Christina L. Dobbs

Core academic language skills: An expanded operational construct and a novel instrument to chart school-relevant language proficiency in preadolescent and adolescent learners

Beyond academic vocabulary, the constellation of skills that comprise academic language proficiency has remained imprecisely defined. This study proposes an expanded operationalization of this construct referred to as core academic language skills (CALS). CALS refers to the knowledge and deployment of a repertoire of language forms and functions that co-occur with school learning tasks across disciplines. Using an innovative instrument, we explored CALS in a cross-sectional sample of 235 students in Grades 4–8. The results revealed between- and within-grade variability in CALS. Psychometric analyses yielded strong reliability and supported the presence of a single CALS factor, which was found to be predictive of reading comprehension. Our findings suggest that the CALS construct and instrument appear promising for exploring students’ school-relevant language skills.

Mastering Academic Language Organization and Stance in the Persuasive Writing of High School Students

Beyond mechanics and spelling conventions, academic writing requires progressive mastery of advanced language forms and functions. Pedagogically useful tools to assess such language features in adolescents’ writing, however, are not yet available. This study examines language predictors of writing quality in 51 persuasive essays produced by high school students attending a linguistically and ethnically diverse inner-city school in the Northeastern United States. Essays were scored for writing quality by a group of teachers, transcribed and analyzed to generate automated lexical and grammatical measures, and coded for discourse-level elements by researchers who were blind to essays’ writing quality scores. Regression analyses revealed that beyond the contribution of length and lexico-grammatical intricacy, the frequency of organizational markers and one particular type of epistemic stance marker (i.e., epistemic hedges) significantly predicted persuasive essays’ writing quality. Findings shed light on discourse elements relevant for the design of pedagogically informative assessment tools.

Scaling up professional learning: technical expectations and adaptive challenges

In order to be effective, professional development efforts are most promising if they are context specific and focus on supporting collaboration. Increasingly, schools initiate professional development with small groups of teachers, with the intention that the effects of the initiatives will spill over to other school personnel. This study follows one such context-specific and collaboration-driven professional development initiative designed to support teachers in implementing new disciplinary literacy practices. Qualitative data – including interviews, focus group data and written narratives from participants – were analyzed to understand how teachers understood the work of participating in a professional learning community over two years and how they thought about scaling their work to other teachers. Initially, participants perceived change as technical and straightforward, but they came to revise their views over time. However, participants’ increasingly complex views of change eventually came into conflict with teachers not in the project, who expected advice about making similar instructional changes to be much simpler. We conclude with implications for how school leaders and professional developers might manage expectations and lead change efforts in ways that balance technical and adaptive work over time.

Using Historical Building Analysis to Support English Language Learners’ Bicultural and Historical Thinking Skills Development

English language learners can develop historical thinking and larger literacy skills by engaging in historical building analysis. Without the barrier posed by traditional text, historical building analysis offers opportunities for English language learners to engage in deep disciplinary practices in ways that simultaneously draw upon and build bicultural and historical knowledge. This chapter presents a framework for engaging in historical building analysis, how to implement it in a classroom, and the specific literacy, linguistic, and cultural practices and skills developed.