Mary A. Avalos

Modified Guided Reading: Gateway to English as a Second Language and Literacy Learning.

Guided reading is an important component of a comprehensive literacy program. Using this approach to reading instruction is beneficial to all students, including English-language learners (ELLs). While guided reading is generally used in the early elementary grades, this approach is recommended for ELLs of all ages when appropriate methods and materials are used. Teachers can modify guided reading to better meet the literacy and second language (L2) learning needs of ELLs. Building on previous work in the area of guided reading and L2 reading instruction, this article describes guided-reading modifications for ELLs, integrating reading, writing, listening, and speaking to build the four language skills. A lesson-planning guide and examples are provided for teachers who are facing the challenge of providing language and literacy instruction to students learning to read in their L2.

Critical SFL Praxis Among Teacher Candidates: Using Systemic Functional Linguistics in K-12 Teacher Education

Drawing on examples of how two teacher educators have developed a critical SFL approach to teacher education, this chapter discusses specific principles of critical SFL to guide analysis of texts in the content areas and planning instruction that integrates these principles. It shows how we have prepared elementary and secondary teachers to use CSFL to plan instruction for culturally and linguistically diverse students, especially English language learners. The chapter concludes by providing some reflections on this process and a few guidelines for teacher educators to integrate this approach into teacher education programs.

Haiti’s Language-in-Education Policy: Conflicting Discourses at the Local Level

The history of Haiti has had a lasting effect on its education system and planning efforts, resulting in Haiti’s current sociolinguistic situation. While there are two official languages recognized in Haiti, French is used for government, education, literature, and business, and Creole is generally used for informal exchanges among close friends, family, or laborers. Despite the fact that the majority of Haitians are monolingual Haitian Creole speakers, the French/Creole elite minority actually governs and economically dominates the majority of the population, creating multiple cultural, and intercultural assumptions involving the idealized native speaker/nonnative speaker and native language teacher/nonnative language teacher realities that drive language learning in Haiti’s classrooms. This chapter focuses on issues related to Haiti’s language instruction around those realities, and critically examines relevant literature on, as well as the actual text of the country’s language policy for educational purposes.

Hey! today i will tell you about the water cycle!”: Variations of language and organizational features in third-grade science explanation writing

This study investigated third graders’ use and variation of linguistic resources when writing a science explanation. Using systemic functional linguistics as a framework, we purposefully selected and analyzed writing samples of students with high and low scores to explore how the students’ use of language features (i.e., lexicogrammatical resources) reflected those expected in the discipline, or register, of science, as well as alternative language patterns used to realize the cyclical explanation genre in science. The language features used in high-scored samples were more aligned with those of the discipline compared with the low-scored samples. Although the low-scored samples revealed that students possessed some valid scientific understandings, these understandings were not as evident due to the students’ limited use of language features commonly found in the science register. This work fills important gaps in the literature concerning the contribution of lexicogrammatical resources in conveying elementary students’ science knowledge through written explanations.

Reading Mathematics: More than Words and Clauses; More than Numbers and Symbols on a Page

Reading comprehension research in mathematics has focused primarily on the teaching of generic content area reading strategies (Alvermann D, Moore D, Secondary school reading. In: Barr R, Kamil M, Mosenthal P, Person PD (eds) Handbook of reading research, vol II. Longman, New York, pp 951–983, 1991; Pearson PD, Fielding L, Comprehension instruction. In: Barr R, Kamil M, Mosenthal P, Pearson PD (eds) Handbook of reading research, vol II. Longman, New York, pp 815–860, 1991). In contrast, mathematics education research has focused on ensuring that students understand and can translate the symbols and register of mathematics (Crandall et al., 1989) to and from everyday language to solve problems. Both approaches have been used to support the treatment of mathematics as a fixed body of facts and procedures that are to be acquired by the learner. More recent thinking, however, views school mathematics as a “way of knowing” (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Professional standards for teaching mathematics. Author, Reston, 1991, Principles and standards for school mathematics. Author, Reston, 2000; Siegel M, Fonzi J, Read Res Q 30:635, 1995) and incorporates “mathematical texts” as affordances that can support students’ development of mathematical literacy (Draper RJ, Siebert D, Rethinking texts, literacies, and literacy across the curriculum. In: Draper RJ, Broomhead P, Jensen AP, Nokes JD, Siebert D (eds) (Re)Imagining content area literacy instruction. Teachers College Press, New York, pp 20–39, 2010; Siegel M, Fonzi J, Read Res Q 30:632–673, 1995). From our work as an interdisciplinary team, we argue for an interdisciplinary perspective of reading comprehension as applied to reform-oriented mathematics-teaching practices. We begin by reviewing the literature on adolescents’ reading comprehension of mathematics and then present a small study investigating how sixth and seventh grade students approached reading math textbooks. We end by proposing a revised definition of reading comprehension for mathematics grounded in the results of our study. In building on multiple theories we redefine reading comprehension in mathematics using the work of Rosenblatt (The reader, the text, the poem. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1978, 1982), Kintsch (1988), and Halliday (Language as a social semiotic. Edward Arnold, London, 1978) to respectively incorporate the transactional, constructivist, and language-dependent nature of thinking and reasoning necessary to create meaning and successfully comprehend mathematical texts.