This e-single focuses on deepening an understanding of Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE), sometimes also referred to as SIFE. SLIFE face different challenges in the classroom than more traditional ELLs. The challenges they face go beyond language and content: SLIFE need to develop basic literacy skills and foundational subject-area knowledge, as well as learn how to “do” school—that is, learn how to engage in the discourse and practices of formal educational settings. Few teachers feel prepared to work with SLIFE and most ESL pedagogical practices are inappropriate and/or inadequate for this population.
Because of their limited or greatly interrupted participation in formal education or, in some cases no exposure to any schooling, SLIFE do not have the literacy skills, grade-level content knowledge, or cognitive ways of thinking required to succeed in school. So what can teachers do to help the SLIFE succeed and to recognize and honor the knowledge, skills, and cultural capital—different though they may be—of SLIFE?
This text in this e-single centers around four guidelines for teaching SLIFE: question assumptions, foster two-way communication, explicitly teach school tasks and academic ways of thinking, and promote project-based learning. Discussion of a new paradigm for instruction, the Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm (MALP®), is included.
This text is available on Amazon.com as a Kindle Edition!
