Let's Talk about Grammar

"Teaching academic language might mean that you teach some grammar within a history or science lesson."

As the word grammar rolled off my tongue, I swear I heard a few of the student teachers gasp for air. Grammar: how can the turn of one word evoke such visceral responses, anxiety, even trepidation. English teachers, who are supposed to tackle grammar in their classes, often don't like to teach it. Even many ESL teachers avoid grammar--or shun it. That is, until the infamous red pen is unsheathed.

It's here, with the pen, that many teachers end up dealing with grammar. Correcting errors in students' writing. The very practice that likely triggers the nausea associated with grammar is the very practice that gets repeated over and over in classrooms.

Accompanying the stress-provoking red pen, there's a good deal of research to suggest that that error correction has little or no effect on students' writing ability, but this is a contested issue in Second Language Acquisition research (e.g., see John Truscott's research and subsequent rebuttals). But does this mean that teachers should abandon grammar altogther? Despite what Stephen Krashen says, I don't think so.

It's just HOW we approach grammar that matters. I like the way Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman take up the issue, addressing both the form, or structure, of language and its functions. What's key is working grammar into content you are already teaching and learning, including students' own writing. In the coming week, I'll post some examples from a hypothetical history unit. In the meantime, just for fun, do you agree with the tree diagram below? If not, what's wrong? Oh, I'm just kidding...

Studying Language Acquisition to Teach Language

I visited my friend last week at her school to talk about teaching and share stories. I always enjoy our meetings because of her classroom tales but also for the lively brainstorm sessions we inevitably get into. In exploration possible classroom collaborations this year, we hit upon an interesting idea to teach academic language. In one of her ESL classes, she is concerned about the amount of slights that students direct at one other in regards to their language output, often in the form of snickering at other kids' accents when speaking or reading.

Setting classroom norms and reminding students of them seems to have worked to a degree but my friend is hoping to be more proactive. We began to talk about a unit devoted to second language learning, with emphasis on psychological and social contexts of learning. She immediately jumped on this, harking back to a unit she taught years ago to a particularly rambunctious and emotionally-charged group of middle schoolers. Together they delved into the subject of adolescent development, discussing and debating psychology research in light of their own experiences. The unit became a way to make the students' social and emotional lives a locus of study by placing them in conversation with the field of adolescent psychology. This dialogue anchored the discussion within personal experiences while elevating it beyond a unique emphasis on the personal. Students were introduced to academic constructs that they could use to make sense of and challenge their perceptions of the world.

Taking this idea and mapping it onto a landscape of high school students learning English as a second (or third) language, we've started to think about teaching a unit on language pedagogy as a way to explore some of their experiences learning English, unpack assumptions about English and language learning, and hopefully address the students' cajoling in a way that doesn't feel like punishment---a way in which the group can come to an understanding about how and why the emotional climate affects motivation and anxiety and, in turn, everyone's readiness to learn. It is also an avenue to teach the group academic constructs around language, or 'language about language.'

This might be a relatively short unit of study, or it could unfold into something else. We'll see. We talked about introducing the topic with a frontloading activity, like an opinionnaire (Smith & Wilhelm, 2002), where students respond to a series of statements about language learning and state whether they agree/disagree, and why. They then interview 2 or more people (e.g students in the class, teachers, principal...) about their responses, and report back to the group. It's a way to privilege students' thoughts and experiences and quickly expose them to other viewpoints. This also serves as a basis to loop in readings and build understandings from each learner's starting point.

The Political Limitations of Academic Language

I'll allow myself a bit of a tangent that informs my growing theoretical perspective on academic language...

