Access to Learning: Examining Group Arrangements and English Learners' Language Use in Classrooms

• In Event: Dialogic Practices in Learning Contexts

Abstract

Drawing from sociolinguistic theories, this paper focuses on how small-group conversations may shape students’ language use and associated opportunities to learn, and how this relationship varies across grouping configurations based on language proficiency. Leveraging natural language processing, corpus-analysis methods examining word frequencies are applied to 1,470 student conversations to uncover patterns in the form and content of language use in different proficiency groups. Results show that regardless of variation in English proficiency, very little significant difference was observed among surface-level indicators (number of turns, word counts, term frequency) between ordinary interactions and generic learning environments. English learners’ language use resembles that of their English-only peers and is in line with typical natural language use in ordinary situations.

Authors

• Hsiaolin Hsieh, Stanford University

• Simon Wiles

• Guillermo Solano-Flores, Stanford University