgeneralizing diversity issues in multicultural educational settings, simplifying cross-cultural
and culture-oriented literacies and standardizing literacy assessment? These conventions of
literacy pedagogy have to be recognized before we can remove the obstacles and move
towards more responsive literacy instruction.
While diversity issues are complicated and responsive literacy instruction is desirable
in multicultural classes, teachers do not have to wait for best practices to be prescribed for
them before exploring diversity issues in their own class. Starting from research-based
literacy practices and then adapting them to meet particular needs within a given classroom is
very important. Deb and Kelly’s descriptions, suggestions and practices of responsive literacy
instruction described throughout this dissertation have been developed with their deeper

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understanding of the complexity of diversity issues in their ESL classes. An important
question is whether and how people from larger communities, including classroom teachers,
school administrators and ESL students’ parents, take initiatives and collaborate with ESL
teachers to recognize ESL students’ diversity and its influence on their literacy performance.
This is especially important because literacy development happens in both ESL and
mainstream classes, in school and at home. These initiatives may encourage all stakeholders
to share their knowledge of student diversity and produce a more comprehensive picture of
diversity among ESL students. For example, ESL students’ parents may share and explain
their children’s pedagogical experiences of literacy that impact ESL students’ literacy
learning in the American context but do not show up in standardized test scores or other
enrollment information-gathering forms. This may happen because previous research on
teaching literacy to ESL students have focused on students’ culture-oriented backgrounds
while paying less attention to cross-cultural experiences and individual variability. This is a
ripe area for future research.
Deb and Kelly’s nuanced descriptions of diversity issues and responsive literacy
practices demonstrate their tolerance, respect and close attention to student diversity in their
ESL classes. Across the vignettes I also see how Deb and Kelly attend to the complex nature
of student diversity and how they understand literacy instruction in a set of social spaces:
school, home, neighborhood and global contexts. When teaching literacy, they offer ESL
students opportunities to share what they have learned in these spaces. For example, they ask
what language(s) they have learned in their motherland, what literacy skills they have
developed in previous educational settings and need to further develop in the current one, or
what aspects of literacy they want to strengthen in America, thereby broadening the criteria
by which one can engage deeply in literacy. However, some of the new literacy skills that
ESL students have developed in American schools are not evaluated in standardized tests and

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are not considered as literacy achievements. Besides analyzing these social spaces to
understand the complex diversity ESL students bring to school, Deb and Kelly include these
spaces as necessary standards to assess students’ literacy performances. The case of ESL
students from China is a good example of how multiple social spaces have complicated ESL
students’ literacy achievement and evaluation of their literacy development. In school,
teachers have strived to help ESL students develop basic literacy skills to satisfy Grade Level
Standards while at home they have to use these skills to construct meanings that meet the
expectations and requirements of the Chinese community. Therefore, culturally responsive
pedagogies would recognize that zones of proximal language and literacy development are
dynamic and diverse. We should recognize ESL students’ ZPD of language and literacy as
heterogeneous, as situation-specific (dependent on subject matter, audience, timing, etc.), and
as changing, which is growing and diminishing even when they learn the same topic. Simply
assessing ESL students’ literacy performance in school may not predict their literacy
achievement in other literacy communities. Besides the constraints on interpreting ESL
students’ achievement, standardized literacy assessments may also prevent teachers from
noticing and appreciating the diverse genres of literacy that ESL students bring to school. The
state in which this study took place has now adopted the new Common Core State Standards
along with 47 other states as the next set of standards for holding teachers accountable. They
are also to be studied and examined for whether they support or hinder ESL students’ literacy
development.
Progressing toward teaching for diversity
To progress towards teaching for diversity, we should keep it in mind that cultural
analysis is intrinsically incomplete. Geertz (1973, p. 350) has suggested that culture is “the
development of a general, closed, abstract, formalistic science of thought, a universal
grammar of the intellect.” According to Geertz, culture can be generalized within boundaries,

