Dialogic Instruction With Fourth-Grade Emergent Bilinguals: Relinquishing Control to Promote Student Learning

• In Event: 79.050 - MTCC Roundtable Session 36
  In Roundtable Session: 79.050-1 - Pedagogical Practices for Bilingual Youth

Abstract

Increased academic rigor in U.S. classrooms has brought attention to the need for dialogic instruction (DI) around complex academic texts, particularly for emergent bilingual (EB) students. For EB students the benefits of DI encompass language acquisition as well as content knowledge acquisition. Drawing upon evidence from a fourth-grade classroom in which students debated “Is immigration beneficial or problematic for the U.S.?” we analyze how the teacher facilitated DI among EB students whose English proficiency varied from beginner to intermediate levels. Findings illuminate how the teacher enacted DI through the development and implementation of tools at the levels of lesson, unit, and classroom structure, all of which were grounded in her overall epistemic stance.

Authors

• Lisa Pray, Vanderbilt University

• Janna Brown McClain, Vanderbilt University

• Shannon Mary Daniel, Vanderbilt University