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Questions On Chinese Learners Of English Fit Very Well With The Course

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had some trouble determining which of the two articles that I read would be most beneficial for the class to read. The quantitative piece on Chinese learners of English fit very well with the course. It exemplified the word recognition view of reading that we have discussed and addressed themes and theoretical frameworks (common underlying proficiency, contrastive analysis, the monolingual perspective) that have come up on many occasions in our class. In the end however I chose the qualitative article from Villalve. My primary justification for this is that the article is so different from the readings we have done in class that I feel it has something more unique to contribute. The primary focus of the article was to consider diverse literacy practices in detail and also to look at approaches to inquiry, learning, and meaning making. In order to do this, Villalve took a case study approach to look at two 17 year-old bilingual Latina students during their last year of high school. These students were involved in an ongoing senior writing project that entailed collecting information from a diverse set of resources, collaborating with other students and school faculty, and finally submitting a thesis and making a final presentation. From this it is clear that one of the primary ways that this article differs from much of what our class has read so far is the age of the students involved. Relatively little data seems to exist on literacy practices of high school bilinguals and

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