California school systems and lay the foundation for substantive conversations about what educati... more California school systems and lay the foundation for substantive conversations about what education policies should be sustained and what might be improved to ensure increased opportunity and success for all students in California in the decades ahead. Getting Down to Facts II follows approximately a decade after the first Getting Down to Facts effort in 2007. This technical report is one of 36 in the set of Getting Down to Facts II studies that cover four main areas related to state education policy: student success, governance, personnel, and funding. Insights on Standards Implementation in California’s Schools Technical Report
ABSTRACT This study examined the effectiveness of an intentional versus an implicit approach to E... more ABSTRACT This study examined the effectiveness of an intentional versus an implicit approach to English oral language development in young children. A vocabulary intervention in science was developed using previous research on effective vocabulary and science instruction. Participants were 39 English-learning, bilingual, and monolingual English-speaking kindergartners from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds in 2 intact classrooms in an urban school in California. The 5-week-long intervention was implemented in 1 classroom where the students' regular classroom teacher taught 20 academic words from texts from the existing science curriculum in addition to the regular science curriculum. The control class received the regular science curriculum from the same teacher without the explicit vocabulary instruction. I used the Emergent Science Vocabulary Assessment, a picture test, to ascertain receptive vocabulary knowledge. I used the Conceptual Interviews on Scientific Understanding, a one-on-one interview protocol, to ascertain expressive knowledge of the words and scientific conceptual understanding related to the words. Findings showed that the intervention class learned more target words than the control class and that students who knew more of the vocabulary expressed their understanding of scientific concepts more effectively. I discuss instructional implications. (Contains 2 figures and 5 tables.)
Among the many approaches proposed for closing opportunity and achievement gaps is supporting stu... more Among the many approaches proposed for closing opportunity and achievement gaps is supporting student’s academic language development. Often, however, instructional approaches that are more familiar to teachers, such as helping students learn new vocabulary, are prioritized over more complex and less familiar explorations into disciplinary language, such as analyzing how a whole text is organized or identifying grammatical boundaries within sentences and connecting these analyses to disciplinary learning goals. In addition, the cultural and linguistic assets students bring to the classroom, valuable resources for learning, are often neglected in school, depriving students an opportunity to leverage and expand such resources. This article argues for an instructional approach that integrates disciplinary language and literacy teaching with culturally sustaining pedagogy. We synthesize research and theories on the approach and provide illustrative examples with elementary grades Hmong-American children.
... Conjunctions such as although are used by writers to create logic and cohesion in their wri... more ... Conjunctions such as although are used by writers to create logic and cohesion in their writing ... writers' awareness of their context and of their relationship with the readers who are part of ... The students in Huang's study wrote multiple drafts of their papers, and it was determined ...
This study examined the effectiveness of an intentional versus an implicit approach to English or... more This study examined the effectiveness of an intentional versus an implicit approach to English oral language development in young children.
Increasing calls for equity and accountability in U.S. secondary schools have led to intensified ... more Increasing calls for equity and accountability in U.S. secondary schools have led to intensified scrutiny of the academic literacy development of English learning (EL) adolescents. This paper discusses some of the challenges that EL secondary students face in achieving the language and literacy skills that will enable them to succeed in their mainstream classes, graduate from high school, and continue their academic careers into college. It presents an instructional approach used to work with students on academic language development and describes the language resources that students were able to take up following instruction. This paper suggests ways that secondary teachers can teach their EL students to use linguistic analysis in order to recognize the expectations of academic writing and produce texts that increasingly incorporate the linguistic features of academic language. # An English learning (EL) student who arrived in the U.S. in the seventh grade, 16-year-old Leticia felt that, regardless of her intellect and fluent conversational abilities in English, she was not considered intelligent by her teachers and native English-speaking peers based on her limited academic literacy proficiency in English. In her fourth year of schooling in the U.S., Leticia still found it difficult to fully comprehend grade-level textbooks in English and to effectively express her ideas in writing using an academic stance. Leticia perceived that her teachers incorrectly Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238-254 * Tel.
