What Teachers Need to Know About Language (CAL Series on Language Education, 2) (Volume 2) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1788920171 ISBN 13: 9781788920179

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2018

Synopsis

Rising enrollments of students for whom English is not a first language mean that every teacher – whether teaching kindergarten or high school algebra – is a language teacher. This book explains what teachers need to know about language in order to be more effective in the classroom, and it shows how teacher education might help them gain that knowledge. It focuses especially on features of academic English and gives examples of the many aspects of teaching and learning to which language is key. This second edition reflects the now greatly expanded knowledge base about academic language and classroom discourse, and highlights the pivotal role that language plays in learning and schooling. The volume will be of interest to teachers, teacher educators, professional development specialists, administrators, and all those interested in helping to ensure student success in the classroom and beyond.

About this title

About the Authors

Carolyn Temple Adger is Senior Fellow, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC. Her research interests include biliteracy and language variation.

Catherine E. Snow is the Patricia Albjerg Graham Professor of Education, Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Her research interests include first and second language acquisition and literacy.

Donna Christian is Senior Fellow, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC. Her research interests include dual language education, dialect diversity, and language and public policy.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

What Teachers Need to Know About Language

By Carolyn Temple Adger, Catherine E. Snow, Donna Christian

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2018 Center for Applied Linguistics
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78892-017-9

Contents

Contributors, vii, 
Introduction Carolyn Temple Adger, Catherine E. Snow, and Donna Christian, 1, 
1 What Teachers Need to Know About Language Lily Wong Fillmore and Catherine E. Snow, 8, 
2 Analyzing Themes: Knowledge About Language for Exploring Text Structure Mary J. Schleppegrell, 52, 
3 What Educators Need to Know About Academic Language: Insights from Recent Research Paola Uccelli and Emily Phillips Galloway, 62, 
4 Language and Instruction: Research-Based Lesson Planning and Delivery for English Learner Students Sarah C. K. Moore, Lindsey A. Massoud, and Joanna Duggan, 75, 
5 "Languagizing" the Early Childhood Classroom: Supporting Children's Language Development Rebecca M. Alper, Lillian R. Masek, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and Roberta Golinkoff, 85, 
6 Working with Families of Diverse Backgrounds: Learning from Teachers Who "Read" Their Students Sonia Nieto, 95, 
7 What Teachers Need to Know About Language: A Focus on Language Disorders Li-Rong Lilly Cheng, 105, 
8 What Teachers Know About Language Kimberly C. Feldman, Daniel Ginsberg, and Iris Kirsch, 115, 
9 Language Awareness Programs: Building Students' and Teachers' Sociolinguistic Knowledge Jeffrey Reaser, 125, 
10 Reflections on "What Teachers Need to Know About Language (2002)" Kristin Denham and Anne Lobeck, 135, 
11 What Teacher Educators Need to Know About Language and Language Learners: The Power of a Faculty Learning Community Elizabeth R. Howard and Thomas H. Levine, 143, 
Index, 153, 

CHAPTER 1

What Teachers Need to Know About Language

Lily Wong Fillmore and Catherine E. Snow

Prologue

A decade and a half ago, we found ourselves together at a conference at which many of the talks were given in Catalan. Unable to follow them, we withdrew to a shady spot where we started to chat about a shared concern — that many teachers had insufficient access to information about language structure, language analysis, bilingualism, and literacy to be able to optimize their instruction or maximize their contributions to discussions about language policy. In response to our concern, we sketched out the text of "What Teachers Need to Know About Language," producing in effect a long list of topics that we argued deserved more attention in teacher education and professional development. We presented those topics in the chapter that opened the previous edition of this work. We return now, some 16 years later, to the same challenge, but with the recognition that the formulation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) (National Governors Association, 2010), the move toward requiring students to read more complex text and to produce argumentative writing, and the persistent failure of policies for educating language minority students have made it both more urgent and more difficult.

In the meantime, though, we think the field has made considerable progress in defining, if not resolving, the challenge. For example, there is now general recognition that adolescents need ongoing instruction in reading to help them cope with the academic language and the discipline-specific discourse forms they encounter in their texts. The study of academic language, which was nascent when we wrote the first version of this chapter and which we referred to only glancingly, has now generated data, theory, tools, assessments, and instructional practices. Researchers have specified discipline-specific features of text, emphasizing that even good basic readers need to learn things about reading texts in history, science, or math that they can't learn from reading narratives.

These advances in the field present even more compelling demands for teachers to be knowledgeable about language than those we addressed when we first wrote on this topic. How might this kind of knowledge contribute to better instruction? We offer an example of linguistically informed teaching to which we will return throughout this chapter. It stands in counterpoint to efforts that respond to the need for more attention to language with explicit teaching of forms (teaching lists of academic vocabulary words, teaching about morphological derivations, teaching the discourse elements of an argument) unhinged from function. The best way to teach language forms, we contend, is to present them in text, where they display their functions, and then to explore with students what the functions are and how the forms fulfill them.

