In American culture, literacy precedes civic participation and empowerment. We strive to teach all domains of language in a highly-collaborative way, so that students can fully participate in their new communities, use their written and spoken word to advocate for and work towards a more full, healthy, fulfilling, and dignified existence.

Literacy is a social practice that is critically connected to people’s social identities; thus, when people develop literacy, they also learn new values, norms, and different ways of thinking (J. Gee, 1996). While literacy may have been seen as the act of encoding and decoding print in the past, this understanding has evolved, and so must our practice. Literacy is not merely the act of encoding and decoding print. Literacy is the ability to appropriate knowledge and skills to communicate and extract meaning through a variety of socially situated and rapidly changing media (Hawkins, 2004; Kress, 2003). This definition remains relevant to English Language Learners. Given this new understanding of literacy, we outline our instructional approaches in the domains of reading, writing, listening, speaking, and grammar on the following pages.