Building Linguistically Integrated Classroom Communities: The Role of Teacher Practices (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Journal of Early Adolescence, 2019
Employing a social capital framework, this study investigates teachers’ role in influencing the peer dynamics between English learners (ELs) and their non-EL peers. Participants include 713 students (211 EL students). Observed teacher-student interaction quality and teacher self-reports of their peer network management were used to operationalize the teacher-directed, classroom-level factors. Peer nominations of friendships within the classroom were used to operationalize students’ same-language-status (bonding capital) and cross-language-status (bridging capital) friendships. Multilevel models reveal teachers’ reported practices and observed interaction quality account for a small proportion of the variance in students’ bridging and bonding relationships at the classroom level overall, but with differential effects for EL and non-EL students. For example, in classrooms with greater reported use of bonding practices, EL students reported more bonding and fewer bridging friendships i...
Linguistics and Education, 2017
As schools are called on to educate an increasingly diverse student body to higher levels of academic skill, examination of the role of social resources and social contexts in the learning outcomes and experiences of students classified as English learners is urgently needed to better understand the many factors beyond instruction that contribute to adolescent English language development. Four descriptive case studies of Spanish-speaking newcomer immigrant youth in New York City public high schools examine how schools structured peer linguistic resources. Findings suggest that school policies designed to support language development created boundaries that isolated language learners from mainstream and bilingual peers and had profound repercussions for access to opportunities to use and learn academic English. Hypersegregation is used to describe the multilayered social separation experienced by emergent bilingual students in this study.
Languages across Borders: Social Network Development in an Adolescent Two-Way Language Program
Teachers College Record, 2015
Background/Context: Two-way dual-language programs have become an increasingly popular educational model in the United States for language minority and majority speakers, with a small but growing number of programs at the high school level. Little is known, however, about how adolescents' social networks develop in the contexts of these programs. Purpose/Objective: This study examines how a two-way, dual language enrichment program for Spanish-language learner (SLL) and English-language learner (ELL) adolescents influenced students' social networks with peers of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Setting: The program took place in a south-Atlantic state at a suburban/rural high school that has substantial within-school linguistic segregation.
As schools are called on to educate an increasingly diverse student body to higher levels of academic skill, examination of the role of social resources and social contexts in the learning outcomes and experiences of students classified as English learners is urgently needed to better understand the many factors beyond instruction that contribute to adolescent English language development. Four descriptive case studies of Spanish-speaking newcomer immigrant youth in New York City public high schools examine how schools structured peer linguistic resources. Findings suggest that school policies designed to support language development created boundaries that isolated language learners from mainstream and bilingual peers and had profound repercussions for access to opportunities to use and learn academic English. Hyper-segregation is used to describe the multilayered social separation experienced by emergent bilingual students in this study.