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and people in the same setting share similar ideologies. However, the more deeply we
examine culture, the less complete it is. The intrinsic incompleteness of cultural analysis
suggests that even within the same culture, diversity exits. Diversity issues are unavoidable
both within and across cultures. In other words, even in a regular class full of students from
the same linguistic and cultural backgrounds, diversity is the norm. Accordingly, in a
multicultural classroom, three broad types of diversity exist: within a given culture, across
cultures and in individual differences. Therefore, teaching for diversity is not only a
democratic call that aims to provide an equal learning opportunity for all students but also the
reality that should be given more attention.
There is no doubt that unpacking the complexity of diversity issues is the first step to
teaching for diversity. According to the argument above, teachers may fail to unpack the
complexity of diversity issues in class if they did not take the learners’ expectations, the
teaching context, and students’ social development into consideration. Then, what does
unpacking the complexity of diversity issues in class mean to teachers? In my understanding,
it does not mean that teachers are pushed to take on more burdens, responsibilities, and
frustrations by themselves. On the contrary, what I have seen in Deb and Kelly’s literacy
practices is that unpacking the complexity of diversity issues in class provides opportunities
for teachers to re-think their role as teachers, and recognize that they are not “experts” about
everything (Britzman, 1991, p.227). Repositioning themselves in class would be helpful in
avoiding over-generalizing or simplifying diversity issues, and to see “what reality is really
like” (Gee, 2008, p. 5) in a multicultural setting. They are learners of the diversity that
students bring into the class, explorers of the multicultural and multilingual teaching
environment, as well as novices in newly emergent social events. It means teachers should
not isolate themselves, but should take initiatives to interact and work collaboratively with
and learn from other knowledge sources, including mainstream teachers who share

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information concerning ESL students’ performances in a regular class, ESL students who
come to class with diverse but unique language and literacy skills, and parents who are
willing to contribute to teachers’ better understandings of students’ literacy experience.
Another important part of progress towards teaching for diversity is to help teachers
break the constraints of their own ideologies. I suggest that teachers should hold a linguistic
view as a moral base to understand ESL students’ literacy performances. According to Gee
(1990, p. 21), linguistics matters in “explicating our tacit and removed/deferred ideologies.”
It is quite common for people to judge others’ behaviors based on their own “primary
generalization” (p. 17) while failing to seriously reflect on multiple viewpoints. It is the main
reason why “overt and covert messages that devalue the culture, heritage, and identity of
minority students” prevail in American schools (Huffman, 2001, pp. 25). Therefore, studying
Deb and Kelly’s practice has helped me see that it is important for teachers to be alert to the
constraints of their own ideology by employing a linguistic framework to see what reality is
really like when confronting others’ different behaviors.
When applying linguistics as a moral basis for analyzing diversity issues, teachers
may demonstrate more understanding of and respect for students’ differences. However, it is
still dangerous to analyze the students’ behavior on such a structured basis. We can see in
Deb and Kelly’s ESL classes that students from particular ethnic groups need different
assistance with literacy development, although most of them have difficulties in literacy
learning. For example, some ESL students from Sudan are fluent in daily conversation but
fail to perform well in academic English; some students from Japan do well in academic
writing, though they seldom communicate easily with teachers and their peers because of
their lack of cultural knowledge of communicating or interacting with others. It is quite
possible that using a linguistic approach as a moral basis for diagnosing diversity issues in
school may mislead the teachers to another extreme – ascribing students’ different behaviors

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(especially inappropriate behaviors) and learning deficiencies to a single cause while
neglecting each student’s differences in cultural backgrounds and individual ability as well as
his or her special needs. Using a linguistic approach as moral basis to understand and respond
to student diversity may result in teachers’ forming standardized judgments of students’
behaviors and performances. In my opinion, ESL students are not proficient in Standard
English, not because they are incapable of learning it or their first language(s) is inferior to
English, but because they have not been sufficiently exposed to Standard English and the
necessary literacy skills needed in an American context. Therefore, progressing towards
teaching for diversity is a must for teachers to deepen understanding of diversity issues and to
identify students’ real learning needs.

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APPENDICES

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APPENDIX A
First Interview
Background
1. Where did you go to college? Major? What are your endorsements?
2. Briefly summarize your prior teaching positions, over the past ten years?
3. How long have you been teaching at this school?
4. How long have you held this current position?
5. Why did you decide to go into ESL teaching? What do you enjoy about teaching
ESL? Not enjoy?
6. What are you strengths as an ESL teacher? Areas you’d like to improve upon, if any?
•

ESL Teaching Context
7. Describe ESL program structure and ELL population in this school.
8. How do you see your roles/responsibilities as an ESL teacher in the school?
9. What teaching tools, materials or resources in the school or local communities do you
usually use while teaching ESL?
10. What other contextual factors that you will take into account while designing and
conducting ESL practices in this school?

