The Power of Peers: An Examination of Classroom Discussion as a Context for Developing Adolescents' School-Relevant Metalinguistic Skills

• In Event: 70.067 - Poster Session 15
  In Poster Session: 70.067-2 - Literacy: Cognitive and Affective Factors

Abstract

Studies examining peer-to-peer structures that support academic language (AL) acquisition remain rare. In particular, we have little evidence of whether students are developing the language resources that support these pedagogical conversations. In this study, we draw on 4th-8th grade student’s oral reflections on AL that occurred in the context of multi-party discussions (n=52) to:

(1) examine student-generated language used to talk about AL (or ‘academic metalanguage’)

(2) gain insight into the affordances of classroom discussions as contexts for AL teaching and learning.
In their answers, students attended to lexical, morpho-syntactic and discursive features of AL. Strikingly, when struggling with the task of meta-talk, students relied on metalinguistic terms previously mentioned by peers or gave prompts to support their peers.

Authors

• Emily Phillips Galloway, Harvard University

• Juliane Stude, University of Munster

• Christina L. Dobbs, Boston University

• Paola Uccelli, Harvard University