Subject Literacy in Culturally Diverse Secondary Schools supports you to help all learners at lower secondary level to develop and communicate their ideas more effectively, particularly learners with English as an Additional Language (EAL).

Starting from basic educational principles, the authors help you to consider the processes of learning and why every good teacher needs knowledge about language to support this, looking at how language is used for different purposes. Drawing on their experience across language in culturally diverse classrooms and teacher education, the authors encourage you to explore:

-How is language used to present and discuss knowledge in my subject?
-Who are the EAL learners in your classroom?
-What are the processes of language development?
-What approaches to task design and language modelling can a subject teacher use for building subject knowledge?

You are supported to reflect on the specific features of your own subject language, enabling you to consider how you can make your subject related language more visible to learners and how you can use existing knowledge of language to help learners to understand and develop subject literacies.

Esther Daborn is Lecturer in Educational Linguistics and teacher education in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow, UK. She has taught English as a first and as a second language in mainstream classrooms in the UK and East Africa. She has extensive experience of working with international students preparing English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to study at university and has prepared and delivered a number of in-service teacher's courses.

Sally Zacharias is Associate Teaching Fellow in TESOL and teacher education in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow, UK. She has taught English as a second language in the UK, Germany and France and is a trained science teacher (Content and Language Integrated Learning specialism).

Hazel Crichton is Lecturer in Modern Languages Education in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow, UK. She taught French, German and Spanish in UK secondary schools for 30 years.