Book Bridges for ESL Students: Using Young Adult and Children’s Literature to Teach ESL

Approaches to multicultural reading and education remain perennial topics of importance for teachers and resource providers like librarians in schools. Suzanne Reid has produced a topical and conversational little book, based on her own experience in the USA, where she teaches courses on children’s literature and ESL (English as a second language) at Emory and Henry College in Appalachian Virginia. It is a practical guide to how‐to‐do‐it and what‐to‐use‐and‐why, looking at dealing with the teaching and resource demands of the multicultural classroom, the interpersonal skills needed by the teacher, the cultural and linguistic characteristics of the learners. It alerts readers to the ways of introducing new information, selecting appropriate literature, getting the reading and personal maturity levels right, using reading and group activity work to encourage and develop reading, and enabling independent reading. Some attention is given to readers who are adults and not children or young adults. Several chapters are provided on specific resources like picture books (for young and older children), history (emphatically North American) and selecting suitable work (such as the fiction of Collier, series works), maths and science (more attention here to curricular material), and multicultural works (for and about African Americans, other cultures, special groups like migrant workers and their children, cultural traditions like oral cultures and attitudes to group activity). A bibliography is provided covering resources for reading, for teaching history and maths and science, and multicultural themes, and resources for the professional teacher (for classroom, ESL/EFL teachers) and resource providers (for example McCaffery’s Building an ESL Collection for Young Adults, Greenwood Press, 1998, and Pratt and Beatty’s Transcultural Children’s Literature, Prentice Hall, 1999). Orders and further information about the book can be found on The Scarecrow Press Web site at scarecrowpress.com. The issues raised, and materials recommended, in this book will be of most relevance to professionals in the USA, although the challenges exist in many other places. A chatty style and snapshot approach to current works will endear it to such readers now, but it is unlikely to have a long life and is one of many in a crowded field.