Secondary Content-area Teachers Research Articles

Linguistically responsive teacher identity construction through reflections on sociocultural pedagogical practices: Collaborating with secondary content area teachers of emergent bilinguals

AbstractThis article shares findings from the implementation of an ongoing National Professional Development (NPD) project that advances second language literacy and biliteracy in secondary content areas. The project is part of a research–practice partnership between a large public university and two school districts in south Texas that engages in‐service secondary school teachers seeking additional certification in English as a Second Language or Bilingual Education. Project activities adapt linguistically responsive theoretical and research perspectives to impact secondary teachers' knowledge, dispositions/beliefs, and practices. Analysis examines how secondary in‐service content‐area teachers reflect, narrate, and enact their professional identities as linguistically responsive teachers of emergent bilinguals (EBs) through professional learning activities. Findings describe how participants negotiated their identities as teachers of linguistically responsive instruction for EBs, as demonstrated through their engagement of reflective practices, digital language stories, and enactments of sociocultural pedagogical practices.

Becoming a Teacher of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners: A Future Content-area Teacher’s Professional Identity Construction through Online Coursework

In this exploratory qualitative study, we applied Clarke’s (2009) framework of ethical self-formation (substance, authority sources, self-practices, telos) to data collected from one pre-service teacher’s completed assignments in an online course at a Hispanic-serving university in the Southwestern U.S. This course was dedicated to helping pre-service secondary content-area teachers develop the knowledge, skills, and experience necessary to provide effective instruction for emergent bilinguals (EBs). Findings revealed examples of how the four axes of the participant’s identity manifested in her coursework and how they dynamically interacted. By engaging in reflective practices, she developed an increased awareness of her own sociocultural-linguistic identity and gained a better understanding of EB education and advocacy. Implications are discussed for how teacher preparation programs can prepare teachers to enter the field with a stronger sense of who they are and who they want to be as future teachers and advocates for more culturally and linguistically responsive educational practices.

Bringing a social semiotic perspective to secondary teacher education in the United States

Recent economic, demographic, and policy shifts in the United States are making EAP practice increasingly relevant to the preparation of secondary content-area teachers, particularly those serving students labeled English language learners (ELLs). This article describes how some teacher educators in the United States are using Hallidayan principles and practices like a model of text/context dynamics, the concepts of genre and register, functional metalanguage, and genre pedagogy to support secondary pre-service teachers in conceptualizing language teaching and learning in ways that better prepare them to teach ELLs in the content areas. Based on a mixed methods study of this approach, this article highlights two longitudinal findings: (1) studying social semiotic theory and practice facilitated shifts in how secondary content-area teachers conceptualized language teaching and learning in ways that remained relatively stable over time; and (2) participants’ developing knowledge of Hallidayan concepts and pedagogies influenced how they assessed student writing and attempted to incorporate explicit teaching of disciplinary English into their content teaching, though some promising practices regressed over time. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the design of future EAP coursework for secondary content-area teachers that supports reflection and revised pedagogies in the long-term.

Expert Secondary Content-Area Teachers’ Pedagogical Schemas for Teaching Literacy to Students With Learning Disabilities

Secondary content-area teachers seldom use research-based practices for students with learning disabilities (LD), and prior research indicates they often conceptualize instruction in ways that align poorly with research about effective instruction for students with LD. However, prior research has focused on typical secondary content-area teachers, and we know little about how expert secondary content-area teachers think about instruction for students with LD. We used hermeneutic phenomenological methods to explore expert content-area teachers’ pedagogical schemas for teaching literacy to secondary students with LD. We found teachers’ pedagogical schemas were shaped by their goals for students and the role they believed learning difficulties played in achieving those goals. This led them to integrate literacy and disciplinary instruction to support students’ learning. The findings extend and support existing research on teachers’ expertise, and have implications for future efforts to develop secondary content-area teachers’ expertise in teaching students with LD.