•

ESL Curriculum
(How do ESL teachers understand ESL literacy curriculum in their district and what

is expected of them?)
1. What policies, curriculum or other artifacts are available guiding your literacy
instruction in ESL classrooms?
2. What are the objectives/goals of the ESL education in your school district?
3. What educational experiences does ESL curriculum suggest you to provide for ELLs?
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4. How does ESL curriculum suggest you to assess ELLs’ literacy learning?
5. How does ESL curriculum address the issue of cultural and linguistic diversity?
6. What are the successes and weaknesses of current ESL curriculum according to your
implementation experiences (in terms of educational goals, experiences and
assessment)?
Professional Development
(What formal, informal and other preparation have the teachers had to teach ESL
students?)
1. What experiences did you gain from teacher education program, other jobs or
volunteer work, to help you grow as an ESL teacher?
2. What experiences did you gain from teacher education program, other jobs or
volunteer work, to teach ELLs literacy, especially those came from culturally and
linguistically diverse backgrounds?
3. Describe any formal and informal professional development activities you have
attended addressing minority student needs.
4. List specific teaching skills/strategies/techniques that you gained from those formal
and informal professional development programs, and how those strategies helped
you to teach culturally and linguistically diverse students.
5. What do you read to stay current in your field? Why do you choose those materials?

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APPENDIX B
Second Interview
•

English Language Learners
(What do they notice and try to learn about their students?)
1. What is your prior personal and professional experience with linguistic and cultural
diversity students?
2. Describe the changes in the student population during your tenure in the district. Have
these changes affected your ESL instruction? If so, how?
3. Please describe what and how you would learn about a student when a new ELL
enrolled in your school/class.
4. Describe how ELLs display positive/negative behaviors and attitudes in your class.
Do these behaviors/attitudes differ from mainstream White American students? If so,
please explain.
5. Do you feel ELLs have different literacy learning strengths/weaknesses? Please
explain.
6. How would you identify ELLs’ special learning needs?
7. How would you accommodate ELLs’ special learning needs in your design of a
literacy class?

•

Teaching Responsibilities
(What do they think their responsibilities are when they teach literacy?)
1. What qualities make up a good ESL teacher? Among those qualities, what are the
most important ones in terms of literacy instruction?
2. What are your strengths and weaknesses as an ESL teacher?
3. What do you think your responsibilities are when facing different learning needs and
styles of ELLs from diverse backgrounds?

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4. What allows your responsibilities of teaching literacy to ELLs to be implemented?
5. What prevents your responsibilities from being implemented?
6. Complete the metaphor “teaching literacy to culturally and linguistic diverse students
is…”
•

Literacy lesson Design
(How do they plan for teaching of literacy to their students?)
1. Please describe the general process of designing a literacy plan for ELLs.
2. What resources/materials would you rely on to design literacy lesson plan?
3. How do you choose content, children’s literature, and classroom activities when
designing the lesson plan?
4. What other key factors would you consider when designing a literacy lesson?
5. If you could design the ideal literacy instruction for culturally and linguistically
diverse ELLs what would it look like? Why is it good?
6. What are the differences and similarities in designing a literacy lesson for culturally
and linguistically diverse ELLs, for monolingual ELLs, and for mainstream American
students (optional) ?
7. Complete the metaphor “designing literacy lessons for culturally and linguistically
diverse ELLs is…”

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APPENDIX C
Third Interview
Literacy instruction strategies
(What teaching strategies do ESL teachers adopt and why?)
1. Describe how you think literacy instruction in ESL class should be. How does it differ
from mainstream literacy class?
2. What are your strategies for teaching reading?
3. Describe strategies you usually adopt to teach listening and speaking in ESL class.
4. Describe strategies you usually adopt to teach writing in ESL class?
5. Describe strategies you usually adopt to assess ELLs’ literacy performance.
6. Describe teaching events of reading, listening, speaking and writing you found
challenging. What made them challenging?
7. What activities do you usually use in literacy instruction (or in teaching reading,
writing, speaking and listening)?
8. Do you believe culturally responsive teaching? If so, please describe what culturally
responsive teaching is, and how to enact culturally responsive literacy teaching.
9. How do you handle cultural diversity during literacy instruction?
10. How do you handle culture conflicts among ELLs or between ELLs and students?
Materials and resources
(What materials and resources do they use and why?)
1. What textbooks and other materials do you use for literacy instruction (i.e. literature,
speaking, listening, phonetic awareness, and writing)?
2. Why and how do you choose those materials?
3. How do those materials help you address the issue of ELLs’ culturally and
linguistically diversity?

176

	
  
4. How do you include culturally relevant materials for literacy instruction (i.e. literature,
speaking, phonetic awareness, and writing)?
5. How do you use those materials and resources to teach literacy?
6. What technologies do you use in the classroom? Any other materials would you like
to talk about?
Classroom routines
(What routines are used in the classroom to support literacy learning?)
1. Describe the routine of a typical literacy class. How was it arranged and how did the
arrangement help you to teach?
2. What are key factors influencing the routine of literacy instruction in ESL classroom?
3. When setting up classroom routines, did you take ELLs’ cultural and linguistic
diversity into consideration? If so/not, explain.

177

	
  

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