This book represents a conversation among educators and researchers concerned with language and literacy development in today's linguistically and culturally diverse student populations. The conversation began by chance in the late 1990s at an international conference on literacy when Catherine Snow and Lily Wong Fillmore began talking about the escalating demands that the educational system in the United States places on teachers without giving them the support they need to meet those demands. Snow had just chaired a National Research Council Committee on Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children that summarized what teachers would need to know to provide all children with ample and equitable opportunities to learn to read. Few of the nation's teacher education programs provided the depth and breadth of information that committee members felt was needed. Meanwhile, Fillmore had been pressing for more attention to language and literacy in teacher education and at the University of California, Berkeley, had been teaching one of the few courses in the country that addressed these issues. Clearly, the two scholars agreed, teachers need more knowledge about domains related to language and literacy than teacher education programs typically provide. They decided to develop a paper laying out their views and circulate it to colleagues for comment.

That paper—the first version of this volume's focal chapter, "What Teachers Need to Know About Language"—came to the attention of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) in the U.S. Department of Education, who invited Snow and Fillmore to develop a workshop that would help educators think creatively about some of the issues raised there. Snow and Fillmore conducted the workshops in 1999 at three regional conferences organized by the U.S. Department of Education, focusing on how to make the challenges of language and literacy development clear, a difficult task for educators who themselves had no difficulty acquiring language and literacy skills.