Opportunities for academic language and literacy development for emergent bilingual students during group work

ABSTRACT

The present paper argues for a shift in teacher knowledge and beliefs about the role of group work in the teaching and learning of emergent bilingual students. Using case study data from an eighth grade classroom, the authors analyze the role of collaboration in the interaction with grade-level text of emergent bilingual students. The analysis demonstrates that the quality of collaboration mediates in significant ways the opportunities available to emergent bilinguals for both content and language learning. The authors suggest that expanding students’ repertoires of practice to include collaborative learning should be a worthwhile instructional goal in mainstream classrooms. The analysis problematizes the currently dominant view of group work as an instructional strategy, and supports the positioning of collaboration as a key disciplinary practice in the new college and career readiness standards. The article offers a conceptual framework for contrasting different types of collaboration that is based on Engeström's (1993. “Developmental Studies on Work as a Testbench of Activity Theory.” In Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, edited by S. Chaiklin and J. Lave, 64–103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) activity theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Emergent bilinguals
• second language learning
• collaborative learning
• national standards
• academic language
• language arts

Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our sincere appreciation to the anonymous reviewers whose feedback helped improve the quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The term emergent bilinguals was first introduced by Garcia (2009). In the literature, emergent bilinguals are commonly referred to as English language learners (ELLs), a term that we use only in reference to the students’ official classification by the school. Following Valdés et al. (2005), we differentiate between emergent bilinguals who are incipient bilinguals, ascendant bilinguals, and fully functional bilinguals. These labels roughly correspond to the general descriptions beginner, intermediate, and advanced. As Valdés et al. describe them, incipient bilinguals are ‘newly arrived students who have very little knowledge of English'; ascendant bilinguals are students who can ‘comprehend quite a bit of English but who are limited in their production of the language'; and fully functional bilinguals are students who are not identical to native speakers and are still learning the language but ‘have already acquired high levels of proficiency in the language' (155–156). Here we adopt the terms coined by Valdés et al. because they present students’ journey towards language mastery in an assets-based light, highlight what students can do with language, and are not tied to specific test score measures. The present study includes only ascendant and fully functional bilinguals.

2 We use group work as an umbrella term for many other terms used in the relevant scholarly literature, including peer-mediated learning, collaborative learning, collaborative problem solving, cooperative learning, problem-based learning, and many others.

3 We use the terms mainstream and general education interchangeably to refer to classrooms in which ELLs learn alongside non-ELLs and are usually taught by teachers who are certified in their content area but do not have any formal training on meeting the needs of emergent bilingual students.

4 Groups A and C (not discussed here) also engaged in associative learning even though Group A consisted of four Latino ascendant bilinguals and a monolingual English speaker, and Group C consisted of four high-achieving monolingual English speakers.