Chapter 1: What This Book Is About: Raising Expectations
The title of the book draws together a number of related dimensions critical to the education of English language learners (henceforth El learners or ELLs) in the years spanning upper elementary, middle, and early secondary school. The book aims to raise expectations about what is possible for these learners. It is primarily concerned with the notion of literacy engagement and development in an intellectual challenging curriculum where thinking is valued: that is, a curriculum where all students, including EL learners, are afforded the opportunities to think creatively, transform information, engage in inquiry-orientated activity, and construct their own understandings through participating in substantive conversations and, critically, are given the scaffolding and support to be successful.
Much previous research has suggested the significance of such high-challenge cla**room for successful educational outcomes for all learners. Newmann et al. (1996) have presented three significant findings in relation to raise levels of academic achievement in intellectual quality: first, that students from all backgrounds are more engaged when cla**room work is cognitively challenging that when it consists solely of conventional low-level work; second, that all students, regardless of social or ethnic background, achieve at higher levels when they participate in an intellectually challenging curriculum: and third, the equity gaps diminish as a result of engagement in curricula. Yet the development of curriculum distinguished by intellectual quality and the development of higher-order thinking has in reality rarely been a major focus of program planning for EL learners. Rather, many programs have traditionally been more defined by low-level drill-and-practice activities and a focus on basic grammatical from excised from authentic contexts of language use. As once group of writers has put it, “ELLs” lack of oral language proficiency has often hindered their opportunity to receive cognitively stimulating and content-level appropriate instruction in school” (Carrasquillo et al. 2004, 30).
This book offers suggestion about planning for “intellectual quality” in a curriculum that at the same time is also concerned with integrating second language learning with the development of subject content. For EL learners, this high-challenge cla**room must be one where they are given the kinds of scaffolding and linguistic support that will enable them to engage in learning and be successful learners, in term of both their English language development and the development of their subject knowledge. A major premise of the book is that this this dual notion of “high support” (Mariani 1997 is critical for EL learners: while teachers make the Newmann et al (1996) refer to as “relentless demands for student's best efforts” (214) , students are set up for success through a range of explicit instructional supports. As later chapters will suggest, these supports are embodied in the way that teaching and learning activities are planned and in the nature of cla**room interactions. You will find more about what constructs a high-challenge, high-support cla**room later in this chapter.
The development of intellectual challenging programs requires us all, as educators, to monitor our own a**umptions of students and perhaps to challenge and rethink our own expectations of what learners are able to achieve. While the book is about ways of providing students with intellectual challenge, it also takes the view that this can only occur when teachers also challenge their own expectations of what students are capable of. As Cummins (2000) has pointed out, the way in which teachers talk with and about grows out of they construct their students as learners and how they see their own identities as educators.
Educators have long been aware that low expectations by teachers are a self-fulfilling prophecy: the less that is expected of students, the less they will achieve (see, for example, the seminal work by Rosenthal and Jacobsen 1968). Studies of streaming and tracking (Gamoran et al. 1995; Mehan 1992; Oakes 1985) show that one of the main reasons some students do not achieve high academic performance is that schools do not require them to perform work of high intellectual quality. Conversely, high expectations by teachers correlate with higher achievements by students. (Darling-Hammond and Schon 1996; Carrasquillo and London 1993; Brophy and Good 1986). Carasquillo and Rodriguez (2002) illustrated how these high expectations seem to be characteristic of exemplary teachers. Freeman and Freeman (1998) describe a teacher who worked with a student had bee previously deemed as having a learning disability and who had a reputation of being disruptive in cla** who eventually achieved “beyond her wildest dreams.” They comment that “them most important we can learn as teachers is that our students have unlimited potential” (256).
And so this book also challenges teachers to reflect on their own expectations of students and on the kind of learning environments they create in their cla**rooms. But effective teaching requires more than using the ideas and resources found in a book, and more than a set of one-size-fits-all teaching “gimmicks.” Through the ways they design and implement the teaching and learning activities of their cla**room, and in the cla**room environment they create, teachers are critical in making good ideas context responsive – that is, making them relevant on their own unique situations and to the needs of their students. For this reason the list of questions at the end of each chapter is intended to make the ideas in the book relevant to your own context, by identifying ways in which your particular students may be supported in developing the language and thinking sk**s a**ociated with intellectually challenging work. If you are using this book with other teachers, then the question should stimulate some useful conversations.
