Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education in US Classrooms

Considerable attention has focused on the challenges of English language learners without age-appropriate formal education and first language literacy. They are viewed here as students with high-context learning experiences and expectations (Hall in Beyond culture, Anchor, New York, 1976), and a collectivistic orientation, with a pragmatic, rather than academic way of looking at the world, who are marginalized and disoriented in US classrooms. Building on Ibarra’s Beyond affirmative action: Reframing the context of higher education, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison (2001) “cultural dissonance” construct, the two learning paradigms are contrasted, and a third, the mutually adaptive learning paradigm, is posited as a pathway to academic success for this population.