The more theories and research that I read on teaching academic English, I find myself coming back to the question of limitations of this work. I understand the imperative to explicitly teach academic English. Having it opens doors, while the lack can mean the door is shut quickly in one's face. Consider this quote:

The 'everyday' speech we use is very different from the terminology used in schools. The ability to use the specialized language of the academic sphere is like a gatekeeper: it opens doors for those who have it, and fastens them shut for those who do not. -The Stanford Teacher Education Program

But I am troubled by equating academic language with success in this way for a number of reasons. First, people don't just have academic English or not. Despite the logic of standardized literacy tests, there is no authentic cut-off score that marks students as either having or not having the requisite skills for successful participation in and out of school. Additionally, being academically proficient in the dominant language does not assure access to the privileges of the dominant culture. It may be tempting to assume that teaching students how to be more "academic" is ultimately empowering (and many recent publications on the topic do so, e.g. Bailey, 2007; Zwiers, 2008), and while I agree with this notion to a degree, the logic starts to break down when people confront the harsh reality of systems that do not welcome them. Or perhaps the "welcome" signs are hanging behind many social and economic barriers to participation. For instance, you can work to learn how to write college-level essays all day long but if you can't actually afford to go to college and support yourself (and your family), then how empowering is it really?

For undocumented students the picture gets even cloudier. They have virtually no options for financial aide. If they can pay the international student tuition, which is usually astronomical, they're nervous about enrolling and getting turned in to the feds... Under these circumstances, wielding academic English is still critical but it is insufficient. Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) can help us deconstruct the linguistic structure of a text, but it's not going to confront the systemic failure of a society to support all of its residents, whether citizens or not. What academic language teaching can do, however, is prepare students to read, write, and speak in ways that hold social power. Like it or not, public schools find themselves at the center of a political storm driven by deep fear and resentment that many American citizens feel towards immigrants. We hear it in the inflammatory rhetoric of popular pundits like Lou Dobbs. We see it in the flurry of ICE raids in New Bedford.

Given sweeping anti-immigrant sentiment in this country, public schools cannot rely on old, assimilation strategies. Mastering the English language and adhering to a strong "work ethic" are products of the myth of American meritocracy, but the truth value of meritocracy has increasingly tenuous. Learning the language and working hard and following the law do not guarantee access to the American dream. Today’s immigrants, who are overwhelming people of color, receive more pronounced and protracted scorn than European immigrants did. It is exceedlingly difficult to blend into a melting pot when skin color is used to mark people as outsiders. Skulking behind immigration debates lie fears of demographic shifts that have already substantively altered the composition of many US communities and will favor non-whites in the coming decades, fears that are tacitly framed by matters of race and racism.

SFL will not provide answers to navigate these questions, but by studying it, I hope to find a tool that might aid in the struggle for a more inclusive and just society. Teaching academic language is part of the picture but so is social organizing and contentious politics and coalition building and...

Just some things swirling in my brain today...

Choosing Vocabulary to Teach

So how do teachers go about identifying words to teach? Beck, McKeown, & Kucan (2002) talk about three tiers of voabulary to help categorize words and make decisions about what to teach.

Tier One words are the most basic words, like clock, person, happy, which usually don’t require instruction. Keep in mind, however, that students beginning to learn a new language may need assistance here.

Tier Three words are low frequency words, like isotope or lathe, which are often unfamiliar to students and important for understanding a particular text. However, they do not usually appear in many types of texts across domains.
Tier Two words are high frequency words for mature language learners, like absurd, coincidence, industrious, levity, privy, obscure. We encounter tier two words primarily in written texts. Instruction in these words has good potential to augment one's language ability and will assist students to engage in more "academic" ways as they explore written texts.

Some criteria for identifying Two Tier words:
1) Importance and utility: words that are characteristic of mature learners and appear frequently across domains. Consider how generally useful the word is. Is it a word that students are likely to encounter in other texts? Will it be useful in describing their own experiences?

2) Conceptual understanding: words for which students understand the general concept but offer precision and specificity in describing the concept. Would students be able to explain the concepts using words already familiar to them? For example, ‘benevolent’ might be expressed as ‘kind,’ or ‘haunting’ might be expressed as ‘scary’.

