The Role of a Metalanguage in Supporting English Language Learners’ Literacy Development

• In Event: Investigations of a Functional Grammar Approach to Enhance the Reading and Writing Achievement of Elementary English Language Learners

Abstract

Research on English language learners suggests that these students need opportunities for explicit focus on language itself in the context of meaningful interaction about curricular topics (August & Shanahan, 2006; Genesee et al., 2006; Gersten et al., 2007). However, teachers lack robust supports for engaging students in discussion about the connection between language choices and the meanings they present. This paper reports research on a year-long development effort to make a functional linguistics metalanguage available to teachers and to study the challenges they encountered and the affordances of metalanguage use that were observed in their classrooms and reported in teacher interviews.

For this study, metalanguage from systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (Halliday, 1994) was adapted to enable teachers to be explicit with learners about the meanings presented in the curricular texts of their literacy program and to scaffold children's writing development. For example, teachers were taught to use meaning-oriented metalanguage to engage children in exploration about how authors present the doing, feeling, and saying of characters in the narrative texts they read. In addition, as the children used the language they had explored in writing responses to what they read, a metalanguage of genre stages was used to help them understand expectations for structuring the texts they wrote.

Eight elementary school teachers (grades 2-5) in a high poverty school serving a majority of ELLs were followed over the course of a school year as they attended five professional development (PD) sessions and implemented SFL metalanguage in their literacy instruction. Each teacher's classroom was observed and videotaped following each PD event to explore how teachers took up the metalanguage and how the children responded to it. In addition, teachers were interviewed twice during the year about their experiences with the metalanguage. Classroom lessons were analyzed to identify the ways teachers took up the metalanguage and used it in instruction. The interviews were analyzed to identify how teachers' perspectives on the value of the metalanguage evolved over the year.

Key findings from the analysis include: 1) teachers initially found the metalanguage confusing and challenging, and needed multiple opportunities to engage with it. At the end of the year, teachers reported that the metalanguage was helping them talk more explicitly with ELLs about meaning in the texts they read and wrote; and 2) children readily took up the metalanguage and used it not only in the target lessons but also during other classroom events. In this presentation we will show how discourse analysis of classroom activities reveals the ways SFL metalanguage supports meaning-making, and will draw implications from this study for further development of this approach.

The role of a metalanguage has been controversial in education research, and this study contributes to a growing number of studies that indicate that when metalanguage use supports a focus on meaning, it enables teachers and students to engage in deeper discussion about the texts they read and write.

Author

• Mary J. Schleppegrell, University of Michigan