California school systems and lay the foundation for substantive conversations about what educati... more California school systems and lay the foundation for substantive conversations about what education policies should be sustained and what might be improved to ensure increased opportunity and success for all students in California in the decades ahead. Getting Down to Facts II follows approximately a decade after the first Getting Down to Facts effort in 2007. This technical report is one of 36 in the set of Getting Down to Facts II studies that cover four main areas related to state education policy: student success, governance, personnel, and funding. Insights on Standards Implementation in California’s Schools Technical Report
ABSTRACT This study examined the effectiveness of an intentional versus an implicit approach to E... more ABSTRACT This study examined the effectiveness of an intentional versus an implicit approach to English oral language development in young children. A vocabulary intervention in science was developed using previous research on effective vocabulary and science instruction. Participants were 39 English-learning, bilingual, and monolingual English-speaking kindergartners from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds in 2 intact classrooms in an urban school in California. The 5-week-long intervention was implemented in 1 classroom where the students' regular classroom teacher taught 20 academic words from texts from the existing science curriculum in addition to the regular science curriculum. The control class received the regular science curriculum from the same teacher without the explicit vocabulary instruction. I used the Emergent Science Vocabulary Assessment, a picture test, to ascertain receptive vocabulary knowledge. I used the Conceptual Interviews on Scientific Understanding, a one-on-one interview protocol, to ascertain expressive knowledge of the words and scientific conceptual understanding related to the words. Findings showed that the intervention class learned more target words than the control class and that students who knew more of the vocabulary expressed their understanding of scientific concepts more effectively. I discuss instructional implications. (Contains 2 figures and 5 tables.)
Among the many approaches proposed for closing opportunity and achievement gaps is supporting stu... more Among the many approaches proposed for closing opportunity and achievement gaps is supporting student’s academic language development. Often, however, instructional approaches that are more familiar to teachers, such as helping students learn new vocabulary, are prioritized over more complex and less familiar explorations into disciplinary language, such as analyzing how a whole text is organized or identifying grammatical boundaries within sentences and connecting these analyses to disciplinary learning goals. In addition, the cultural and linguistic assets students bring to the classroom, valuable resources for learning, are often neglected in school, depriving students an opportunity to leverage and expand such resources. This article argues for an instructional approach that integrates disciplinary language and literacy teaching with culturally sustaining pedagogy. We synthesize research and theories on the approach and provide illustrative examples with elementary grades Hmong-American children.
... Conjunctions such as although are used by writers to create logic and cohesion in their wri... more ... Conjunctions such as although are used by writers to create logic and cohesion in their writing ... writers' awareness of their context and of their relationship with the readers who are part of ... The students in Huang's study wrote multiple drafts of their papers, and it was determined ...
This study examined the effectiveness of an intentional versus an implicit approach to English or... more This study examined the effectiveness of an intentional versus an implicit approach to English oral language development in young children.
Increasing calls for equity and accountability in U.S. secondary schools have led to intensified ... more Increasing calls for equity and accountability in U.S. secondary schools have led to intensified scrutiny of the academic literacy development of English learning (EL) adolescents. This paper discusses some of the challenges that EL secondary students face in achieving the language and literacy skills that will enable them to succeed in their mainstream classes, graduate from high school, and continue their academic careers into college. It presents an instructional approach used to work with students on academic language development and describes the language resources that students were able to take up following instruction. This paper suggests ways that secondary teachers can teach their EL students to use linguistic analysis in order to recognize the expectations of academic writing and produce texts that increasingly incorporate the linguistic features of academic language. # An English learning (EL) student who arrived in the U.S. in the seventh grade, 16-year-old Leticia felt that, regardless of her intellect and fluent conversational abilities in English, she was not considered intelligent by her teachers and native English-speaking peers based on her limited academic literacy proficiency in English. In her fourth year of schooling in the U.S., Leticia still found it difficult to fully comprehend grade-level textbooks in English and to effectively express her ideas in writing using an academic stance. Leticia perceived that her teachers incorrectly Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (2007) 238-254 * Tel.
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