Chris Altman stresses the importance of helping English language learners ascertain the medium they best work with in interpreting information presented in class. Altman reminds us that meaning does not come directly from teachers giving students information, but from students productively making meaning and clarifying understanding through a…

The humanities department of the community college where the author teaches has a long-standing policy regarding the demand for sentence-structure correctness in all the composition courses that they provide. That policy holds students accountable for total control over the rules that govern sentence structure. Any student paragraph or essay that…