Customer Reviews

Closing the Achievement Gap: How to Reach Limited-Formal-Schooling and Long-Term English Learners

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This book, "Closing the Achievement Gap: How to Reach Limited-Formal-Schooling and Long Term English Learners", is an excellent resource for teachers of older English learners with limited formal schooling or English learners with more conversational than academic fluency. Yvonne S. Freeman and David E. Freeman, professors at the Graduate School at Fresno Pacific University, describe in detail these two types of students and provide four main ideas to help teachers meet the academic needs of these struggling students. The Freemans' also cite research on effective teaching practices and describe three teachers working with these particular students in a multi-grade, a middle, and a high school classroom. All three teachers are successfully implementing research proven theories in their classroom practices to help close the achievement gap.
Overall, the Freemans' did a good job in examining each point thoroughly. The format was concise, comprehensible, and the strategies described can easily be used with my Newcomer students. I thought it was a good idea to present three different perspectives of teachers working with a range of age groups. It demonstrated that the theories and strategies presented can be effective across grade levels.
I recommend that school administrators and professors of teaching candidates also read the book for the strategies presented and for the valuable research on second language acquisition. The academic gap of struggling English learners will only continue to widen if educators and administrators do not become more knowledgeable in this area.

The writing style is direct and the organization is good. However, I often find with the Freeman's that their books tend to be generall and not specific enough. It is a book written for teachers teaching teachers (or researchers)who are not directly involved in the classroom.

The content of this book is not the problem, it is its poor organizational structure. It is redundant and organized in an unhelpful way, so that the read focusses on the repetitive statement(s), leaving the seemingly tidbits of research and theory to get lost. It's like having a simple base beat up too loud and dragging on throughout a whole album. They could have summed up the content of this book in 2-3 short articles with greater success. The content, however, was helpful!

I bought this book to complete some research for my thesis and it turned out to be the best resource I have seen in a while. I have shared the book with all my colleagues and fellows graduate students. I would highly recommend this book to any and all teachers and particularly those who teach language learners.