Toward an Integrated Practice: Facilitating Peer Interactions to Support Language Development in Science

ABSTRACT

Dialogic, sense-making interactions are critical venues for language development and science learning, particularly for emergent multilingual students. Designing and facilitating such learning opportunities is pedagogically complex work and often requires significant shifts in practice. We report on a design study in which we partnered with 5th grade teachers to pilot inquiry-based science units designed for linguistically diverse classrooms. Through our analysis of classroom videos and teacher interviews, we surfaced ways teachers used the curriculum to create affordances for emergent multilingual students’ language use and development, as well as tensions and recurrent “missed affordances” that emerged in their practice.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ While some researchers (e.g., Escamilla, Hopewell, & Slavick, 2021; Soltero-González, Sparrow, Butvilofsky, Escamilla, & Hopewell, 2016) suggest that emergent multilingual students benefit from explicit instruction on language and cross-language connections, this instruction is embedded in purposeful uses of language. Our focus in this study is on how teachers create these purposeful opportunities for sense-making talk during content instruction.

² Students’ and teachers’ names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1502507. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.