Toward a Language-Related Knowledge Base for Content Teaching

• In Event: Teachers' Knowledge of the Role of Language in Content Pedagogy

Abstract

Content teachers take on multiple roles in their professional life. In addition to the role of teaching content and disciplinary language, teachers must concurrently be proficient language users. To support students in their learning, teachers must develop a deep appreciation of the language demands and challenges involved in the learning process. This entails being an analyst of the language. These three distinct roles -- language teacher, user and analyst (cf. Angel & Lin, 2018) -- encapsulate the demands placed on teachers and point to the knowledge base needed to take on a ‘language-informed’ approach to teaching (Fillmore & Snow, 2018). Such a perspective has previously been linked to language/literacy instruction rather than language in content instruction. Adger et al. (2018) articulate why basic language knowledge (e.g., differences between oral and written language; fundamentals of language development, linguistic and cultural diversity; what makes texts easy/difficult to read) is essential to all teachers, including content teachers. However, a framework for understanding and investigating a language-related knowledge base (LRKCT) for content teachers is still lacking.

In this presentation, we articulate a framework for LRKCT that is based on prior scholarship. Several constructs have been proposed in recent years to capture the LRKCT that content teachers need to support students in their learning of respective subject matter (e.g., pedagogical language knowledge (PLK, Bunch, 2013); language knowledge for content teaching (LKCT, Morton, 2016). These constructs presume the context of content teaching as multilingual classrooms with students coming from diverse language backgrounds who learn both language and content concurrently. It is our contention that the language-related knowledge base proposed here is equally relevant for teaching in monolingual classrooms, albeit to a different extent from multilingual ones, since disciplinary languages are distinctive. Thus, all content teachers need a strong language-related knowledge base.

As a specialized body of knowledge, LRKCT serves to inform how content teachers represent content knowledge linguistically as well as supporting the learning of general academic discourse and disciplinary-specific language and literacy practices. In this presentation, we distinguish and outline the various components constituting this knowledge base as synthesized from a number of scholars such as Andrews and Lin (2017), Bunch (2013), Love (2009), Morton (2016), Turkan et al. (2014). These components include knowledge of language, knowledge about language, knowledge of students, and pedagogical knowledge. The distinctions made about the various knowledge components are for analytical and theoretical purposes. In teaching, these knowledge components are likely to be utilized in a synthesized manner. Crucially, they interact with one another to enable a teacher to serve the roles of a language user, language analyst and language teacher in the context of a content classroom.
 

Authors

• Lay Hoon Seah, National Institute of Education - Nanyang Technological University

• Rita Elaine Silver, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University

• Mark C. Baildon, United Arab Emirates University