3) Instructional potential: words that can be worked in a variety of ways so that students can build rich representations of them and their connections to other words and concepts.
• How does the word relate to other words and concepts that students are learning? Does it directly relate to a classroom topic? Would it add a dimension to ideas that have been developed?
• What does the word bring to a text or situation? What role does the word play in communicating the meaning of the context in which it is used? Does the use of the word convey a particular mood or attitude?
• Keep in mind that there is no formula for selecting age-appropriate vocabulary words, no golden rule. As long the word can be explained in known words and applies to what students might think, read, talk, or write about, it is an appropriate word to teach.
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Beck, I. L, McKeown, M. G, & Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction. New York: Guilford Press

Fill Your Head With Words

Over the course of our marathon of academic language trainings, a handful of people raised concerns about teaching vocabulary. When it comes to teaching academic language, key vocabulary is probably one of the first places that people turn to. I think it's a good way into thinking about how language gets used in a content area, but we cannot address vocabulary the way many of us were taught. Like many people, I recall English and French classes where I got a list of words to learn and memorize for a spelling and vocab test. Being the good little student I was, I'd go home and toil away to learn the words, I'd look them up in the dictionary, write definitions, devise sentences for each word, and I amassed a collection A's for a job well done. I enjoyed the challenge, and I had rich in-school literacies to rely on, habits and strategies that my librarian parents instilled, that school reinforced. I didn't memorize the words and definitions out of context. Maybe that works to learn them long enough to pass the test but, for most people, that's not going to help retain the words. Instead, we need to help students develop a web of meaning to latch new vocabulary onto.

The following ideas I've drawn from Beck et al.'s (2000) Bringing Words to Life*. The aim of their approach is to engage students in: 1) active thinking about word meanings, 2) active thinking about how to use the words in different situations, and 3) active thinking about the relationships among words.

Just providing information or definitions does not result in deep or sustained knowledge of a word. Two essential things to keep in mind:

1) Make word meanings explicit and clear. One way to do this is to develop student-friendly explanations and create instructional contexts for discussing word meanings.

Student-friendly explanations:
--Characterize the word and how it is typically used. Ask yourself, when do I use this word particularly? Why do we have such a word?
--Explain the meaning in everyday, accessible language.

Instructional contexts, as opposed to natural contexts, are those that have been developed with the intention to provide strong clues to a word’s meaning. Helping students to derive meaning using these context clues might be done through modeling or probing questions to scaffold students’ thinking.
For example, consider the following instructional context and follow up questions: “The deer would be able to eat all that they wanted in the meadow, for there was an abundance of grass.”
• Why would the deer be able to eat all they wanted?
• How much grass must be in the meadow?
• So, what do you think abundance means?

2) Get students actively involved in thinking about and using the meanings immediately. Here's some activities to engage students in thinking about word meanings:

• Word Associations: After presenting explanations for words (eg. accomplice, virtuoso, philanthropist, novice), ask students to associate new words with a presented word or phrase, such as:

What word goes with crook?
Which word goes with gift to build a new hospital?
Which word goes with piano?
Which word goes with kindergartner?
Then ask students to explain their reasoning. Why did they decide on the connection they made?

• Have You Ever…? For this activity, students clap to indicate how much they would like (not at all, a little bit, a lot) to be described by the target words. And, why they would feel that way.

• Idea Completions: In contrast to traditional “write a sentence using the vocabulary word, provide sentence stems that require students to integrate a word’s meaning into a context to explain the situation. For example:

The audience asked the virtuoso to play another piece of music because…
The skiing teacher said Martha was a novice on the ski slopes because…
d) Ask questions such as the following with the newly introduced words:
When might you…? How might you…? Why might you…?

_________
Beck, I. L, McKeown, M. G, & Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction. New York: Guilford Press

Challenges to teaching academic language

This week I began co-leading Title III trainings for pre-practicum student teachers. Each undergrad and master student working towards licensure at the Ed school must complete an academic language project. In the Title III office, we get 1.5 hours to prepare them for the task, a wholly inadequate amount of time to cover the what and how of teaching academic language, especially when a chunk of time gets eaten up with admin. issues like how to fill out required paperwork. I found myself getting frustrated about the limitations of a one-shot training. While I definitely question the usefulness of this 90 minute training for the students, I have found the conversations instructive on a number of levels. First, I've gotten a chance to guage these soon-to-be teachers' familiarity with a variety of language issues on the classroom and their understanding of the challenges and opportunities of working with English language learners (ELLs) in "mainstream" classes.

