No doubt you discovered that you use the skills and strategies in this inventory often without really thinking about it. The skills included in this inventory can fall into different categories.
There is academic language, for example, adapting language to a variety of contexts and communicative tasks.
You know that you need to address an officer of the law differently than you might a family member. You know that an email to your spouse will be written very differently than a letter to a teacher at school. You use language strategies, for example,
you read texts differently depending on your purpose; you probably scan the weather page for the. high and low to decide how to dress in the morning
When you get to work, you might read an email from your boss about an upcoming structural change in the school very carefully. You employ critical thinking skills, for example,
you synthesize information from multiple sources. When you need to do a presentation or write something for school or work,
you don't gather information from only one source, do you? When you are making a major purchase, you may do the same thing.
Then you analyze, compare, and contrast the information. Finally, the inventory included essential skills such as note-taking, planning, and organizing strategies.
You may have acquired these skills through models from parents, friends, teachers, or co-workers.
You may have had explicit instruction in some of these in a study skills class at school, for example, note-taking strategies. You have been in school settings
that put a high premium on writing for different purposes and on critical thinking. Whether your adult English language learners readily employ these skills
may be largely dependent on their educational backgrounds. We know that acquisition of these academic skills is dependent on experience with formal schooling
and those learners with limited formal schooling may take more than ten years of instruction to acquire them. Adult English language learners
may have limited opportunities to develop skills like these outside of classes. This is why we need to include them early and often.
Why are they so important? As we will explore in this unit, we live in a changing economic and work landscape.
The nature of jobs has changed over the past century. According to the 2007 State New Economy Index,
ÒWorkers who were skilled with their hands and could reliably work in repetitive and sometimes physically demanding jobs were the engine of the old economy.
In today's New Economy, knowledge-based jobs are driving prosperityÉ positions held by individuals with at least two years of college.Ó
New jobs require extensive use of both oral and written language; they involve working with complex texts; they involve more interactions with co-workers.
Incorporating instruction in the types of skills and strategies in the inventory will not only help adult English language learners prepare for those jobs,
but also help them to be more engaged language learners and community members. Building academic language,
language skills and strategies, and critical thinking means increased rigor in English language instruction.