Legitimating Participation: Positioning English Learners in Scientific Sense-Making

• In Event: Critical Dialogic Education: Sustaining Inclusive Discourse Practices in U.S. Schools

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
Given the importance of student discussion for conceptual and language development (Resnick et al., 2015; Winokur et al., 2009), English Learners (ELs) need frequent opportunities for collaborative talk. While recent standards reforms can expand language development opportunities by foregrounding students’ engagement in interactive disciplinary practices (Lee et al., 2013), effective dialogic instruction requires significant shifts in teacher practice (Michaels & O’Connor, 2015; Sandoval et al., 2018). This paper describes what we learned about these shifts by working with teachers as they piloted inquiry-based science units in linguistically diverse classrooms. The findings highlight the challenges inherent in supporting teachers to make dispositional and instructional shifts in their teaching of science with ELs.

Theoretical Framework
Sociocultural perspectives frame second language development as building the capacity to use the target language to participate in communities of practice (Cook, 2002). Conceptualizing classrooms as communities of practice investigating scientific phenomena, we considered how they could promote language development. In a community of practice, learners develop through participation in the community’s practices, first as legitimate peripheral participants, then assuming more central roles as they develop competence (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Through this participation, they develop interactional competence and linguistic resources to negotiate different contexts (Pekarek Doehler, 2018).

Methods & Data Sources
We developed two inquiry-based science units designed to promote language development by scaffolding students’ participation in peer sense-making interactions. We supported four 5th grade teachers to pilot the units and studied the participation of four focal students per classroom. Students’ interactions were video recorded and analyzed to examine how they used language for collaborative sense-making and how their participation changed over time.

Results
Most focal students expanded their participation over time, employing an increasingly variety of interactional moves to contribute to collaborative sense-making. However, their participation was context-dependent, and teachers struggled to facilitate contexts that consistently supported focal students’ participation. Affirming previous research (Lewis & Zisselsberger, 2018; Martin-Beltrán, 2010), we found that ELs’ positioning by peers particularly impacted their affordances for participation and language development. In productive interactions, peers engaged ELs as valued contributors, asking them questions, using multi-modal resources to facilitate communication, and building on their ideas. Unfortunately, peers frequently positioned ELs as lacking competence and constrained their participation, often responding to teachers’ requests that they “help” ELs and to teachers’ emphasis on products over sense-making processes.

Scholarly Significance
Efforts to change teacher practice often focus on providing curricula and professional development focused on its implementation, but our research demonstrates that this approach is insufficient. Creating productive interactions requires attending to the moment-to-moment ways in which ELs are positioned by peers and teachers. We highlight the importance of building teachers’ capacities to analyze students’ language use in ways that illuminate competence and challenge reductive and raciolinguistic conceptions of language and ELs (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Only when teachers learn to recognize ELs’ competence will they be able to position them as legitimate participants and expand their learning opportunities.

Authors

• Laura Alvarez, Saint Mary's College of California

• Sarah Capitelli, University of San Francisco

• Marguerite L De Loney, Stanford University

• Guadalupe Valdes, Stanford University