Tammy Slater

Cooperation Between Science Teachers and ESL Teachers: A Register Perspective

Cooperation between English as a second or other language (ESOL) and content-area teachers, often difficult to achieve, is hard to assess linguistically in a revealing way. This article employs register analysis (which is different from, but complementary to, genre analysis) in a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective to show how an ESOL teacher uses the same content-area task as a cooperating science teacher so that she can provide a theory–practice cycle similar to that of the science teacher, but at a level that reflects and builds on the language abilities of her students. The task allows her to assess her students formatively and help them develop relevant meanings in the register of science. We argue that the development of register through related tasks in content classes and language classes provides a principled basis for cooperation and that register analysis offers revealing insights into cooperation and formative assessment between language and content teachers.

Patterns of tasks, patterns of talk: L2 literacy building in university Spanish classes

ABSTRACT Second language (L2) classroom research has sought to shed light on the processes and practices that develop L2 learners’ abilities [Nunan, D. 2004. Task-based language teaching. London: Continuum; Verplaetse, L. 2014. Using big questions to apprentice students into language-rich classroom practices. TESOL Quarterly, 179, 632–641; Zeungler, J., & Mori, J. 2002. Microanalyses of classroom discourse: A critical consideration of method. Applied Linguistics, 23(3), 283–288]. Honing in on the micro-level of classroom tasks and even further into the language of the tasks can help to reveal the patterns in teacher- and student-talk that help scaffold students’ academic literacy. Literacy, from a systemic functional view of language learning, entails having the tools to function in the social contexts that are valued in students’ lives. This study illustrates how grounded ethnography was used in conjunction with functional discourse analysis to illuminate bi-literacy development in two third-year university Spanish writing classes. Findings uncovered unique patterns of tasks and oral interactions that helped build students’ academic bi-literacy. While grammar tasks helped build students’ knowledge of wording–meaning relationships, culture and writing tasks supported their evolving understanding of how language construes content. This study puts forth a systemic functional curricular model for literacy-based tasks that aims to bridge the previously observed language-content gap.

Learning to use systemic functional grammar to teach literary analysis: Views on the effectiveness of a short professional development workshop

Learning to analyze literature involves developing an ability to identify important aspects of a text and learning where to find evidence of that importance. Systemic functional grammar (SFG) is a theory of language that connects linguistic form to the meaning being constructed; thus, it offers a useful foundation for analyzing literature. This chapter describes a two-hour professional development workshop carried out to introduce English language arts (ELA) teachers to SFG and show them ways to help their ELLs develop an ability to carry out systematic, language-based literary analyses that connect with research across the curriculum, thus addressing Common Core Standards. Teachers’ views regarding the workshop and the usefulness of this approach are discussed, using data collected during the workshop and subsequent focus group interviews.