Developing Linguistic Responsiveness in Science Teachers of Multilingual Learners

• In Event: Improving the Education of Multilingual Learners and Their Teachers Through Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Online Professional Development

Abstract

Objectives:
At the fourth grade level, The Colorado Academic Standards (Colorado Department of Education, 2009) focus on the topic of energy and propose that students, “apply an understanding that energy exists in various forms, and its transformation and conservation occur in processes that are predictable and measurable” (p. 6). In order for students who are multilingual to demonstrate such understandings, complex uses of academic language are necessary. Therefore, this research investigates the ability of an online professional development module to support the development of linguistically responsive teachers (Lucas, Villegas, & Freedson-Gonzalez, 2008) who can support both the content and language development of multilingual students.

Theoretical framework:
Lucas, Villegas, and Freedson-Gonzales (2008) assert that linguistically responsive teachers need:
• To understand the academic and linguistic background of their students;
• To understand the language demands of their classroom;
• To have the skills necessary to successfully scaffold both content and academic language learning for their multilingual students.
This framework guided the development of the online module as well as the analysis of the data collected regarding teacher learning outcomes from taking the module.

Methods and data sources:
We collected and analyzed three main sources of data: 1) online discussion threads and conversation among teachers; 2) teachers’ responses to a survey to measure the effectiveness of the online professional development; and 3) teachers’ interviews with a team of researchers to share their experiences and inputs for revising the modules as well as what they learned and how their practice changed from participating in the modules.

Results:
Despite attempting to design modules to support the linguistic responsiveness of in-service science teachers, the results of our research demonstrate that the overall success in supporting teacher learning was more in terms of supporting improved content instruction than linguistically responsive content instruction. Teachers reported learning a great deal about how to teach science, but still felt they needed to learn more in terms of teaching science to multilingual learners. The results of this study highlight the extreme challenge in preparing teachers of multilingual learners, particularly at the intersection of content and language development.

Scholarly significance:
This study highlights both promising practices and remaining challenges in preparing linguistically responsive teachers of multilingual learners for elementary science classes. It appears that more work needs to be done to break down the disciplinary silos that continue to separate language development and content knowledge. It also appears that our approach to online professional development and improving teacher education through focusing on the practices of in-service teachers who serve as mentors to pre-service teachers has real potential to improve teacher education generally. Further, the approaches to science content teaching and learning that teachers learned through the module were found to be quite valuable by teachers. Future work should take these things into consideration while striving to prepare linguistically responsive teachers of multilingual learners.

Authors

• Geeta K. Verma, University of Colorado - Denver

• Helen Douglass, University of Colorado - Denver

• Boni Hamilton, University of Colorado Denver