Language as Social Context and Literacy Development of Students from Diverse Backgrounds

In this article, the author invokes Cummins’ model for social empowerment of minority students to suggest an alternative way of thinking about the empowerment of school communities. This paper explains Cummins’ theoretical framework and suggests implications that might help teachers better understand social language literacy development in terms of Cummins’ (1986-1994) conceptual framework, which is based on the notion that students who are from a diverse background are in need of school literacy learning that attends to “the goals of instruction, the role of the home language, instructional materials, classroom management and interaction with students, relationships with the community, instructional methods and assessment” (Au, 1998, p. 298). This paper also attempts to explain how the relationships among students’ literacy development, social practices, and their diverse background empower them and assess them in developing their learning literacy skills, taking into consideration the types of literacy that best work with diverse communities.