This process is demonstrated here by a teacher working with a group of five third graders who are recently arrived English learners. During this 20-minute session, the teacher takes them on a close walk through a sentence from a science text their class has been reading.

OK — so let me read this first — I'll read it twice — and after that you can read it as many times as you need to before you write down what you think this sentence is saying: The wires behind your wall that carry electricity to lights and appliances are made of metal, usually copper.

After reading the sentence, which is written on chart paper, the teacher hands the students some Post-it notes on which they are to jot down their initial understanding of the sentence, a relatively complex one with multiple modifiers (behind your wall and that carry electricity to lights and appliances) in its subject noun phrase. While the words are neither difficult nor especially technical, some are nonetheless unfamiliar to students who have had only a year or so of exposure to English. Over the course of this short lesson, the teacher guides the students in a deconstruction of the sentence, helping them figure out what each part means and how it relates to the other parts of the sentence.

"What's the subject of this sentence? What is this sentence about?" she asks. "About wires," a student says. The teacher nods, "This sentence is about the wires (pointing to the first two words on the chart). Now we are going to find out what the rest of the sentence is telling us about the wires." The students, guided by their teacher, work out the meaning and function of each part of the sentence, but stumble when they arrive at the word appliances. A student reads: "that carry electricity to lights and uh — uh-pleyshus." "Appliances," the teacher repeats. "I can tell by the fact that you had trouble saying that word that it's probably not a word you are familiar with. Does anyone know what appliances are?"

The students do not. The teacher guesses that the students might also have difficulty understanding other words that make up the sentence, even ones they read correctly. The word appliances presented a special challenge — it denotes a category of household equipment or devices that serves particular functions, and that, in this case, is powered by electricity. The teacher could have simply said just that and been done with defining it, or have had on hand a chart depicting such devices. But she does something far more beneficial: She engages her students in constructing a conceptual understanding of appliances as a categorical term. She guides them to think about devices that are powered by electricity. The students begin by suggesting buses and cell phones as examples. After distinguishing between battery power and the electrical power from the wires that the sentence tells them are behind the wall, the teacher redirects them to think about household devices that must be plugged into the wall to operate. "Computers" is the first suggestion, but when it comes to other devices, the students have difficulty naming them in English: Holding up his hands to suggest a large object, a student offers, "The — the thing that you put when you put when you're cooking?" The following exchange reveals how the teacher provides these English learners opportunities to draw on their prior knowledge to communicate their understanding in a language they are just learning:

T: (Repeating student's utterance) "The thing that you put when you're cooking." Is it big or is it small?

S1: It's big. (Gesturing, again hands apart indicating object about 2 feet wide)

T: It's big, and what do you put on it?

SS: Um, pan!

T: Pans, good. Does anyone know the word for that big thing in the kitchen that you put pans on to cook?

SS: uhm ...

S2: A cooker.

T: A cooker. I'm glad you put that there because something that cooks, if you add an 'E-R' there, it is like a cookER, because I teach, and I am a teachER. So something that cooks could be a "cooker." But it has another word, so we can call it an oven, you know the word "oven"? And how about stove? Do you know the word "stove"?

S2 & SS: (Excitedly): Oh yeah! Yeah!

T: That's the one you were thinking about! OK! Anything else you know that runs with electricity?

The teacher goes on to elicit words for other electrically powered household devices from the students: freezer, refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, washer, dryer, etc. They lack the English vocabulary to name them, but she patiently draws out descriptions of their functions or what one does with them, and then she offers the English word for the device. Together, the teacher and students identify each item and as they do, she writes that word above the word appliances in the sentence, which they have before them on the chart paper.

This interaction reveals that even a relatively simple, relatively brief sentence can pose comprehension and processing challenges to students. What do words like appliance really mean? What is "behind your wall" doing in the sentence? How does this sentence signal that copper is a kind of metal? These comprehension challenges may surprise teachers, or worse, be invisible to them. In that case, they lose an opportunity to help students dig deeper into the language used in texts, learn how to navigate that language, and in the process become better speakers, readers, and writers of English. The teacher's summarization as she nears the end of her short session with the students reveals just how her sensitivity to language and her awareness of its complexities figure in the opportunities she provides for them to discover the functions of words and structures in this sample of academic discourse:

So there are many things in our homes (pointing at the items she has written above the word appliances) that run with electricity that are appliances, like all these things you told me: refrigerator, freezer, oven. ... Those are all appliances — OK? So, (she reads, starting from the beginning of the sentence) "the wires" (circling the phrase behind your wall) "that are located" (pointing at the word behind) this is a word that tells us where — (she writes where above the word behind on the chart) "behind your wall" — (she points at the relative clause) "that carry electricity to lights and appliances" (she circles the words she has written above the word appliances) "all these things." (Returning to the beginning of the sentence, she summarizes) "The wires that are located there and do all of this — 'carry electricity to' all these things, are made of metal."

