Equipping all teachers to teach disciplinary language: Toward a developmental continuum in teacher education

Abstract

AbstractEquipping all teachers to teach multilingual learners disciplinary language— content‐specific ways of knowing through language— is an unresolved teacher education challenge. This challenge is particularly acute for teacher educators who serve general education teachers, because these teachers typically lack the specialized language preparation or multilingual skills of TESOL or bilingual educators. Accordingly, this brief article presents an emerging framework that conceptualizes how teachers can learn to teach disciplinary language, drawing from scholarship on teacher learning, pedagogical language knowledge, and language of history. Then, it illustrates how one history teacher learned to teach disciplinary language over a 9‐year period from preservice preparation and novice years to a later role as a mentor teacher. This illustrative example supports prior research suggesting three teacher learning prerequisites are essential to improve instruction for MLs: consistent focus on disciplinary literacy, inquiry into practice, and school‐university collaboration. The article concludes by proposing a developmental continuum in equipping teachers to teach disciplinary language through preservice, novice, and mastery phases with differentiated supports and opportunities. This article seeks to contribute a descriptive framework that teacher educators and researchers can pilot, study, and adapt to advance efforts to equip all teachers to teach multilingual learners disciplinary language.