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When students write "My goldfish name is Scaley" or "Mama walk to the store," teachers correct student grammar and offer remedial exercises. Yet, teacher experience and national statistics on the achievement gap in English reveal that current approaches fail to assure Standard English mastery for all.

Anchoring in actual writing from year-end NCLB English tests, this workshop shows how traditional responses to home speech grammar misdiagnose student writing performance. In response, with just one 1 linguistic insight, participants will learn how to correctly assess African American student writing needs. Then, based on her NCTE book, Code-Switching: Teaching Standard English in Urban Classrooms, Wheeler will lead participants in hands-on work with 3 strategies that build on students’ existing knowledge – Everyday English -- as springboard to Standard English. We will see how the research-based strategies directly support and implement State literacy standards and embody nationally recognized best-practices (Marzano). All participants will receive a packet of overheads, graphic organizers and lesson plans which support work in the Standard literacy classroom.

What should teachers do when students’ grammar in formal school essays sounds like just their voices on the playground? How do we succeed in teaching Standard English in Urban classrooms?

In this lively, interactive web seminar, NCTE consultant and author of Code-Switching: Teaching Standard English in Urban Classrooms shares research-based classroom insights and strategies for teaching Standard English to students who speak and write in Everyday English.

In this hour you’ll learn

• 1 linguistic insight to transform the dialectally diverse classroom
• 3 strategies for teaching Standard English
  • how to lead students in discovery learning of grammar
  • how Marzano’s #1 strategy, comparison and contrast, plays in the grammar classroom
  • how code-switching helps students reflect on their writing choices
• the top 10 patterns in African American students’ writing
• charts and graphic organizers to support student editing
• An approach—code-switching—that enlivens students and brings results