Pedagogical Language Knowledge in Action in K–12 ESL Classrooms

• In Event: Teaching at the Crossroads of Language and Content: New Insights on Pedagogical Language Knowledge

Abstract

Background and Significance
The development of PLK among non-language specialist (or mainstream) teachers holds great potential to help EBs acquire the language necessary to access challenging content (Bunch, 2013; Galguera, 2011). For their part, English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers develop and draw upon PLK; indeed, this construct likely manifests more visibly in their instruction. Hence, examinations of how early career ESL teachers draw upon their PLK could offer mainstream teachers concrete examples of how pedagogy informed by PLK is more than “just good teaching” for EBs (e.g., de Jong & Harper, 2005). Though studies have investigated how early career teachers develop PLK (e.g., Aalto & Tarnanen, 2015; Galguera, 2011; Moore, 2015), little is known about how they enact PLK in practice. This study addresses that gap by examining how early career ESL teachers recruit their PLK to support EBs’ language and content learning and aims to contribute a deeper understanding of how PLK impacts teachers’ work with EBs.

Method
This paper is part of a three-year project to study the instructional practices of 11 early career K-12 ESL teachers. Data sources include 68 lesson observations, 64 post-lesson debriefing conversations, 8 individual interviews, and 13 focus groups. Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method (Corbin & Strauss, 2014). Our prior work (Authors, 2017, 2019) resulted in the development of a set of core practices (e.g., McDonald, Kazemi & Kavanaugh, 2013) that were used as a priori codes. The analysis discussed in this paper consists of a closer examination of the data coded for the core practice “supporting academic language and literacy development.” We examined those data in more detail to identify ESL teachers’ awareness of their own PLK and to determine precisely how they used it in their practice.

Findings
The ESL teachers were aware of the central role of language in their work and viewed their PLK as a factor that differentiated them from mainstream colleagues: “There's this big language side of it that I think people identify, but they can't quite… understand what that entails.” Participants were observed drawing on their PLK during planning, instruction and assessment. For example, a kindergarten teacher was observed helping students develop the language to discuss quantities. In this case, the teacher’s PLK manifested through a series of linguistic scaffolds, nudging her EBs along the mode continuum from use of imprecise language to more academic phrasing (Gibbons, 2007). The data revealed PLK as essential to participants’ work with EBs, as evidenced by data showing visible and purposeful attention to language when engaging in and discussing their practice.

Significance
By offering concrete examples of how ESL teachers draw upon and discuss their own PLK, this study deepens our understanding of how PLK manifests in the practices of early career ESL teachers. Evidence of such enactment suggests that the teacher education methods for ESL teachers could also be used to help mainstream teachers develop the necessary language knowledge to support EBs in their content area classrooms.

Authors

• Tabitha Kidwell, University of Maryland - College Park

• Megan Madigan Peercy, University of Maryland - College Park

• Daisy Fredricks, Grand Valley State University

• Johanna M. Tigert, University of Massachusetts - Lowell