Understanding Language and Literacy Development: Diverse Learners in the Classroom offers effective supporting strategies to address the cultural and linguistic diversity of students in contemporary classrooms. Today's schools are characterized by significant cultural and linguistic diversity--and teaching is correspondingly becoming an increasingly complex, multi-faceted, and challenging endeavor. Understanding Language and Literacy Development features a wide variety of effective supporting strategies to address the varying language and literacy developmental characteristics of children and adolescents in contemporary classroom settings. Utilizing Critical Discourse Analysis as a conceptual framework, Wang examines the complexity of language and literacy and their roles in academic learning. The author expertly discusses children's developmental stages, considering a wide range of topics including English language acquisition among children and adolescents--and the typical issues related to comprehension and production at different stages and ages of acquisition--as well as the impact of various language impairments (from SLI to autism). Special features of this work include questions that engage and challenge the reader throughout the chapters, and exercises designed to facilitate understanding of language phenomena in the classroom and elsewhere; the author also ties her discussion into the new Common Core standards that underlie the public school curriculum. Innovative and timely, this is an invaluable resource to assist in meeting the teaching challenges of 21st-century classrooms.