Disciplinary Linguistic Knowledge for Teaching Content to English Language Learners

• In Event: 75.044 - Teaching Academic Content to English Language Learners in the Context of New Common Standards

Abstract

As the student population in U.S. classrooms becomes increasingly diverse, it is critical that all teachers develop the knowledge and skills to support ELLs in mainstream classrooms at every grade level. However, a majority of teachers do not feel prepared to teach academic content to ELLs (National Center for Education Statistics, 1999). There is a clear gap between the demands of teaching ELLs and the supply of mainstream teachers who are adequately prepared to teach ELLs. As the demand for trained teachers increases, many, if not most, mainstream teachers will need to develop the knowledge and skills needed to teach in classrooms with increasingly diverse student population. In order to provide the mainstream teachers with the essential knowledge base through teacher preparation and professional development, it is important to first identify and validate the knowledge base that would inform the curricula and field experiences within teacher education programs.

Driven by this motivation, this paper proposes that effective teachers of ELLs draw on a specialized knowledge base to teach academic content in accessible ways. We use the term Disciplinary Linguistic Knowledge for teaching (DLK) academic content to ELLs to refer to this specialized knowledge base and argue that DLK is needed to model for ELLs how language is used to communicate meaning and to engage them in disciplinary discourse. DLK is a specialized knowledge that teachers need to have regarding how language is used to communicate the ideas and concepts within the content areas. DLK encompasses teachers’ knowledge of the academic discourse of the content areas in order to represent their disciplinary content in multiple ways that are accessible to ELLs. Teachers’ knowledge of discourse in a particular discipline involves the ability to model the ways in which discourse of the discipline is constructed and to engage ELLs in communicating meaning in the disciplinary discourse.

In view of this framework, we explored how a geographically representative sample of 60 mathematics and 57 science teachers teaching middle grades in predominantly ELL districts responded to a set of 21 ELL teaching scenarios. In these scenarios, teachers were asked to scaffold ELLs’ understanding of the discipline-specific language demands and participation in using the languages of the discipline. Interviews with mathematics and science teachers revealed insights on how teachers drew on the information about students’ proficiency levels to reason through the given instructional scenarios. However, teachers did not link this information with the most appropriate instructional practices that could serve the needs of ELLs at specific proficiency levels. While teachers’ knowledge of ELLs’ needs influenced their decision making, the teachers did not have knowledge of instructional practices that might best help ELLs with certain language proficiency and cultural background characteristics. The results suggested that mainstream mathematics and science teachers might need to draw on a systematic knowledge base, beyond the scope of Disciplinary Linguistic Knowledge, to facilitate ELLs’ linguistic and content-related challenges, as these teachers are not readily trained to differentiate their instructional practices according the needs of ELLs in the classrooms.

Author

• Sultan Turkan, ETS