Recognizing and Expanding Competence: Supporting Newcomer Students' Language Development Through Disciplinary Practices

• In Event: Countering Deficit Ideologies Surrounding English Language Learners in K–12 Settings

Abstract

This paper examines how inquiry-based science instruction that scaffolds students’ engagements in disciplinary practices can support recently-arrived newcomer students’ language development. By analyzing newcomers’ participation in heterogeneous classrooms, we demonstrate how they use English to participate in disciplinary practices and how this participation develops over time. Conceptualizing disciplinary practices as social processes, we describe how newcomers employed an increasing variety of interactional moves to contribute collaborative sense-making. However, newcomers’ participation was context-dependent. They benefited from small group interactions that leveraged multi-modal resources and from working with peers who positioned them as valuable contributors. Although peers often positioned newcomers in ways that constrained participation, they succeeded in challenging and shifting their positioning, which coincided with their increased participation in collaborative sense-making.  

Authors

• Laura Alvarez, Saint Mary's College of California

• Marguerite L De Loney, Stanford University

• Sarah Capitelli, University of San Francisco

• Guadalupe Valdes, Stanford University