Tinkering With Language: Case Studies of Multilingual Elementary Students' Meta-Linguistic Engagement in a Language-Based Reading Curriculum

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Ten
  In Roundtable Session: Evidence-Based Reading Instruction From a Multilingual Standpoint (Table 9)

Abstract

Purpose:
While instructionally targeting metalinguistic awareness supports reading outcomes (Nagy, 2007), there are few descriptive accounts of multilingual students' participation in the type of metalinguistic engagement that fosters awareness, exploration, and knowledge of the dynamic and creative capacities of language in order to encourage multilingual skills and resources for reading across contexts, purposes, and modalities. To explore this, I investigated the small group instruction of three teachers and their fourth-grade multilingual students who took part in a reading curriculum project that targeted language and metalinguistic awareness. I asked:
(1) How do students participate in metalinguistic engagement to build dynamic and creative understandings of language?
(2) What pedagogical elements (e.g. materials, modalities, and processes, etc.) facilitate students’ participation in metalinguistic engagement toward dynamic and creative understandings of language?

Framework:
Metalinguistic engagement (ME) is an umbrella concept for participation in language-focused discussion and activities and includes the work that students and teachers do with and amongst each other, both pedagogically planned and spontaneously, to reflect on language (i.e. meaning, form, function, structure, strategic application, etc.) through use of mental effort, communicative repertoires, and pedagogical tools in service of language and metalinguistic awareness (Author B, 2020). Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT; Greeno & Engström, 2014; Roth & Lee, 2007) informed by heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981) serves as a theoretical lens for attending to centripetal goal-oriented activity and centrifugal multivoicedness that occurs during ME episodes (Wertsch, 2009).

Setting:
As part of a larger reading curriculum project (Author B, 2020), three teachers (Teacher 1, Teacher 2, Teacher 3) at a two-way dual language school separately taught four small groups (n=4) of 4th-grade Spanish/English students. The curriculum targeted component language (semantics, morphology, and syntax) knowledge and skills through text-based (print and multimodal) and discussion-based practices designed for multilingual learners (Author B, 2021).
Data. Video, audio recordings, and lesson artifacts (student work, curriculum materials, anchor charts) were collected for each teacher and groups’ instruction (Teacher 1=four videos at 90 minutes; Teacher 2=eight videos at 240 minutes across two groups; Teacher 3=four videos totalling 120 minutes). Teacher interviews, student focus groups and surveys, and teacher meeting recordings and notes were collected.

Analysis:
Primary analysis employed classroom discourse analysis (Rymes, 2015) and case study methods (Yin, 2013) to code lesson videos, coordinating transcripts, and lesson artifacts to account for ME patterns within and across teachers and groups.

Findings:
Students (1) creatively tinkered with, hypothesized, and negotiated understandings of language rules, structures, possibilities, and [critical] meanings. Curricular elements such as (1) talk-based structures, (2) creating and co-creating materials that mapped connections, contrasting elements, and multiple meanings, and (3) allowing students to draw on lived experiences, multimodalities, and cross-linguistic connections fostered dynamic ME and encouraged complex understandings of language and metalinguistic knowledge.
Significance. In an effort to be responsive to bi/multilingual children’s engagement in the “word and world” (Freire & Macedo, 1987), this study encourages leveraging students’ insights and resources during metalinguistic engagement to foster knowledge of language in all its nuanced functional, structural, sociocritical, multisemiotic, creative, meaning-making facets.

Author

• Renata Love Jones, Georgia State University
  Presenting Author