Gina N. Cervetti

Attending to the Language and Literacy Needs of English Learners in Science.

This article presents the results of a study testing the efficacy of an instructional model that attends to the science, literacy, and language learning needs of English Learners (ELs) through a curriculum development project. The model is based on the premise that reading, writing, and discourse are better served when these important language processes are regarded as a means to rich subject matter learning. The quasi-experimental study included fourth and fifth grade ELs who experienced a science curriculum in one of two conditions: (a) science, literacy, and language integrated curriculum; or (b) a content-comparable curriculum where the focus was “hands-on” science. ELs in the treatment condition outperformed ELs in the comparison group in science understanding and science vocabulary, but no statistically significant differences were found with science reading.

Factors That Influence the Difficulty of Science Words

This study examines, within the domain of science, the characteristics of words that predict word knowledge and word learning. The authors identified a set of word characteristics—length, part of speech, polysemy, frequency, morphological frequency, domain specificity, and concreteness—that, based on earlier research, were prime candidates to explain variation in word knowledge and word learning. The outcome measures were the pretest (evidence of word knowledge) and posttest (evidence of word learning) vocabulary scores of second- through fourth-grade students who participated in one of several studies designed to evaluate the efficacy of science units that were part of a multiyear research and development program for an integrated science and literacy curriculum. The authors first examined individual predictors and then built multivariate models from the individually significant predictors of pretest score. Three characteristics were predictive of word knowledge (pretest score) at two or more grade levels; frequency, polysemy, and length predicted word difficulty independent of instruction. These three characteristics accounted for 39% of the variance in third graders’ pretest scores. Polysemy and frequency alone accounted for 34% of the variance at second grade and 23% at fourth grade. In addition, frequency and polysemy explained students’ vocabulary growth scores (posttest controlling for pretest) over the course of instruction at two of three grade levels. Understanding which characteristics of words are related to difficulty within the domain of science may provide a principled basis both for the selection of words for instruction and for differentiating instruction across categories of science words.

The Teacher and the Classroom.

In Becoming a Nation of Readers (BNR) (1985), Richard C. Anderson, Elfrieda H. Hiebert, Judith A. Scott, and Ian A. G. Wilkinson argued that the quality of teaching is a powerful influence on childrens reading development–more powerful than the influence of the general teaching approach or materials used. In this article, we focus on one research tradition in the area of literacy teaching quality: case studies of teachers who are identified as effective or exemplary as literacy educators. Review of these studies reveals a wide range of well-coordinated practices used by effective literacy educators, echoing, expanding, and deepening points made in BNR.