The story of a woman's attempt to teach working-class minority students in the USA the mainstream academic ways of speaking necessary for success in school. She recounts the veiled antagonistic relationship between herself (a white teacher) and her Mexican-American students.

Unlike more conventional language learning literature where the political dimensions of language learning are seldom acknowledged or addressed, Bartolom candidly discusses the dominant deficit ideology underlying cultural difference explanations of linguistic minority student underachievement as well as the romantization ideology that implicitly presents dominant culture ways of speaking as more advanced and desirable ways of communicating. Her book critically analyzes a well-intentioned teachers efforts to teach her working class Mexican American students mainstream academic ways of speaking and unmasks the veiled antagonistic relationship between a white teacher and her students of color, the students resistance efforts, and the teachers resulting deficit explanations of her students performance. The Misteaching of Academic Discourses is a must read for all those educators who are faced with issues of language, race, and class. }

Foreword
(James Paul Gee)
Understanding Academic Discourses
Language and Ideology: The (Il)literacy
of Linguistic-Minority Students
A Potentially Ideal Classroom
The Misteaching of Academic Discourses: Three Discourse Events
Student Language Performance on Language Tasks
Rethinking Academic Discourses: Some Pedagogical Comments