Volume 9, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Language and literacy in educational contexts; Guest Editor: Zhihui Fang

This qualitative-dominant mixed methods study aimed to investigate how native English speaking third graders ( n  = 72) and sixth graders ( n  = 88) navigate cohesive ties in academic sentences. There are studies on supporting students with academic language at the word and text levels, but less research has been done on readers’ knowledge of the dense and challenging sentences in academic texts. The current study examines both how students navigate cohesion in academic sentences as well as how their knowledge of cohesion relates to their performance on reading comprehension measures. With a multi-case study framework, we analyzed students’ ( n  = 6) metalinguistic interviews with academic sentences. We then designed Maze tasks for a larger sample ( n  = 160) to identify patterns in students’ knowledge of cohesion. We also conducted correlational analyses between students’ sentence-level knowledge and performance on measures of reading comprehension. Qualitative findings suggest that students draw on both metalinguistic and epilinguistic knowledge to explain cohesion, and that students value explicit instruction with academic sentences. Quantitative findings show that knowledge of cohesive ties is significantly correlated with performance on reading comprehension measures. Implications and future research for both monolingual and multilingual learners are addressed.

This study examined the forms and functions of collaborative scaffolds used by a monolingual teacher within a translanguaging pedagogy, which we frame as instruction that invites students to draw from their entire linguistic repertoires in ways that honor and sustain their multilingualism. More specifically, it investigates how a 9th-grade teacher of multilingual students fostered collaboration within a literacy activity that leverages strategic translation of grade-level texts. Data sources include ten consecutive video-recorded class periods involving strategic collaborative translation, interviews with the teacher, instructional materials, and translation artifacts. Findings show three major themes that capture teacher approaches to foster learners’ meaning-making. First, the teacher fostered collaboration to support meaning-making within the text by suggesting resources, guiding the collaborative steps, and praising to help students’ meaningful engagement with the text. Second, the teacher fostered collaboration around the text by setting collaborative ground rules and promoting joint construction of meaning to support students’ learning. Lastly, the teacher offered new teacher-student roles to support collaboration, which included affirming aspects of students’ identities during translation. This study offers specific ways that teachers might foster meaningful engagement with texts when they have limited experience with languages other than English, and similarly, emerging proficiencies in engaging in translanguaging pedagogies.

Writing is fundamental to science and integral to its practice. This study examined two sixth-grade science teachers’ perspectives on and practices in teaching writing to English language learners (ELLs). Both teachers were interviewed on their beliefs about and experience in teaching writing to ELLs in science. They were also each observed once per week for their writing instruction over one semester. All writing samples produced by the ELLs during the semester were collected. Qualitative analysis of the data revealed that both teachers recognized the importance of writing to science but provided few opportunities for extended writing and limited writing instruction to ELLs. The teachers cited ELLs’ disinterest in science and lack of writing proficiency, as well as their own lack of time and preparedness to teach writing, as the main reasons for not making writing a priority in their teaching practice, for having lower expectations for ELLs, and for not offering substantive language/literacy support to ELLs. These findings indicate that the lofty goal of literacy-science integration remains largely unfulfilled, despite nearly two decades of strong push for border crossing by both science and literacy educators. They suggest that a reenvisioning of the relationship between literacy and science is needed to ensure effective science instruction for ELLs and other students in need of language/literacy support.

Becoming mathematically literate means not only knowledge of the content of mathematics but also understanding of the nature of mathematics and the literate practices involved in the creation, communication, and consumption of its content. This case study examined one mathematician’s view of the nature of mathematics and his literate practices. Data collected include semi-structured interviews with the mathematician, observations of his daily work routines, and his think-alouds during the reading of a disciplinary text. These data were analyzed qualitatively through an iterative process involving multiple readings and identification and refinement of codes. The analysis revealed that the mathematician (a) viewed mathematics as rigorous and demanding, both theoretical and practical, relatively stable but highly rewarding, interconnected with other disciplines, and involving discipline-legitimated discursive practices; (b) engaged in extensive reading/viewing and writing, valued learning from repeated trials and errors, and collaborated with an international network of peers in research; (c) used a range of reading strategies (e.g. close reading, summarizing, questioning, storying, evaluating, annotating) to help him make sense of the disciplinary text; and (d) marshaled both verbal and visual resources to create specialized knowledge, engage in rigorous reasoning, develop logical argument, and construct professional identity. These findings provide important insights that can help teachers design activities that are authentic to mathematics practices and effective for promoting mathematics literacy.

This paper explores whether the reading comprehension of complex texts can be facilitated through an online reading platform designed for novice readers with English proficiencies below the Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) threshold. We hypothesize that computer-mediated text glosses could speed up lower-level processing in the readers’ working memory and thus enhance the overall comprehension of complex texts for study purposes. We tested 46 participants with estimated International English Language Testing System (IELTS) reading scores between 5 and 5.5, sampled from a pool of 1,406 students who took a diagnostic reading test and 631 students who completed a survey on their reading practices. Our participants were randomly assigned to read one General Reading IELTS text and one Academic Reading IELTS text, either on an on-screen Word file or on the e-reading platform with the glossing tool. The tests were video-recorded and the participants completed post-test interviews for further qualitative analysis. While the Mixed-model ANOVA did not suggest an interaction effect between the two language proficiency categories and the mode in which the tests were administered, it revealed a main effect on the use of online reading ( p  < 0.01) across the 5–5.5 IELTS spectrum, indicating that the electronic glosses enhanced reading comprehension. Implications for further research and pedagogy are discussed.

This article focuses on a study of the decision-making and patterns of discourse of 21 novice teachers as they engaged with, reflected on, and discussed school-based scenarios about English learners. Employing qualitative content analysis, researchers explore patterns related to intention, bias, and criticality in participants’ discourse. Participants avoided engaging with scenarios where solutions could not be enacted solely within their classroom, expressing hesitation about being disruptive to the school ecosystem and fear of conflict with colleagues, superiors, or parents. They focused on immediate solutions but rarely endeavored to identify the underlying assumptions that compelled characters to act in biased ways. While participants expressed awareness of their own privileged social positionings, they often struggled to connect their social identities to the underlying assumptions that informed their reactions to the scenarios. Notably, participants often used language that exonerated them from the judgment being cast on a character. Additionally, participants repeatedly racialized social identities unrelated to race and expressed distrust of students speaking a language they could not understand. These findings offer insight regarding novice teachers’ intentions and (mis)understandings when working with English learners and offer important implications for teacher educators’ as they prepare pre-service teachers to respond to such learners.

This paper analyzes languages and their connections to thinking and culture using an autoethnographic lens. This autoethnography utilized personal examples and those from the author’s students’ compositions as evidence of the link between languages and cultures. Both named languages and dialects of those languages are contemplated for the basis of how their traits influence perceptions. A neuroscientific rationale is also made between human languages and human cultures. The link between culture and language, including dialects, is made, positioning the act of translanguaging as real time dialogue between cultures. Finally, classroom implications are presented with actual student writing and multimodal performances to showcase how students’ cultures are manifested via classroom engagements, particularly through translanguaging.