Based on these conversations, I'll rephrase some of the concerns/questions/challenges that surfaced:

• How can a teacher identify ELLs without stigmatizing them?
• How can teachers provide the kind of individualized attention that ELLs need when there is so much pressure to cover a broad range of standards?
• How to "know" the students, their language backgrounds and literacy experiences?
• How to connect with your students and help them feel confortable to be able to work more closely with them?
• How to know what vocabulary or other language to focus on with students, so as not to assume they know more than they do and not to insult them? How can teachers help ELLs build language without sounding patronizing?
• How can student teachers implement an academic language project in a class dominated by lecture, especially if the student teacher mostly just observes the cooperating teacher (CT)?
• How can a student teacher work on academic language if a CT doesn't get the point of doing language teaching in history class? i.e. How to persuade a content area teacher to change their practice and to focus on language as well as the content?
• How can you help ELLs keep apace in a lesson... e.g. they might be trying to figure out what was discussed earlier in class when the teacher has already moved on to something different?

These are all valuable questions to address and I'll offer some possible answers as I continue. Before I do, I'll raise another problem that came up in two separate trainings, and may present a more significant challenge to the long-term positive impact of this project. A few students intimated that the academic language project as a whole has usually felt contrived, that it's more about writing language objectives for the sake of paperwork than it is about creating meaningful language learning. I worry that if students come away from their supervised teaching experiences thinking that supporting ELLs in their classrooms hinges foremost on writing language objectives, they will be ill-equipped to actually assist ELLs in their content area classes. My concern is similar to the issue I have with content standards--they can be helpful guides when planning lessons but I do not believe they should be the first and last word.

Certainly, teachers need to hold their curriculum to high standards, but we've got to balance these choices with knowledge of the young people within the classroom. What experiences do they bring? What topics and questions motivate them to learn intrinsically? What texts do they choose to read on their own? What school-based texts are difficult--and in what ways? What school texts are interesting and why? The English Language Proficiency Benchmarks and Outcomes (ELPBO) is a good referrence tool but it's not going to answer these questions. And I have been in more than one curriculum planning session where the standards get used as the tool to decide what should be taught, rather than a piece of the discussion informed by teachers' knowledge of actual students. I understand that the primacy of standards is something that gets pushed from a number of fronts, the cumulative effect being something of a cultural juggernaut that drives the conversation.

OK, let me get off the soapbox. So, after the first set of trainings, we added a short piece to discuss some ideas to better know students' language and literacy experiences. We suggest that student teachers develop a short survey for students to help them better know the pupils, and we share a list of some topic areas they may want to cover (see list below. Thanks to Kevin O. for generating the list for our trainings). But this is rushed in an hour and a half, and needs more sustained attention.

A List of Suggestions to Getting to Know Students--Topics to help shape surveys/interviews/informal conversations to better understand students' language and literacy backgrounds.

• Country of origin
• Age
• Length of time in the US
• Intended length of time in the US
• Parents’ occupation
• Parents’ education
• Language spoken at home
• Languages used at home for reading/writing
• Number of languages spoken
• L1 proficiency
• L2 proficiency
• School history
• In the US
• In home country
• Current school experience
• Student population- minority and majority
• Attitude towards L1 and L2
• Personal goals for L1 and L2 literacy
• Motivation
• Interests
• Responsibilities outside of class
• Language preference for reading and writing

Teaching Academic Language

As the title of the blog suggests, it deals with multiliteracies, in the spirit of Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Over the course of the fall '08 semester, I will devote the majority of my time on this blog to thinking and writing about one aspect of a multiliteracies approach to pedagogy, the teaching of academic language in school. I will focus on academic language in middle school and secondary history teaching, but will address questions that pertain to other subject areas across the curriculum.

A central question I will pursue: In what ways can teachers explicitly and implicitly develop students' academic language as they teach history content?

My driving purpose is to develop a theory-into-practice framework to help history teachers support students' language learning, particularly non-native English learners, as well as history content learning. The linguistic demands of history texts and learning tasks pose significant challenges for non-dominant students. By explicitly framing the language of middle school and secondary history and reflecting on ways that teachers can scaffold students into these types of language, I hope to help in rupturing a "pedagogy of entrapment" (Macedo, 1999), whereby many schools expect students to speak, read, and write in certain ways but fail to explicitly teach students how to engage in these practices.

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Macedo, D. (1999). A pedagogy of entrapment. In Leistyna, P. (1999) Presence of Mind, Westview Press.