역사 및 물리 교사의 텍스트 읽기 양상 비교를 통한 학문 문식성 개념의 교육적 적용 방안 탐색1)

Despite the consensus that reading is a fundamental skill for the learning of content areas, there are two different perspectives to enhance secondary students’ reading skills and strategies. One the one hand, a content area literacy approach assumes that reading skills are generalizable and transferable across content areas. On the other hand, a disciplinary approach emphasizes the differences of epistemology, vocabulary, knowledge, and discourse conventions between disciplines. Although a variety of theoretical and practical studies are investigated for the experts’ literacy skills such as historians and scientists , there is still lack of research on how secondary content area teachers perform when they read and write texts. This study focused on how five history and five physics teachers read and thought the disciplinary and non-disciplinary texts through verbal protocols and interviews. Overall, the teachers demonstrated thoughtful and deliberate reading behaviors during reading a text belonged to their discipline. However, such reading behaviors seemed to disappear when they read other text not belonged to their discipline. This finding was interpreted as evidence to demonstrate that disciplinary literacy played a role in comprehension. Despite the overall reading tendency, individual differences of reading were also identified. Therefore, the readers were categorized according to their levels of deep reading: (1) expert reader, (2) active reader, and (3) passive reader in the same discipline, and (4) active reader and (5) passive reader outside of the discipline. After the analyses of the results, the concept of disciplinary literacy and its educational application in the classroom are discussed.

Promoting Content Knowledge of Secondary Students With Learning Disabilities Through Comprehension Strategies

Students with learning disabilities struggle with basic comprehension skills across all content areas. By pairing comprehension strategies with content instruction, secondary content area teachers can strengthen students’ reading skills and content knowledge. This article provides an overview of two comprehension strategies, anticipation guides and double entry journals, that align with research-based recommendations in adolescent literacy and that can be employed across the primary content areas (i.e., English language arts, social/global studies, mathematics, and science).

An Exploratory Case Study of One Early Career Teacher’s Evolving Teaching Practice in Northern Canada

This paper focuses upon the case of one early career teacher, Don, a participant in a longitudinal study examining the transfer of learning about literacy practices from pre-service teacher education to the classrooms of secondary content area teachers. We followed Don from his B. Ed. program into his first two years of teaching in an Indigenous community in northern Canada, with a focus on how his pedagogical content knowledge and his culturally relevant pedagogical practices developed. This case traces Don’s journey from his goals and plans at the end of his teacher education program, through his feelings of uncertainty near the end of his first year of teaching, to his growing confidence in his second year of teaching.

Writing in the Secondary-Level Disciplines: a Systematic Review of Context, Cognition, and Content

Situated within the historical and current state of writing and adolescent literacy research, this systematic literature review screened 3504 articles to determine the prevalent themes in current research on writing tasks in content-area classrooms. Each of the 3504 studies was evaluated and coded using seven methodological quality indicators. The qualitative synthesis of studies is organized by the overarching categories of context, cognition, and content. The studies are further grouped by relevant themes to explore how the incorporation of writing tasks into content-area instruction benefits the secondary students’ content-area learning and knowledge acquisition. Primary themes include the elements of explicit strategy and inquiry-based instruction, the impact of prewriting models, the role of metacognition and journaling, and the writing-related implications for content-area assessment. Recommendations for future research are offered. Additionally, practical implications for secondary content-area teachers are presented.

Interactive Writing in the Disciplines: A Common Core Approach to Disciplinary Writing in Middle and High School

In this article we argue that interactive writing (IW), an approach to writing instruction, is uniquely supportive of secondary content-area teachers working to integrate meaningful writing instruction without sacrificing time or attention to content. Drawing on research and our experiences with IW in middle school settings, we explain the roots of IW and its potential to support powerful writing instruction in the disciplines because of its emphasis on externalizing thought, negotiating meaning, and teaching conventions of writing and language in the context of real writing.

