Opportunities and Challenges for Accessing Disciplinary Literacy Learning for Bilingual Middle School Students

• In Event: Disciplinary Literacy and Learning From Text: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Abstract

Purpose & Perspective:
This paper examines the opportunities and challenges for bilingual students to use disciplinary literacy in social studies classrooms. Secondary teachers are expected to teach, engage, and support all students to learn content and disciplinary thinking through text as highlighted in the Common Core-ELA Standards. The challenges of disciplinary “ways of knowing, doing, reading, and writing” (Moje et al., 2001, p. 482) are heightened even more so for bilingual adolescents. These students need opportunities to access these ways of thinking and learning in order to participate in subject-matter learning and the “culture of power” associated with academic achievement and post-secondary opportunities (Cummins, 1984; Delpit, 1988; Schleppegrell, 2004).

Methods & Data Sources:
This qualitative study was conducted in three classrooms across two grade levels in an urban middle school. Three social studies teachers were purposefully selected for their record of disciplinary and content expertise, and their ability to engage students. Four 6th and 7th graders in the classes who had exited from English language services 2-4 years prior were selected as participants. Classroom observations, teacher and student interviews, and classroom and student artifacts documented the opportunities and challenges for disciplinary literacy as students engaged in independent research projects (e.g. ancient world artifacts, civil rights) over eight weeks. Stimulated recall interviews (Gass & Mackey, 2000) with student work were conducted to identify teachers’ instructional reasoning, and students’ disciplinary reasoning and literacy strategy use. Field notes and interviews were analyzed using constant-comparative methods (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).

Results:
Analysis indicates three main findings. First, teachers believed that providing choice and building on students’ interests would create opportunities for student engagement throughout the research projects. However, three of the four bilingual students had reading comprehension difficulties with the texts they encountered, leading them to use ineffective reading strategies and to disengage with the tasks. Second, teachers believed that a variety of comprehension strategies, including making connections, annotating, and noting nonfiction features, that were previously taught and displayed on classroom posters, could be applied to the texts students found online. However, some of these strategies were not applicable to online texts (e.g. annotating) and others were not scaffolded by teachers, even when students displayed difficulty understanding texts. Instead, teachers often told students what was in the text or relied on peers to support the bilingual students. Finally, teachers believed that the scaffolds and resources they provided would implicitly invoke disciplinary thinking (e.g. explanation, argumentation, contextualization, reliable sources). In reality, teachers reinforced a purpose of accumulating information rather than building knowledge and deeper understanding. Strikingly, when bilingual students asked questions that suggested possibilities for developing disciplinary thinking, teachers’ responses often focused on task completion.

Significance:
The opportunities teachers facilitated to provide all students with access to content, disciplinary thinking, and literacy learning became barriers for their bilingual students because the teachers underestimated the role of text and its impact on these students. Further research needs to explore how learning disciplinary content from texts can be fostered for bilingual students.

Author

• Susanna Eng, University of Washington - Seattle