Building a Language Toolkit for Teachers: A Functional Approach

This book is designed for pre-service teachers and K-8 educators seeking to develop their knowledge of how language works. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, it serves as a practical language toolkit, offering supportive task cycles with exercises that help teachers identify, analyze, and apply language features to support student learning.

This book is essential for those looking to develop their pedagogical language knowledge (PLK) to support multilingual students. Through accessible, targeted, task-based resources for pre-service teachers, this guide supports teachers to apply a functional approach for disciplinary purposes of narrating, informing, explaining, and arguing in elementary and middle grade level instruction.

Although this book focuses on unpacking the WIDA English Language Development Standards, it is well suited to support teachers' development of language in any context.

Sally Humphrey, a teacher educator and literacy researcher, has long collaborated with international scholars to research and apply knowledge of grammar and discourse in K-12 schools, pre-service, and professional learning contexts. Many of these studies have informed teaching resources, including reference and workbooks used in international professional learning contexts. Research-based publications that are most relevant to the content of this book are:

Humphrey, S. (2017). Academic literacies in the middle years: A framework for enhancing teacher knowledge and student achievement. Routledge.

Ruslana Westerlund is an educational consultant, teacher educator, and researcher of disciplinary literacy through Systemic Functional Linguistics with 30 years of experience in the field of multilingual learner education. Her recent Routledge publications are:

Besser, S. & Westerlund, R. (2024). Making Language Visible in Social Studies: A Guide to Disciplinary Literacy in the Social Studies Classroom. Routledge.

de Oliveira, L. C., & Westerlund, R. (Eds.). (2022). Scaffolding for multilingual learners in elementary and secondary schools. Routledge.

Olga Malin is an ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) teacher and an ESOL endorsement instructor with a wide-ranging instructional experience, as well as an educational background in foreign languages and linguistics.