Explicit and Meaningful:An Exploration of Linguistic Tools for Supporting ELLs’ Reading and Analytic Writing in the English Language Arts.

Literacy;Linguistics;English Language Arts;English Language Learners;Education;Social Sciences;Educational Studies

Moore, Jason PatrickMoje, Elizabeth B. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Literacy;    Linguistics;    English Language Arts;    English Language Learners;    Education;    Social Sciences;    Educational Studies;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/107275/moorejp_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation explored ways in which teachers might offer explicit support and strategies for English Language Learners (ELLs) to read and respond to literature in analytical ways, a central goal of the English Language Arts (ELA). Data were collected as part of a larger development project that called upon socio-linguistic and socio-cultural theories of language and learning to design professional development materials and classroom lessons for primary-grade teachers in a high-poverty, urban school district. One strand of the project’s curriculum focused on supporting students to interpret and evaluate literary characters and to write arguments. The dissertation focused on three aspects of the project. The first area of investigation employed qualitative analysis of classroom conversations, offering evidence that grammatical metalanguage from systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and related artifacts can support ELLs in meaningful discussions about literature in which they interpret and evaluate characters. The second area of inquiry explored the implementation of writing lessons informed by socio-linguistic genre theory, as well as the students’ writing of character analysis, a form of argument valued in secondary ELA. Qualitative analyses found that students participated in classroom conversations that highlighted natural constraints and choices consistent with the target genre and its social purpose, but at times, the teachers imposed unnatural constraints on students. Sociolinguistic analyses of the students’ writing found that students successfully responded to the prompts, using language appropriate to the genre and its purpose. Specifically, students took varied evaluative stances in response to prompts, modified their interpretations of character attitudes using nuanced lexis, and provided differing, but relevant evidence in support of their claims. The last area of inquiry focused on the project’s Design-Based Research (DBR) approach, an iterative, cyclical research method committed to producing both instruction and theory in authentic classrooms. There are few concrete examples of how DBR is conducted to best support these goals, particularly the development of instructional theory. The dissertation offers one such example. The analysis that employed theoretical constructs from narrative inquiry to detail the first two years of research, uncovering ways theory and instructional practice functioned and interacted during our development process.