This chapter introduces the key ideas suggested in the title of the book: literacy in the middle years of schooling and the implications for EL learners, and the notion of “intellectual quality” and an intellectually challenging curriculum. It also introduces the sociocultural approach to learning that underpins the ideas in the book. At the end of this chapter you will find a brief summary of what each chapter contains.
What Is “Academic Literacy”?
In this book, discussion about literacy and language refers to EL learners' development of English. While mention is made of mother tongue use in a number of the activities described throughout the book, it is outside the scope and focus of this book to discuss bilingual approaches to learning in detail. However, this omission is not intended to detract from the value of these approaches for learning and participation. This book should be read in that light, and the readers will find many possibilities for mother tongue use in the overall pedagogical approach suggested.
Academic literacy is about far more than reading comprehension and decoding, because the language a**ociated with academic learning traditionally “codes” knowledge in ways that are different from everyday ways of expressing what we know. This new coding is linguistically unfamiliar to many students, not only ELLs. A young child, for example, will talk about a refrigerator magnet as “sticking to” a refrigerator but note that it doesn't stick to a wooden table. Coded more scientifically, we may express this context-specific way of knowing as a generation: magnets attract certain kinds of metal or some metal is attracted by a magnet. Increasing the degree of abstraction, the fridge experience could then be recoded as: magnetic attraction only occurs between ferrous metals. This disciplinary language of science also makes it possible to express more complex concepts such as magnetic field. As Martin (1990) points out in relation to science discourse, “it codes an alternative perspective on reality to commonsense [knowledge], a perspective accumulated over centuries of scientific enquiry “ (86).
Similarly, the development of literacy within any subject in the school curriculum involves learning to control new language. Here is a further example of how language changes according to context. At the time of writing this we had some extremely heavy rain over a period of several days. I commented to a friend that the rain had washed away most of the soil in a section of my garden. Of course this is a perfectly appropriate piece of language in the context in which I used it, but if I wanted to think and talk about the “big ideas” around the soil erosion, the notion of rain washing away soil would not get me very far! For example, I would need to know and understand the verb erode rather than wash away and be able to nominalize it (turn it into a noun) in order to talk about the concept of erosion.
So it is important to recognize that the kinds of technical language we find in academic contexts is not simply “jargon,” although it is often dismissed as this. Rather, using the appropriate terminology is integral to the concepts being learned: understanding the term photosynthesis is not separate from biology content knowledge. But neither is it simple a question of learning new vocabulary, although this is certainly a significant part of subject-related literacy. Disciplinary literacy also means being able to express more concisely and precisely the complex ideas and concepts that are embedded in the content of a subject and that are essential for learning in that subject.
To illustrate this further, consider this sentence and imagine how you would explain it to a young child:
The extended drought caused the crops to fail, resulting in a widespread famine and many d**hs, especially among the children and the elderly.
You would need to say something like this:
There was no rain for a very long time. The farmers had planted crops like maize and wheat and corn, but because it didn't rain, all the crops died. Because there were no crops there was nothing for the people to eat, and they became very hungry. Because they didn't have enough to eat, many of them died, especially the children and old people.
You can see that although the two texts have similar meanings, it takes more double the words to express them in the second text – sixty-four compared with twenty-three in text 1. This is because there is much a**umed knowledge in the first text that is made explicit in the second. A further difference is in the grammar of the two texts; for example, causality is expressed by because in the second and the caused and resulting in in the first. But more importantly, the language of the second of the second text provides no way of talking about the broader concepts – the big-ideas – of drought and famine, and no way of relating these two concepts in order, for example, to talk about the causes of famine, or to talk about drought-related famine in a new and different context.
