Harvard Educational Review
"a comprehensive and readable resource that early childhood teachers, administrators, and parents will find insightful and invaluable"


Choice
Early childhood educators of linguistically diverse preschoolers will find this a practical resource...


Book Description
Written expressly for teachers, this highly readable resource demystifies the natural process of second-language learning in young children. With this book, teachers will learn how to create supportive classroom environments for secon-language learners, measure children's progress, address individual differences, and work effectively with parents-all the while acknowledging the importance of children's home languages and cultures. This idea-packed guide infuses research findings with the author's firsthand observations of linguistically and culturally diverse children, making it an important addition to every early childhood educator's desk.


About the Author
Patton O. Tabors, Ed.D., is Research Associate in the Projects in Language Development at the Grad-uate School of Education at Harvard University. For the past 9 years, Dr. Tabors has been the Research Co-ordinator of the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development, a longitudinal study of low-income, English-speaking children and their families. For the past 4 years, she has also directed research related to the mother-child book-reading project of the Manpower Development Research Corporation's evaluations of New Chance and JOBS training programs. Pursuing an interest that developed while teaching bilingual students in the Cambridge Public Schools, Dr. Tabors entered the doctoral program at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University in 1981 to study first- and second-language acquisition. Her qualifying paper and dissertation research, based on 2 years of ethnographic investigation in a nursery school classroom, resulted in the delineation of the developmental pathway for young children learning English as a second language. In 1989, she used this information in planning a trilingual preschool/primary school for the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. In 1995, Dr. Tabors became coordinator of the Harvard Language Diversity Project, a research activity of the New England Quality Research Center on Head Start. While writing One Child, Two Languages, Dr. Tabors was able to visit preschool classrooms, interview teachers, and hold workshops related to the topic of young children learning English as a second language. Recognizing the importance of a continuing dialogue on this topic, she has established an e-mail account (patton@onechild.

FROM THE PUBLISHER