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Primary Teachers' Use Of Communicative Strategies For Linguistically Diverse Learners: A Cross-Cultural Case Study, Geraldine Mongillo, Dorothy Feola, Rochelle Goldberg Kaplan, Vered Vaknin, Randa Abbas

The Language and Literacy Spectrum

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of communicative strategies employed by two primary grade teachers whose students’ home language differed from the language of instruction. The communicative strategies examined included verbal, gestural, and other visual modes of interaction within classroom discourse to promote student learning. One school we studied was in Northern Israel and one was in New Jersey in the US. In Israel, the teacher taught using formal Modern Standard Arabic while the children were familiar only with Spoken Arabic. In New Jersey, the teacher taught using English while the students were largely from Spanish-speaking …