In addition to the more obvious specialist vocabulary and grammatical patterns that are evident in the examples above, academic literacy also needs to take account of the different kinds of genres or text types and generic structures particular to specific subjects. A written discussion is constructed differently in science or social studies or English: each discipline has its own conventions and patterns of thinking that make it distinctive from others. Or, to put it another way, it “packages” knowledge differently. As Mary Schleppegrell (2002) has suggested: The Language of each discipline has evolved in way that enable the construal of the kinds of meanings that the discipline requires…(B)y an*lyzing the ways of using language that are valued in different disciplines, we can illuminate the key issues that face teacher and students in gaining disciplinary knowledge. (120, italics added) Thus different disciplines require very different literacy sk**s, including the reading of different types of texts and the use of different text structures, different presentation formats, different ways of organizing languages, and different standards of evidence (Meltzer and Hamann 2005). These differences extended into spoken language to: how teachers talk about science is different from how they talk about English or mathematics, and how we write poetry is different from how we write history or science or mathematics. Content standards now widely used in U.S. schools and syllabus statements in Australia and the U.K., in fact require that students know how to think, ready, write, and talk like a historian or a scientist or a mathematician. Being subject literate means understanding how the “big ideas” of the discipline are organized and evaluated and is thus clearly related to being able to think and reason in subject-specific ways: think, for example, of the differences between carrying out an inquiry in science or in history or in social studies. Using critical thinking as an example, Langer (1992) suggests subject-specific differences in how this sk**ed is used: Although critical thinking behaviors such as questioning and an*lyzing are involved in science and in English cla**es, the reasons for involving them, the ends to which they are put, and the ways they are engaged in, differ in marked and identifiable ways. For example, in biology and physics cla**es, questions seem to be asked primarly for clarification of the unknown (for explication), while in English, questions are often asked to explore possible interpretations (for investigation). (2, cited in Meltzer and Hamnn 2005) Since so much academic language is subject related, it is really more accurate to talk about academic literacies rather than academic literacy. Developing the spoken and written literacy of a particular subject is not only a key to performing well on standardized tests in content are learning; it is also, as later chapters make clear, the key to being an effective learner in intellectually challenging work.
Of course there are some similarities across the academic language of different subjects. In general all academic languages tends to be more “written like”, less personal, more abstract, more explicit and more lexically dense, and more structured than the face-to-face everyday language with which students are familiar. Some literacy teaching contains many examples of these generic in that they can be applied across the curriculum, and this book contains many examples of these generic strategies. But this should not mask the fact that much literacy teaching - the teaching of vocabulary development, for example or the teaching of specific text types – is only meaningful and relevant when it is taught within the context of a particular subject. You will find more about these issues in Chapters 3 and 4, together with a range of examples of teaching strategies that focus on literacy.
Implications for Teaching Subject Literacy
One of the implications for discussing literacy in this way is that it is about much more than reading and writing. In order to read and write effectively students need also to be able to use what Chang and Wells (1998) refer to as “literacy talk”. In their talk they need to make their reasoning explicit, use language precisely, question and critique others' ideas, and be prepared to rethink their own ideas. While not all cla**room talk needs to be of this type, later chapters will show how being able to use language in these ways has positive benefits for the development of reading, writing, and thinking. Conversely, the development of reading and writing likewise supports the development of oral language. Most definitions of literacy now include attributes such as critical thinking and the ability to use language appropriately in a range of contexts. The definition used for the International Year of Literacy in Australia (which drew on the definition developed by the United States), for example, stated that literacy involves the integration of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and critical thinking and includes the cultural knowledge that enables a speaker, writer, or reader to recognize and use language appropriately to different social situations. It is also suggested that the aim of literacy teaching is to develop an active literacy that allows people to use language to enhance their capacity to think, create, and question and that helps them participate more effectively in society.
Clearly a major implication of recognizing that literacy is subject related is that in order to support students in their development of academic literacy, subjects teachers must themselves understand the language demands of their own subjects and be able to explicitly teach subject literacy to students. Without this explicit and planned teaching of literacy, the development of EL learners' academic literacy sk**s is unlikely to occur in a mainstream cla**; it cannot be a**umed that they will simply “pick up” what they need to know. Unfortunately, as EL specialists are aware, many subject or content teachers are reluctant to devote time to students' literacy development, seeing it instead as the domain of the English teachers (Langer and Applebee 1998). This book takes the stance that in English-medium education, all teachers are teachers of English, and so the book is intended not only for EL specialists but also for content teachers who have EL learners in their cla**. (It is worth remembering that making mainstream cla**room responsive to EL learners by incorporating academic language and literacy learning is an adaption that will benefit all learners.)
