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.

KEYWORDS:

• Language learning tasks
• classroom discourse
• academic literacy
• systemic functional linguistics
• third-year Spanish courses
• blended learning

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank ‘Dra Clemente’, without whose support, encouragement, and expert modelling this manuscript could not have come to fruition. ¡Mil gracias! We would also like to thank the various peer reviewers for their suggestions on improving the manuscript, and give special thanks to the participants in our study for helping us see the world through their eyes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Jesse Gleason http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7980-4500

Tammy Slater http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9504-7922

Notes

1. Also referred to as content-based language teaching or content-and-language-integrated learning.

2. Also referred to as advanced literacy (Christie, 2002), academic language (Crosson, Matsumura, Correnti, & Arlotta-Guerrero, 2012), Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency, or CALP (Cummins, 2013), and the language of schooling (Schleppegrell, 2004).

3. All names except that of the researcher/co-author of the study are pseudonyms, which do not necessarily reflect the cultural heritage of the participants.

4. Appendix A summarises data from the end-of-semester course evaluations.

5. Appendix B summarises students’ exceedingly positive comments about the course and instructor taken from interview excerpts.

6. Mohan and Beckett (2003) distinguish a functional from a formal recast in that while the latter’s main purpose is grammatical error repair, the former ‘paraphrases meaning in discourse and thus raises the question of relations between form and meaning in discourse’ (p. 424).

7. Lexical density is defined as the number of lexical items over the number of clauses; higher lexical density has been shown to occur more frequently in advanced language (Veel, 1997).

8. Although some research argues no use of L1 in the language classroom, other work shows that some L1 use plays an important role (Brooks & Donato, 1994).

9. According to Mohan (1986), the knowledge structure of classification is about grouping items based on their similarities or differences, while the knowledge structure of evaluation is about evaluating, judging, or appreciating.

10. Classification is depicted here with bold text and evaluation with underlined text, as consistent with this type of research (e.g. Mohan & Slater, 2006; Slater & Mohan, 2010).

11. According to SFL researchers, construction and joint construction of genres or subgenres are two of the necessary steps in helping students to write effectively (Christie & Martin, 2007; Martin, 2009; Veel, 2006).

12. In this example, bold text indicates the declarative mood, underlined text depicts the interrogative mood, and text in bold italics indicates the use of the imperative mood.

13. The mood network includes options such as the declarative, interrogative, and imperative moods (Derewianka, 2001). Imperatives are monoglossic in that they do not provide alternatives for alternative actions (Martin & White, 2005), whereas declarative and interrogative open up the conversation to multiple voices and alternatives.