Education Week - Moving Beyond the Mainstream - October 30, 2013 - S16

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 14
from engaging more with English,
especially orally, for fear of being
corrected.
Focus on Concept
Some English-learner experts reject
the term "academic language."
"Really, what we are talking about
are academic practices that embed
language, things such as describing,
comparing, and engaging in
presenting ideas," said Aída Walqui,
the director of teacher professional
development for WestEd, a San
Francisco-based research group.
Most teachers, she said, have
a preoccupation with correcting
students' language when the attention
should be first on whether
students are grasping the conceptual
language and academic skills.
"As soon as you put an emphasis
on the language, then people start
teaching grammar. The language
gets chopped into pieces, and students
don't engage in it in a discourse
form," she said.
But because so many of the
readings required in the common
standards are informational
texts-a major shift, especially in
the early grades-many students,
and especially English-learners
and struggling readers, may come
to these nonfiction selections with
language voids for teachers to fill.
And that is what has Ms. Kinsella
worried-whether teachers
themselves have enough command
of the language of informational
texts, to name one example, to effectively
teach and support English-learners.

She conducted a seminar with
elementary teachers in a California
district in September on this
very point. Using photocopies of
a chapter from an informational
text, Ms. Kinsella asked the teachers
to label various features of the
article, such as captions, sources,
and legends on bar graphs.
"Many of them couldn't do it," she
said. "They didn't know the terms.
They know 'main idea' and 'details'
because those have been the big
thing in kindergarten through 6th
grade for so long."
The common core also calls for
students to be able to cite evidence
from the text, analyze it, and provide
written and oral responses
with sophisticated language. Providing
such responses, Ms. Kinsella
said, means students will need vocabulary
and language that they
may rarely hear a teacher use.
Students need to hear and read
phrases such as "based on" or "I
concluded that" and be given constant
opportunities to use that
language themselves with their
classroom peers, she said.
"We've engaged in real benign
neglect with English-learners and
those students who come from
generational poverty and families
with minimal educational experience,"
Ms. Kinsella said. "We as a
profession have not done a very organized,
systematic job of helping
these students" progress to more
formal ways of speaking and using
advanced English.
Connecting the Dots
One of the biggest efforts to help
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teachers bridge those gaps as they
begin using the common standards
is the revamped version of
English-language-proficiency standards
shared by the 29 states in
the World-Class Instructional Design
and Assessment consortium.
The consortium, better known
as WIDA, revised its five Englishlanguage-development
standards
to clearly show the connections
between the content standards
of the common core across every
grade level and the academic language
that will be necessary to
teach across the varying levels of
English proficiency.
In 1st grade, for example, the
common core calls for pupils to
"write opinion pieces in which
they introduce the topic or name
the book they are writing about,
state an opinion, supply a reason
for the opinion, and provide some
sense of closure."
The WIDA edition clearly spells
out the grade-level vocabulary
words and expressions that teachers
should use-such as "fact,"
"paragraph," "topic sentence," "main
idea," or "detail"-while teaching
that writing standard to students
at all levels of English development.
The WIDA edition also offers example
topics that are pulled directly from
a content standard in the common
core and provide teachers with the
types of support and scaffolding of
academic language that they need
depending on students' proficiency.
Guadalupe Valdés, an education
professor at Stanford University
who studies second-language acquisition,
has a different take on
academic language that stems
from her view that language is
not a set of structures that must
be learned in a linear fashion.
She sees academic language as
something that students, whether
English-learners or not, acquire
through exposure and experience
in using a variety of language types
in all settings.
Because the most common ap-
proach to teaching ELLs is to sequester
them in classrooms with other
language-learners and to focus so
much on grammar and vocabulary,
Ms. Valdés said they don't get
enough opportunities to hear and
speak what she calls "rich English"
with peers and other educators.
"You've got to let the kids play
the game," Ms. Valdés said. "If I
want you to play basketball but
I just keep you dribbling the ball
the whole time without a chance
to pass or shoot, you're not likely
to ever play the game very well.
But if you get into the game, play
it, and watch all that's happening
around you, you've going to have a
much better chance at playing the
game well." n
S16 | EDUCATION WEEK OCTOBER 30, 2013
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Education Week - Moving Beyond the Mainstream - October 30, 2013

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