An Approach to Teaching and Learning: High-Challenge and High-Support Cla**rooms
Many teaching approaches are now based broadly on the work of Vygotsky (1978, 1986), who offers a very different view of teaching and learning from two other major approaches still in evidence to school. The latter can broadly be described as teacher-dominated “transmission” approaches (where teachers are seen to transmit sk**s and knowledge into the “empty minds” of their students) and “progressive” approaches (where learners are seen to construct their own knowledge and where the role of the teacher is to “facilitate” this learning through the stage management of appropriate learning experiences).
Both of these approaches can be critiqued from the standpoint of EL learners. Transmission-based approaches work against the central principle of language development, namely that using the language in interaction with others is an essential process for both first and second language learning (see Chapter 7). Transmission-based approaches, coupled with low expectations of what students are capable, unfortunately often dominate the teaching of English language learners and other students seen as “disadvantaged,” and many compensatory programs focus heavily on low-level literacy and numeracy sk**s that often offer no intellectual richness or opportunities for high-level literacy development. Although progressive pedagogy offers a welcome focus on the learner and on learner-centered activity, it too has been critiqued in the past because of its lack of explicit teaching, especially in relation to language. While these common ideologies appear to be very different, they are alike in that they both view learning is essentially an individualistic activity and the learner as independent of others and self-contained.
In contrast, a Vygotskian view of learning sees it as essentially a collaborative activity, occurring within a particular sociocultural setting. An individual's intellectual and linguistic development is seen, to a significant extend, as the product of his or her education, not a prerequisite for it to occur. Thus, for example, wile we are all biologically programmed to learn language, how we learn it and the purposes for which we are able to use it successfully are a matter of the social context and situations we participate in. As Wells (2007) has suggested, “who we become depends on the company we keep and on what we do and say together” (100).
This sociocultural approach to learning recognizes that with a**istance, learners can reach beyond what they can reach unaided, participate in new situations, and take on new roles. People learning to drive, for example, are initially very reliant on their instructor for support, but as they gain in sk**s and confidence the instructor's support gradually diminishes until they are able to drive alone. This a**isted performance is encapsulated Vygotsky's notion of the zone of proximal development, or ZPD, which describes the “gag” between what learners can do alone and what they can do with help from someone more sk**ed. This situation help os often known as “scaffolding” (Gibbons 2002).
Scaffolding, in the way it is used, has three major characteristics: It is temporary help that a**ists a learner to move toward new concepts, levers of understanding, and new language. It enables a learner to know how to do something (not just what to do), so that they will be better able to complete similar tasks alone. It is future oriented: in Vygotsky's words, what a learner can do with support today, he or she will be able to do alone tomorrow. Scaffolding is therefore teacher support in action, and is at the core of learning and teaching for autonomy (Mariani 1997).
Vygotsky also drew a clear relationship between the dialogues we participate in as children (and as adults) and the development of thinking, arguing that the development of cognition is also the result of participation with others in goal-oriented activities. Most people, for example, can remember situations where they have been helped to find solutions or understand difficult concepts by talking with others. We learn and develop new ideas through this collaborative talk. Vygotsky argues that this external dialogue with others gradually internalized and becomes “inner speech”, creating our personal resources for thinking. It follows, then, that the conversations learners have at school impact on how well they develop the kind of high-quality thinking described earlier.
Implicit in these ideas is the idea of high challenge (tasks we cannot do unaided) accompanied by high support (the scaffolding that enable us to complete these tasks successfully). One notion of constitutes a high-challenge, high support cla**room has been developed by Mariani (1997), who suggests that the quality and quantity of the challenge support we provide, and the way the dimensions of challenge and support intersect, construct four kinds of cla**room environments. These are summarized in Figure 1.1
From the perspective of the learner, a high-challenge cla**room with low levels of support creates frustration and anxiety and may lead to learners giving up and ultimately opting out of school. Low challenge and low support is likely to lead to boredom, with similar resistance to school. Low challenge and high support allow learners to work in their “comfort zone,” but not a lot of learning will take place and neither will learners develop autonomy and independence in their learning. In the fourth quadrant, the combination of high challenge and high support allows learners to be stretched to reach their potential and to successfully engage with new learning: here they learn in their zone of proximal development. This central idea of “learning in the challenge zone” is the backdrop against which the remainder of the book should be read.