English Learners in STEM Subjects Transforming Classrooms, Schools, and Lives (2018) / Chapter Skim
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4 Effective Instructional Strategies for STEM Learning and Language Development in English Learners
4 Effective Instructional Strategies for STEM Learning and Language Development in English Learners
Pages 89-142
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, Mathematics Education and Young Dual Language Learners by Sylvia Celedón-Pattichis (2018) , Secondary Science Education for English Learners by Sara Tolbert (2018)
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teacher in the STEM classroom. The committee then identifies promising instructional strategies for enriching STEM learning and language development and concludes with a brief discussion of curriculum.
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Capabilities Teachers who hold asset views typically: Teachers who hold deficit views typically: Hold high expectations for EL's success Hold low expectations for ELs' success View ELs as willing and able to learn both View ELs as homogeneously low in language STEM content and English -- as eager and proficiency in STEM -- conflating English capable learners language proficiency with STEM content understanding Recognize ELs as a diverse, rather than Hold stereotypes of ELs grounded in their homogeneous, group -- background, first language, ethnicity, and/or country of interests, and/or English proficiency level origin Believe that ELs bring valuable knowledge Believe that ELs lack relevant prior and experiences to STEM classrooms that knowledge, experiences, and/or language should be elicited and built on View ELs as entitled to rich learning See ELs as unable or unwilling to opportunities (and) adequate scaffolds and communicate with teachers and/or with their supports non-EL peers Assume ELs enrich the classroom for all Assume ELs are motivated and hardworking students rather than intelligent Engage ELs in disciplinary Engage ELs in low-level cognitive demand meaning-making tasks Believe ELs have access to different yet Believe ELs have access to the same cultural important cultural knowledge that is knowledge as non-EL students dependent upon their experiences in and out of school See ELs as potential future scientists and See ELs as having limited future vocations or mathematicians professions Believe that ELs require similar time as Believe that ELs require more time to have non-EL peers to have their needs met their needs met than their non-EL peers Believe that ELs are constrained by Believe that ELs experience fundamental institutional and economic forces and inequities in their lives that teachers and experience fundamental inequities in their schools should not be expected to address lives that teachers and schools could help to address SOURCE: Developed and adapted from commissioned paper Teachers' Knowledge and Beliefs about English Learners and Their Impact on STEM Learning by Julie Bianchini (2018)
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; and failures to consistently use ESL strategies to promote English language development in STEM lessons (Lee et al., 2009)
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SOURCE: Developed and adapted from commissioned paper Teachers' Knowledge and Be liefs about English Learners and Their Impact on STEM Learning by Julie Bianchini (2018)
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) to illustrate teaching practices that have facilitated equitable partnerships for ELs in mathematics classrooms.
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Another way they positioned students as problem posers was having students write their own word problems and then ask other students to solve them. SOURCE: Developed and adapted from commissioned paper Mathematics Education and Young Dual Language Learners by Sylvia Celedón-Pattichis (2018)
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INTERACTIONS BETWEEN STEM CONTENT TEACHERS AND ESL TEACHERS ESL teachers play significant roles in various ESL education programs at elementary and secondary levels. At elementary schools, some of the program models in which teachers of ELs play significant roles include pull-out, push-in, or inclusion models, and team teaching (Becker, 2001)
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As these objectives illustrate, classroom interaction with peers and engagement in meaningful activities is central to this view of STEM instruction. PROMISING INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES TO SUPPORT STEM CONTENT AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT The Promising Futures report (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017)
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This chapter offers a review of research on instructional strategies in mathematics and science classrooms that have shown promise for supporting ELs through opportunities to engage in disciplinary practices, interact in meaningful and varied ways that draw on their language and other meaning-making resources, and attend to language and its meanings as they do disciplinary work. Given all of this, the five promising instructional strategies discussed include 1.
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. STEM subjects often involve authentic engagement with material supports and central ideas.
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, and productive and receptive language functions as outlined in the Framework for English Language Proficiency Development Standards corresponding to the CCSS and NGSS (Council of the Chief State School Officers, 2012)
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. SOURCE: Developed from commissioned paper Secondary Science Education for English Learners by Sara Tolbert (2018)
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Using large-scale and experimental or quasi-experimental designs, studies examined the impact of inquiry interventions on science and language development with ELs. Some interventions focused primarily on science learning while attending to language development (Llosa et al., 2016; Maerten-Rivera et al., 2016)
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. Moreover, research has described how teachers learn to recognize how ELs express their mathematical ideas as they are learning English and maintain a focus on mathematical reasoning as well as on language development (Khisty, 1995, 2001; Khisty and Chval, 2002; Moschkovich, 1999, 2011; Razfar, Khisty, and Chval, 2011)
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While engaging in the disciplinary practices, ELs comprehend (receptive language functions) and express (productive language functions)
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Such instruction offers students repeated, extended access to participation in disciplinary practices such as conjecturing, explaining, and arguing with appropriate scaffolding. Scaffolding Scaffolding for ELs is not simply one kind of support.
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(See Wells [1993] for further discussion of the potential of IRF participation structures to support language development.)
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. Work on teacher talk moves in mathematics classrooms has documented how teachers support whole-class discussions (Chapin, O'Connor, and Anderson, 2003, 2009; Herbel-Eisenmann, Steele, and Cirillo, 2013; Michaels and O'Connor, 2015; Razfar and Leavitt, 2010, 2011)
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. Utilize Multiple Registers and Multiple Modalities While communicating ideas with peers and the teacher, students use multiple modalities, including both linguistic and other semiotic modalities.
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. Likewise, in the science classroom, precision goes beyond the use of specialized vocabulary to the communication of precise disciplinary meaning.