Multiplying the Effect of Professional Development: Teachers Training Teachers

This article describes the effects of participation and collaboration in an in‐service professional development project for secondary content area teachers referred to as turnaround training. The participating teachers were experienced, skilled practitioners in their content areas (math, science, social studies, or English language arts) who were challenged with meeting the needs of students who were learning English as well as course content. The goal of the professional development project was to improve student performance by enhancing the skills of the secondary teachers. The authors found that the training project enhanced the technical skills of participants for working with English language learners. Furthermore, these newly minted English as a second language (ESL) “experts” negotiated their professional identities as they translated what they learned about multicultural competence, second language acquisition, and teaching ESL into turnaround training sessions for their colleagues.

Preparing Mainstream Secondary Content-Area Teachers to Facilitate English Language Learners’ Development of Academic Language

Preparing Mainstream Secondary Content-Area Teachers to Facilitate English Language Learners’ Development of Academic Language

Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content- Area Literacy

In this article, Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan argue that "disciplinary literacy" — advanced literacy instruction embedded within content-area classes such as math, science, and social studies — should be a focus of middle and secondary school settings. Moving beyond the oft-cited "every teacher a teacher of reading" philosophy that has historically frustrated secondary content-area teachers, the Shanahans present data collected during the first two years of a study on disciplinary literacy that reveal how content experts and secondary content teachers read disciplinary texts, make use of comprehension strategies, and subsequently teach those strategies to adolescent readers. Preliminary findings suggest that experts from math, chemistry, and history read their respective texts quite differently; consequently, both the content-area experts and secondary teachers in this study recommend different comprehension strategies for work with adolescents. This study not only has implications for which comprehension strategies might best fit particular disciplinary reading tasks, but also suggests how students may be best prepared for the reading, writing, and thinking required by advanced disciplinary coursework.

Reading Comprehension Strategies in Secondary Content-Area Classrooms

AS STUDENTS move up through the grades, the academic demands on them increase, and a great many of those increases come in the form of reading. While basic literacy is certainly a problem for some students, they are in the minority. Most of our middle and high school students can read--if by that we understand the ability to decode text. But the academic tasks students encounter in the upper elementary grades, and even more so in secondary school, involve a great deal of in support of learning new and complicated content. As Michael Kamil has reported, the ability to comprehend the expository texts in content-area textbooks is critical to students' academic success.(1) Yet as the academic demands on our secondary students become more complicated, explicit instruction diminishes.(2) The academic importance of instruction in comprehension is clear. Students who are taught such comprehension strategies as predicting, questioning, and summarizing improve their comprehension scores on both experimenter-constructed tests and standardized tests.(3) So it seems clear that secondary teachers can help students become proficient readers of academic texts if they arm them with a variety of comprehension strategies. Of course, for many decades literacy researchers have called on content-area teachers to provide explicit instruction in secondary classrooms. Cries of every teacher a teacher of reading are anything but new. However, the message sometimes seems to have fallen on deaf ears, and there is much room for improvement with regard to literacy integration in math, science, social studies, and the fine arts. Over the course of the 2005-06 academic year, I set out to examine the extent to which content-area secondary teachers included explicit comprehension strategies in regular classroom instruction. I examined the instructional practices of four content-area teachers in middle school and four content-area teachers in high school and sought answers to two broad questions: * To what degree do the teachers incorporate comprehension strategies in their science and social studies classrooms? (That is, what percentage of instructional time do they spend on integrating literacy strategies in their classrooms?) * Which comprehension strategies are most frequently used in middle and high school science and social studies classrooms? I collected data from 2,400 minutes of direct classroom observations in eight middle and high school science and social studies classrooms. Acting as a nonparticipant observer, I coded the instruction I observed according to whether it was judged to be comprehension instruction or non-comprehension instruction. While I began my study under no illusions that literacy integration would be extensive in these classrooms, I was surprised by how little instruction in comprehension I actually saw. In a total of 40 hours of classroom observations, these secondary content-area teachers allotted an average of just 82 minutes to teaching, explaining, modeling, scaffolding, and assisting students in using effective comprehension strategies. That's just over 3% of instructional time devoted to helping these adolescent readers make meaning of text by asking and answering questions, summarizing, applying fix-up strategies when comprehension broke down, examining text structures, using graphic organizers, predicting, and clarifying. Furthermore, the comprehension instruction I did observe was limited in scope: the most heavily used strategies to support comprehension were asking literal questions and having students write summaries of text. What might these findings mean? First, because middle school and high school curricula emphasize breadth over depth, teachers are likely to see their major instructional responsibility as covering their particular content in preparation for state tests. …

