Patterns of tasks, patterns of talk: L2 literacy building in university Spanish classes

Full Article Figures & data References Citations Metrics Reprints & Permissions Get access ABSTRACT Second language (L2) classroom research has sought to shed light on the processes and practices that develop L2 learners’ abilities [Nunan, D. 2004. Task-based language teaching. London: Continuum; Verplaetse, L. 2014. Using big questions to apprentice students into language-rich classroom practices. TESOL Quarterly, 179, 632–641; Zeungler, J., & Mori, J. 2002. Microanalyses of classroom discourse: A critical consideration of method. Applied Linguistics, 23(3), 283–288]. Honing in on the micro-level of classroom tasks and even further into the language of the tasks can help to reveal the patterns in teacher- and student-talk that help scaffold students’ academic literacy. Literacy, from a systemic functional view of language learning, entails having the tools to function in the social contexts that are valued in students’ lives. This study illustrates how grounded ethnography was used in conjunction with functional discourse analysis to illuminate bi-literacy development in two third-year university Spanish writing classes. Findings uncovered unique patterns of tasks and oral interactions that helped build students’ academic bi-literacy. While grammar tasks helped build students’ knowledge of wording–meaning relationships, culture and writing tasks supported their evolving understanding of how language construes content. This study puts forth a systemic functional curricular model for literacy-based tasks that aims to bridge the previously observed language-content gap

Learning to use systemic functional grammar to teach literary analysis: Views on the effectiveness of a short professional development workshop

As students’ academic language ability grows, they are expected to move from summarizing or retelling works of literature to studying texts critically. With this comes the demand for more developed literacy skills or, as those working from a systemic functional linguistic perspective would argue, an increase in the students’ resources for making meaning in an ever-widening variety of contexts (Derewianka, 2001). English language arts (ELA) teachers in the United States today are challenged with the task of developing this literacy to meet Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). Specific standards for literacy development include teaching students to understand how to uncover what is important in a text and to describe and argue the explicit evidence and inferences that support their opinions as well as to analyze the connection between an author’s word choice and the meaning of the text. Throughout the schooling years, teachers are required by the Common Core to move students from enjoying literature in the younger grades to studying literature from middle school onwards, and in doing so teachers must aim to develop students’ ability to argue and support ideas and opinions in literature classrooms as well as develop literacy skills across all areas of the curriculum. In other words, ELA teachers have the challenging task of helping students engage in literature while also developing literacy skills for use across the curriculum. This can be an especially ambitious task when their students are also learning the English language

Connecting Criterion scores and Classroom Grading Contexts: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Model for Teaching and Assessing Causal Language

This study utilized theory proposed by Mohan, Slater, Luo, and Jaipal (2002) regarding what they refer to as the Developmental Path of Cause to examine issues of AWE score use in classroom contexts. Utilization of this model enabled this study to investigate the accuracy of the AWE scores by comparing them to ratings based on teachers’ intuition as well as to scores generated based on existing rubrics. The qualitative data collected from focus group interviews of three experienced teachers’ justifications for their intuitive evaluations of essays suggested that the Developmental Path of Cause helped teachers articulate their intuitions, identifying the core features of the model. The quantitative results showed that the grades provided by raters trained to use the Developmental Path of Cause tended to support Criterion scores more strongly than did instructor grades. The findings from this study suggest that AWE scores from Criterion not only closely correlated with teachers’ intuitions and with raters trained to use the Developmental Path of Cause, but that the use of the Developmental Path of Cause for teaching may support the use of AWE systems in the classroom context, and would help students focus on the core of a cause-effect essay: appropriateness and sophistication of causal language

Integrating Language and Content: The Knowledge Framework

Teaching English Language Learners (ELLs) academic literacy skills—academically appropriate ways of thinking, talking, writing, and problem solving—is an important goal of our school systems, and subject-based literacy is critical for students to succeed both academically and professionally. Given that language is the primary means through which teaching and learning is carried out, teachers need strategies to ensure that they can develop these skills in all their students. This article describes a non-commercial heuristic called the knowledge framework (KF), which provides a springboard for developing classroom tasks that aim to bridge language and thinking skills so that students can learn content and academic language simultaneously. We present selected work that has been carried out on the KF for more than twenty years and offer ideas for thematic units as an illustration of how to implement the KF

