Supporting social strengths amid emerging bilingualism: effects of Word Generation on social perspective taking in English learners’ writing

ABSTRACT

Bilinguals often outperform monolinguals at apprehending the perspectives of others—an apparent consequence of their experiences moving across linguistic and sociocultural contexts. Whether English learners' (ELs') use of such skill in academic writing may be affected by literacy curriculum is the focus of this study. The study explored students' use of social perspective taking (SPT) in writing by examining their responses to a novel argumentative writing task, the iPad–Take A Stand assessment (iTAS). The iTAS was designed to assess the efficacy of the Word Generation curriculum (WG), which provides supports for discussing and deploying multiple perspectives, during its 2012–2014 randomized controlled trial. iTAS essays produced in that study by 4th–7th-grade ELs and their non-EL peers were coded along two dimensions of SPT, acknowledgment and articulation. Analyses revealed a positive impact of WG irrespective of language status on social perspective acknowledgment, the less sophisticated dimension; in contrast, a ‘bilingual boost' of the curriculum was detected in students' use of social perspective articulation, the more sophisticated dimension. These findings suggest ELs may draw on their SPT skills when constructing written arguments, at least in the presence of WG’s sociocognitive and linguistic supports.

KEYWORDS:

• Perspective taking
• argumentative writing
• English learners
• sociocognitive skills
• bilingual advantage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘English learner’ (EL) is the term that is used in federal statutes to designate emergent bilingual students who are still in the process of developing the English language skills needed to access grade-level curriculum. In this article we use this term to signal that all students in this subsample held this designation through their school district. This terminological convention respects the possibility that the non-ELs in the study may also have been emergent bilinguals, just not currently receiving EL services.

2 Note that ‘non-ELs’ are not necessarily the same as monolinguals: students who have never received EL services may nevertheless be bilingual, possessing a range of proficiencies in a non-English language, from receptive knowledge to full oral and written proficiency. Some bilinguals arrive at school with sufficient English proficiency that they are not tested; others are assessed and receive the sometimes-used label of initially fluent English-proficient (IFEP; see Ragan and Lesaux 2006); yet others have placed out of EL status (though the label often continues to apply for two or up to four years after testing fully proficient, depending on the policy context).

3 Three of these four districts were located in one of the three states with some of the country’s strongest policy commitments to English monolingualism in schooling at the time (see Lillie 2016), hence the particular pressure within the RCT of WG to focus on literacy skills in English.

4 No student text in the study sample contained a single T-unit with both a clear instance of articulation and a prototypical act of positioning. However, a sample essay provided below does contain both types of SPT acts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Institute of Education Sciences: [Grant Number R305F100026].

Notes on contributors

Lisa B. Hsin

Lisa B. Hsin is currently a senior researcher at the American Institutes for Research and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education when this study was carried out. Her research is focused on understanding the mechanisms of effective teaching and learning of literacy skills, particularly in linguistically diverse classrooms.

Emily Phillips Galloway

Emily Phillips Galloway is assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College. Her quantitative and qualitative research explores the relationships between school-relevant language development and language expression and comprehension during middle childhood, focusing on linguistically and culturally minoritized learners.

Catherine E. Snow

Catherine E. Snow is the John and Elisabeth Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). Much of her recent work has been carried out in collaborations with educational practitioners and other researchers focused on understanding the most urgent problems of practice in literacy education, under the auspices of the SERP Institute and the Boston Public Schools.