Tracking movement toward academic language in multilingual classrooms

Abstract

Learning history depends heavily on language and cultural references that students supposedly already know. Understanding how young people from multilingual backgrounds develop language in content area classrooms can help us better assist students to achieve higher levels of literacy needed to understand discipline-specific knowledge. Using the conceptual framework and analytic tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1994) we analyze the changes in lexico-grammatical and discourse-semantic choices in learners' responses to two primary source history texts as indexes of academic language development. The data comes from a larger study that explored the integration of text analysis to history lessons focusing on primary sources and documenting the impact of the intervention on students' disciplinary literacy development. In this paper, we focus on the configuration of linguistic indices that serve to track academic language development. The analysis shows changes in students' linguistic choices that realize ways of reasoning and arguing typical of history. The findings show that it is important to document academic language development in qualitative ways that capture the complexity of development considering constellations of linguistic features and how they function to serve discipline-specific ways of making meaning.