The problem of supporting English learners in reading texts like the one they were working with in this lesson is not simply one of vocabulary. We see the teacher focusing on both new words and new structures in the context of an effort to get at meaning. She extracts student observations about the function of the elements of the sentence, rather than focusing on disembodied forms (e.g., preteaching the new vocabulary) or isolated grammatical structures (e.g., relative clause constructions or appositives).

This then, in a very large nutshell, suggests how we conceptualize the question we address in this chapter: What do teachers need to know about language to work effectively with diverse students and with the many aspects of teaching and learning in which language is a key?

What Teachers Need to Know About Language

Today's teachers need access to a wide range of information to function well in the classroom. The competencies required by the various state certification standards add up to a very long list indeed, but they constitute only a beginning. The new demands created by many states' adoption of the CCSS (National Governors Association, 2010) or other versions of college- and career-ready standards for students add to the list of what teachers need to know. Even more importantly, though, the tasks that students will face when they get to university or into the workplace require that they have developed advanced communication and literacy skills — skills they can attain only if their K-12 educational experiences have prepared them well. What do their teachers need to know about language to work effectively with all students, including ones who enter school speaking languages other than English? This is a challenge faced by teachers in schools across the nation. While English learners are most heavily concentrated in five states, with 62% of this population attending schools in California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois, there is hardly a school to be found in any state where there are not at least a few English learners. These students speak many languages: Spanish is the most frequent, but home languages as typologically different as Ilocano, Mixteco, Somali, Urdu, Hmong, and Polish are also represented (Ruiz Soto et al., 2015).

The U.S. teaching force is not well equipped to help these English learners or students who speak vernacular dialects of English adjust to school, learn effectively and joyfully, and achieve academic success. Too few teachers share or know about their students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds, or understand the challenges inherent in learning to speak and read Standard English. In this chapter, we argue that teachers lack this knowledge because they have not had the professional preparation they need.

These issues have been brought to the foreground by 21st-century changes in educational policy and practice, in particular the introduction of the CCSS. Society has raised by quite a few notches the educational bar that all children in the United States, including newcomers, must clear in order to complete school successfully and, ultimately, to survive in the economic and social world of today. The passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation in 2001 established curricular standards and introduced a system of benchmark assessments to evaluate the progress that schools and students were making toward meeting those goals. Those efforts resulted from policymakers' impatience with the apparent failure of schools to educate students adequately at each level, and they led to many changes: ending the practice of "social promotion" whereby students are passed to the next grade each year whether or not they have met academic expectations; adopting high school proficiency examinations — tests of English language and literacy and of mathematics — with high school diplomas at stake; and, perhaps most significantly, introducing disaggregated reporting guidelines, so that achievement gaps between groups of students could no longer be obscured.

The limited success of the NCLB approach to enforcing higher standards reflects several of the themes of this chapter. NCLB provided support to schools for Reading First, an effort focused on K–third-grade reading, and implicitly endorsed the idea that students reading at third-grade level at the end of third grade would proceed through the higher grades without difficulty. In effect, the theory was that later reading comprehension and learning challenges all derived from an inadequate foundation in word reading accuracy and fluency. The failure of NCLB policies to improve the reading outcomes of older students made very clear that, while word reading accuracy and fluency are necessary to successful reading, they are far from sufficient. Policymakers thus embraced the opportunity to formulate newer, broader, higher standards, and most states endorsed some version of newer, higher college- and career-ready standards. These standards shift the emphasis in literacy instruction radically — away from words toward text; from accuracy toward interpretation, evaluation, and synthesis; and from summarization toward argumentation. These shifts will undoubtedly be helpful in improving educational outcomes, but only if teachers and curriculum designers understand the demands they make on students' language skills. The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act by Congress in December 2015, as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), adds yet another layer of complexity to the overall picture. It requires states to have in place English language proficiency standards that cover the domains of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and annual assessments of English proficiency aligned to those standards for English learners. It allows states greater flexibility in how they assess student progress, but it requires states to align their academic standards to credit-bearing coursework at their own public postsecondary education institutions.

Another source of pressure on K-12 educators comes from tertiary education, since successful participation in the economy is increasingly dependent on a college education (Duncan & Murnane, 2014). The restriction on the use of categories such as race and ethnicity, language background, and gender in admissions decisions in higher education raises the stakes for educators. The assumption is that all applicants will be judged strictly on their own merits and in comparison to universally applied norms. For university entrance, this means scoring at an acceptable level on standardized tests. For advancement in university, it means passing writing proficiency assessments. Increasingly in the workplace, it means being a competent user of Standard English and being fully literate (Murnane & Levy, 1996).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from What Teachers Need to Know About Language by Carolyn Temple Adger, Catherine E. Snow, Donna Christian. Copyright © 2018 Center for Applied Linguistics. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1788920171
• ISBN 13: 9781788920179
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 176
• Editor: Adger Carolyn Temple, Snow Prof. Catherine E., Christian Donna