Language Across the Curriculum: Why All Community College Faculty Must Learn to Support Emergent Bilingual Students

ABSTRACT

Community Colleges (CCs) in the U.S. provide open access to education for an extremely diverse student body, with large numbers of emergent bilingual students enrolling in CCs. This paper describes the rationale behind offering professional development to instructors across CCs on teaching Language Across the Curriculum (LAC). In order to meet the needs of the CC student population, I argue that all instructors need to be prepared to support the development of academic language which differs among disciplines and takes years to develop. Furthermore, all educators need a deeper understanding of emergent bilingual students in order to best meet their needs. Equipping instructors with the ideas and tools of LAC is a promising practice that will support emergent bilinguals throughout their educational experiences in CCs.