Sociocultural influences in content area teachers' selection and use of multiple texts

The purpose of this study was to explore how three secondary content area teachers used and viewed multiple texts in their classrooms. A sociocultural perspective guided data collection, including: observation, interviews, and collection of text‐related school documents, such as assignments and evidence of texts used during instruction. The data were analyzed in order to answer the following question: How do secondary content area teachers use and view multiple texts in their classrooms? Findings suggest that while the three teachers used multiple texts in the classroom, they had different levels of use and purposes in their instruction that can be identified in terms of a continuum. Furthermore, use of multiple texts is complex. Each teacher hoped to enhance student interest and engagement, which is difficult while attending to standards and assessment.

Every Teacher a Literacy Teacher? An Analysis of the Literacy-related Messages in Secondary Methods Textbooks

Every teacher a reading teacher has been the call of educators who have made their life work the promotion of reading and writing for middle and high school students (Gray, 1925; Herber, 1970; Ruddell, 1997; Vacca & Vacca, 2002). State departments of education in many states in the United States require secondary content-area teachers to complete course work in content-area reading and writing in order to obtain a teaching license (Romine, McKenna, & Robinson, 1996), seemingly to support this notion that every content-area teacher should also be a teacher of reading and writing. Although these requirements may be changing to accommodate other state requirements (Stewart & O'Brien, 2001), course work in content-area literacy remains common. Instructors with expertise in adolescent and content-area literacy have provided preservice courses to inform secondary teachers of methods to infuse literacy instruction with content instruction in ways that strengthen students' content-area learning and promote general literacy development. However, despite the slogans, the legislation, and the coursework, limited instruction in literacy occurs in secondary content-area classrooms (Eldridge & Muller, 1986, in Alvermann & Moore, 1991; Ratekin, Simpson, Alvermann, & Dishner, 1985).

Content Reading and ESL Students

Many districts in the United States and Canada have majority ESL populations. ESL students in secondary schools are enrolled in content classes such as Social Studies where the ability to read and comprehend English is vital. Reading is such a vital skill that many states in the United States require secondary teachers to take courses in reading methodology. Farrell and Cirrincione (1984), for instance, found that 63% of state agencies required all content teachers to have a course in reading methods while 10% required only teachers of English/language arts to have such a course. Only 14 states did not require a reading methods course for content teachers. It has also been observed that content teachers' attitudes toward teaching reading has improved considerably over the last decade or so (Stieglitz, 1983). However, as Ratekin, Simpson, Alvermann, and Dishner (1985) note " ... changing teachers' knowledge and attitudes about content reading strategies does not guarantee they will use those strategies in the classroom" (p. 432). An analysis of observations ofeight classes-math, science, social studies, English/language arts-at grades 8 and 11, led the authors to conclude that content teachers use one textbook with their class rather than a variety, information in the textbooks is the same as that of lectures, and the use of adjunct aids is extremely low. Content area teachers do not incorporate content reading methods into their daily lessons. An important area to be addressed concerns ESL students. Do content teachers modify their instruction relative to the needs of students whose first language is not English? This study was conducted in order to discover more about the nature of ESL reading instruction in content area classrooms. Procedure. A questionnaire was designed containing 26 items. This paper reports on the responses of secondary content-area teachers who were asked to: 1) "Describe carefully how you instruct ESL students in your classroom," and 2) "How could ESL students be better prepared to meet the requirements of your content classes?" Subjects. Five hundred subjects were randomly selected by computer from the membership roles ofthe British Columbia Teachers' Federation (BCTF) and the British Columbia Association of Teachers of English as an Additional Language (TEAL). Each of the approximately 30,000 teachers in the province is required by legislative .mandate to belong to BCTF while the TEAL membership consists of individuals who are interested in ESL matters. Questionnaires were mailed to the 500