Engaging in the Language Arts: Exploring the Power of Language, Second Edition

This unique guide focuses on helping teachers ensure that students learn to use language to communicate with others in our increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse society. It also reminds teachers to draw upon a great resource in their classrooms: the language power of their students themselves.

Here readers get a firsthand look at the language challenges teachers face and how teachers need to identify these language possibilities and make optimal use of them in their classrooms. With lively narrative, clear organization, and exceptional pedagogy, distinguished authors Donna Ogle and Jim Beers bring the language arts to life for teachers through a focus on contemporary communication and visual literacy, coupled with varied genre and electronic resources. They also bring students into the classroom in their new feature, Key Teaching Strategy, with a rubric teachers can use to evaluate their instruction.

In Engaging the Language Arts, the key focus is on helping teachers ensure that students learn to use language to communicate with others, to explore ideas, and to demonstrate their learning orally and in written formats. All of the basic writing processes are covered, while the book places a unique emphasis on the actual purpose behind teaching writing. Included are classroom-based assessments and activities reflecting state and national standards that provide important resources to help teachers differentiate instruction.