"What Do You Think?" Leveraging Small-Group Meta-Talk for Genre-Based Writing Instruction With Bilingual Students

• In Event: Writing Instruction Across Bilingual Education Contexts: Mapping the Landscape and Illuminating Promising Practices

Abstract

Debates about the ways that teachers can best support bilingual children’s literacy development should be grounded in honoring children’s complex communicative repertoires and agentive participation. The current study investigated structured small-group, writing instruction within a language-based reading curriculum project in an upper elementary school context. The two research questions were: (1) Does a language-based writing approach provide content and language foundations for persuasive and argument writing instruction?; and (2) In what ways does this approach support individual and co-constructed genre-based student writing?
Language-based writing instruction was informed by three frameworks that leverage the strengths and needs of bilingual learners. First, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2013) focuses on the ways in which language is structured in text via genre (e.g., personal recount, report). Through an SFL-approach, students work to deconstruct and co-construct texts in the service of genre mastery (Brisk, 2014; Gebhard, et al., 2014). Metalinguistic engagement (Authors, 2020) is a pedagogical approach that seeks to bring students’ attention to the properties of language and how it works, and honors the range of languages bilingual learners bring to the classroom. Sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978; Wersch & Wersch, 2009), builds on SFL and metalinguistic engagement by situating students’ prior knowledge and experiences in the context of discussing text structure and developing linguistic awareness.
Participants include three teachers in an urban, Northeastern U.S. school that taught four small groups of four students (n = 16) using the language-based writing approach. All instruction was captured using video and/or audio. Each teacher and group of students were treated as an individual case (n = 4 cases). Teacher 1 had three videos totalling 90 minutes of instruction. Teacher 2 had four videos totalling 120 minutes. Teacher 3 had one video and five audio files across two groups totalling 180 minutes. Video, audio files, and classroom artifacts were analyzed using cultural historical activity theory (Engestrom, 1987), classroom discourse analysis (Rymes, 2015), and case study methods to identify broad domains of interaction.
Findings for RQ 1: Teachers leveraged content and language foundations for persuasive writing by encouraging students to discuss evidence collected during instructional activities that supported text comprehension. Although this evidence was originally gathered to support small group discussions, notes and anchor charts were revisited during talk-based writing instruction to support students’ written argumentation.
Findings for RQ 2: During the co-construction of student writing, teachers and students discussed opinions, stance-taking, and reasoning using specific metadiscourse and metalanguage. However, despite implementing a guided curriculum, the three teachers varied considerably in how they structured these discussions and students’ participation. Teacher 1 engaged students in recognizing and naming structural and argumentative components of written text. Teacher 2 identified textual frames and had students verify structural components. Teacher 3 highlighted argument components (reasons, examples), but elicited minimal student talk and did not engage in breaking down structural components of argumentative text according to the SFL-informed curriculum.
Implications highlight how language-based literacy curriculum and teachers’ use of sociocultural approaches can position bilingual students’ knowledge and insights during genre-based writing instruction.

Authors

• Renata Love Jones, Georgia State University

• Patrick Proctor, Boston College