Academic Success for English Language Learners: Strategies for K-12 Mainstream Teachers

There are some interesting and potentially useful ideas in this book, but unfortunately it suffers from trying to do too much. Each chapter is written by different authors, all with widely varying ideas about ELL approaches. Unfortunately, because of the nature of the book, none of the chapters goes into enough detail to provide any real meat for the classroom teacher to use. I've taught English in Japan for three years, and many of the things in the book I came to do intuitively. Lots of theory here, but little substance.

As a means to access critical references in the field of designing instruction with English Language Learners in mind (in other words, its nice to have all these bibliographies in one place) this is exceeding valuable. Also serves as a good overview of the literature. As a course book it suffers from its "collection of work" nature for those who might be looking for a more coherent plan of attack, but again this is a developing field and there is a lot to chose from in terms of how to design instruction, so I guess 'its all good'. Includes both very recent (2005) and some classic research.