Ann Arbor, MI: Center for the Improvement of Early …, 2002
This study examines the year-long process in which a teacher and her fourth-and fifth-grade students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds implemented Book Club, a literature-based instructional program. Data analysis reveals a gradual release of responsibility from the teacher to students in carrying out book conversations. Five features highlight the practice in this classroom. First, the teacher believed that all students brought with them rich experiences and knowledge to contribute to the discussions and the classroom learning community. Second, time and space were created for the students to discuss their responses to literature. Third, students were pushed to think critically and reflectively about what they read by responding to challenging questions. Fourth, the teacher employed multiple modes of teaching: telling; modeling; scaffolding; facilitating; and participating. Finally, the teacher persisted in maintaining high expectations of the students. Three appendixes contain: a list of books read during the school year; students' gains from pre-to post-Slosson Oral Reading Test (SORT) scores; and an analysis of paired mean differences for pre-and post-test scores in the Metacomprehension Strategy Inventory (MSI). (Contains 2 figures, 5 tables, and 62 references.) (PM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
2002
This study examines the year-long process in which a teacher and her fourth-and fifth-grade students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds implemented Book Club, a literature-based instructional program. Data analysis reveals a gradual release of responsibility from the teacher to students in carrying out book conversations. Five features highlight the practice in this classroom. First, the teacher believed that all students brought with them rich experiences and knowledge to contribute to the discussions and the classroom learning community. Second, time and space were created for the students to discuss their responses to literature. Third, students were pushed to think critically and reflectively about what they read by responding to challenging questions. Fourth, the teacher employed multiple modes of teaching: telling; modeling; scaffolding; facilitating; and participating. Finally, the teacher persisted in maintaining high expectations of the students. Three appendixes contain: a list of books read during the school year; students' gains from pre-to post-Slosson Oral Reading Test (SORT) scores; and an analysis of paired mean differences for pre-and post-test scores in the Metacomprehension Strategy Inventory (MSI). (Contains 2 figures, 5 tables, and 62 references.) (PM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
Language policy is de facto as well as de jure (Shohamy, 2006). In Ontario, de jure policy limits the linguistic media of communication in the classroom to English and French, following the Official Languages Act. For the most part, spaces for nonofficial minority languages, encapsulated under the rubric: international languages, are found in the marginalia of public education—after school in heritage cum international language classes, or in limited high school options where European languages such as German and Spanish make their way into traditional language object study. Policy, though, is also de facto, invisibly forged through social practice. Without intervention, schools can and do support attitudinal biases against nonofficial language use. Numerous teachers at Joyce Public School in Toronto can recall incidents where newcomers to Canada were singled out in the classroom and bullied for their perceived lack of English. Interestingly stories extend to supply teachers as well as children. In this city, where over 50% of all children entering school speak a language other than English or French at home, all public schools welcome a slice of the super-diverse urban population that has come to characterize this city. Every class is linguistically diverse. At Joyce Public School, about 2/3 of children speak a nonofficial minority language at home. Teachers participating in school-university research to develop socially responsive literacy education banded together to design and teach cross-curricular projects that focused on the theme of respect. This presentation describes how the culture of an elementary school changed over the course of a 10-year collaborative action research project (2002-2012) and outlines the positive collateral effects in its de facto language policy.
1999
This study examined what happened in the first month of the school year when a fourth/fifth grade teacher attempted to establish a learning community in her classroom of culturally and linguistically diverse learners. The researcher conducted two teacher interviews and was a participant observer during the first month of the school year. Data analysis involved examining the teacher's vision of the classroom learning community; class activities designed to help enhance students' awareness of their class as a learning community; the class' work on developing a shared literacy practice (a book club); and power relationships between the teacher and students. Results indicated that the teacher had a clear goal of establishing a learning community. She told the students explicitly and repeatedly that they were a learning community. In developing a shared literacy practice, she created opportunities for students to learn to participate. She encouraged students to think for themselves. When students used passive resistance when faced with challenges in doing the Book Club, the teacher persisted because she believed it would be a better way to engage students in reading, writing, talking, and thinking and would create opportunities for them to interact with each other that might help develop the learning community. She considered discipline to be the foundation for a learning community. (Contains 14 references.) (SM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
Martín and the pink crayon: peer language socialization in a kindergarten bilingual classroom
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2020
This paper addresses the interactional dynamics of one bilingual, two-way immersion classroom where children came from diverse linguistic, cultural, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Based on an ethnographic discourse analytic study of one kindergarten TWI classroom, I analyze interactional data using participant frameworks as the unit of analysis and develop a linguistic analysis from a language socialization lens. Findings illustrate the ways that children’s talk and communicative behaviors act as peer socializing processes as children move in and out of various participatory roles in conversation. By virtue of their intentional spatial positioning around communal tables, students are socializing each other as participants into a bilingual learning community, even when they are silent participants or overhearers. I argue that this framework is a productive lens through which to analyze bilingual multiparty conversations in a way that does not privilege linguistic codes as a basis for analysis.