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The teacher described this lesson as an ESL mathematics lesson, where students would be using English to discuss different shapes in the context of fold ing and cutting to make Tangram pieces as exhibited in the figure. Vignette 1.
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This vignette illustrates several instructional strategies that can be useful in supporting student participation in mathematical discussions. Some of these strategies are (a)
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. As STEM content areas expect all students to use multiple modalities strategically and in ways appropriate to each discipline, nonlinguistic modalities are not just compensatory for ELs.
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Takeuchi calls for broadening the definition of language in mathematics classrooms as well as embracing students' identities that are shaped through classroom interactions with content and language. In the science classroom, students use multiple modalities to engage in science and engineering practices (Grapin, 2018)
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, the precision with which the concepts are expressed (e.g., "the red were more" versus "50% in red") , and the accuracy with which relations are represented (e.g., leveraged to support science learning (Lee and Fradd, 1998)
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. Research has documented a variety of language resources that ELs use to communicate mathematical ideas: their first language, everyday language, gestures, and objects.
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found that ELs at all levels of English proficiency were able to provide a range of examples from home experiences that were directly connected to school science standards on topics ranging from measurement to energy transfer to the changing seasons. However, the majority of their science teachers, when viewing video recordings of the students discussing these science topics, were more likely to highlight linguistic or conceptual limitations than to focus on the relevant experiences that could be leveraged to support science learning.
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The teacher's simplified understanding of her role as language instructor led to simplified science talk in the classroom, and simplified science learning by her EL students. The authors pointed out that integrating language and content instruction "means taking what is known about quality science education and infusing into those goals of cognitive development corollary goals of language development" (p.
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. Meaningful metalanguage supports students to explore the ways speakers and writers use language, analyzing dense text to recognize how the wording means what it does.
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A key implication of this research is that although teachers of STEM content may not initially see language instruction as their purview, they can be motivated to learn to talk about discipline-specific language tied to achieving their broader instructional goals, and when they do so, they are
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120 ENGLISH LEARNERS IN STEM SUBJECTS BOX 4-6 Elementary Science In the following interaction, the teacher is holding a balance scale in her hand. Her 4th-grade student, Dai, is concerned that having a person hold the scale rather than placing it on a table could yield unreliable results.
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This interaction involves important language and science learning. The teacher invites Dai to participate, even though he cannot do what she is asking him to do.
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Accomplishing this goal calls for the development of teachers' knowledge about language and STEM content in ways that rarely occur. This is especially true of secondary school teachers of STEM subjects, as the culture of secondary school positions teachers as disciplinary experts, leading them in many cases to resist taking on instructional responsibility for issues such as language development that may seem to fall outside of their disciplinary mandate (for discussion, see Arkoudis, 2006)
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The implications for mathematics instruction is that teachers cannot just teach what is perceived to be "mathematics" vocabulary and expect that to be sufficient for supporting ELs in learning how to solve word problems; they need to support students to make sense of problem situations. There is substantial research to support this recommendation and the importance of supporting students to make sense of problem situations albeit not specific to ELs (see, e.g., Jackson et al., 2013)
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Educators can apply existing research about ELs in science and mathematics education (as well as other disciplines) to create engineering curricula, activities, and learning environments that embed effective classroom strategies from their inception.
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Research suggests that access to high-quality curricula, instruction, and teachers are effective in supporting the academic success of ELs learning English and content (American Educational Research Association, 2004; Gutiérrez, 2009, 2012)
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conducted a professional develop ment intervention with a 3rd-grade teacher that introduced approaches for enhancing mathematics curriculum for ELs. In this case, the teacher created new curriculum materials so that the ELs in her classroom could further their language development, extend the curriculum context, and encourage metacognitive thinking about mathematics.
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curriculum to simultaneously support the science knowledge and academic language development of middle-grade ELs. A controlled study of the QuEST intervention showed that use of the curriculum materials had a statistically significant positive effect on ELs' science knowledge and science vocabulary development.
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Collaboration with ESL teachers may play an important role in facilitating ELs progress as they engage in STEM subjects. Given the committee's stance that language and content are inextricable, the instructional strategies proposed to foster ELs' learning of STEM disciplinary practices acknowledge this relationship.
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Overall, STEM subjects afford opportunities for ELs to simultaneously learn disciplinary content and develop language proficiency through engaging in the STEM disciplinary practices. By explicitly focusing on language in the teaching of STEM concepts and practices, teachers are able to encourage ELs to draw on their full range of linguistic and communicative competencies and use different modalities and representations to communicate their thinking, solutions, or arguments in STEM subjects.
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Paper commissioned for the Committee on Supporting English Learners in STEM Subjects. Board on Science Education and Board on Children, Youth, and Families, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education.
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. The effects of educative curricu lum materials on teachers' use of instructional strategies for English language learners in science and on student learning.
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. Reflecting on the dialogue regarding the mathematics education of English learners.
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. Multimodality in the new content standards era: Implications for English learners.
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Mathematics Education Research Journal, 14(3)
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. How science instructional shifts and language in structional shifts support each other for English learners: Talk in the science classroom.
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. Secondary Science Teaching for English Learners: Developing Supportive and Responsive Contexts for Sense-making and Language Development.
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. Mathematics, the common core, and language: Recommendations for mathematics instruction for English learners Aligned with the common core.
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In The Common Core State Standards in Mathematics for English Language Learners, Grades K–8 (pp.
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. Engaging in argument and communicat ing information: A case study of English language learners and their science teacher in an urban high school.
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Paper commissioned for the Committee on Supporting English Learners in STEM Subjects. Board on Science Education and Board on Children, Youth, and Families, Division of Behavioral and So cial Sciences and Education.
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, The Common Core State Standards in Mathematics for English Language Learners: High School (pp.
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