Syntactic Complexity of EFL Chinese Students’ Writing

Syntactic complexity as an indicator in the study of English learners’ language proficiency has been frequently employed in language development assessment. Using the Syntactic Complexity Analyzer, developed by Lu (2010), this article collected data representing the syntactic complexity indexes from the writing of Chinese non-English major students and from the writing of proficient users of English on a similar task. The results indicate that there is a significant difference in the use of complex nominals, the mean length of sentences, and the mean length of clauses between the writings of EFL Chinese students and more proficient users. This study provides suggestions for EFL writing teaching, particularly writing at the sentence level

Cooperation Between Science Teachers and ESL Teachers: A Register Perspective

Cooperation between English as a second or other language (ESOL) and content-area teachers, often difficult to achieve, is hard to assess linguistically in a revealing way. This article employs register analysis (which is different from, but complementary to, genre analysis) in a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective to show how an ESOL teacher uses the same content-area task as a cooperating science teacher so that she can provide a theory–practice cycle similar to that of the science teacher, but at a level that reflects and builds on the language abilities of her students. The task allows her to assess her students formatively and help them develop relevant meanings in the register of science. We argue that the development of register through related tasks in content classes and language classes provides a principled basis for cooperation and that register analysis offers revealing insights into cooperation and formative assessment between language and content teachers

Towards Systematic and Sustained Formative Assessment of Causal Explanations in Oral Interactions

The questions and answers in the above exchanges are common occurrences in classroom discourse: requests by the teacher for causal explanations and efforts by the students to give them. To succeed in school, students need to be able to explain causally, and teachers need to be able to assess these explanations. Students’ causal explanations allow teachers to check understandings of how and why; thus, examining the development of this type of discourse has the potential to provide a framework for formative assessment that can promote learning. Researchers and educators working from a systemic functional linguistic perspective have provided a body of work on causal discourse in science, offering an excellent starting point for examining the development of causal explanations in that subject area. Much of the work that has been undertaken has generally focused on texts written by expert writers (e.g., Mohan et al., 2002 ; Veel, 1997), such as textbooks and encyclopedias

Examining connections between the physical and the mental in education: A linguistic analysis of PE teaching and learning

Discourse analyses of science teaching have revealed patterns of knowledge structures (KS) reflecting Halliday\u27s observation that science teaching involves constructing technical taxonomies and relating them in logical sequences. In science education, this pattern has included problem solving as a way for teachers to assess learning. Science has always been considered an academic subject, but how does it compare to physical education (PE)? Given that language is the primary means through which we learn and assess learning, we present a discourse analysis of a sixth-grade PE class taught using a Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) approach and compare the discourse to analyses of science teaching. Findings suggest that in the discourse of both PE and science classes, the six KS identified by Mohan as comprising a framework for activities (KF) appear in similar patterns. This focus on similarities rather than differences across diverse disciplinary fields has major implications for educators

Using the Developmental Path of Cause to Bridge the Gap between AWE Scores and Writing Teachers’ Evaluations

Supported by artificial intelligence (AI), the most advanced Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) systems have gained increasing attention for their ability to provide immediate scoring and formative feedback, yet teachers have been hesitant to implement them into their classes because correlations between the grades they assign and the AWE scores have generally been low. This begs the question of where improvements in evaluation may need to be made, and what approaches are available to carry out this improvement. This mixed-method study involved 59 cause and effect essays collected from English language learners enrolled in six different sections of a college level academic writing course and utilized theory proposed by Slater and Mohan (2010) regarding the developmental path of cause. The study compared the results of raters who used this developmental path with the accuracy of AWE scores produced by Criterion, an AWE tool developed by Educational Testing Service (ETS), and the grades reported by teachers.Findings suggested that if Criterion is to be used successfully in the classroom, writing teachers need to take a meaning-based approach to their assessment, which would allow them and their students to understand more fully how language constructs cause and effect. Using the developmental path of cause as an analytical framework for assessment may then help teachers assign grades that are more in sync with AWE scores, which in turn can help students gain more trust in the scores they receive from both their teachers and Criterion

Oral Academic Discourse Socialization of an ESL Chinese Student: Cohesive Device Use

Framed in language socialization theory, this study examines the longitudinal cohesive device development of an ESL Chinese graduate student over time during his discourse socialization by focusing on his oral presentations through a systemic functional linguistics approach. The study found that the participant improved in his use of textual resources as he continued his discourse socialization in the academic community that he had joined. Yet the problems and challenges the participant faced during his development of cohesive devices also illustrated the complexity and non-linear characteristics of academic discourse socialization. The study contributes to language socialization research by employing a systemic functional linguistics approach as an analysis tool for longitudinal linguistic discourse development. The findings inform second language curriculum and instruction, particularly oral language instruction