Investigating Functional Grammar Analysis as an Instructional Tool for Meaning-Making with Fourth-Grade English Learners.

[摘要] According to the U.S. Department of Education, 9.1% (4.4 million) of the students in U.S. schools are learning English as a new language. Unfortunately, an achievement gap between English learners and their native English-speaking peers has persisted for years. It has become imperative for English learners to have equitable access to instruction that will advance their literacy development; mainstream classroom teachers must know how to meet the needs of linguistically diverse students.Literacy and language scholars suggest this requires adopting a linguistic orientation to reading comprehension instruction with which teachers can support English learners’ language development and content-area learning simultaneously. However, there are few empirical models to which teachers can turn to understand how this can occur, with what tools, and the challenges they might encounter. The present study aims to redress this gap. Stemming from Systemic Functional Linguistics theory, functional grammar analysis is a technique that may support teachers in bringing a linguistic orientation to meaning-making with text. This case study investigates one fourth-grade teacher’s enactment of a curriculum designed to support English learners’ meaning-making with a functional grammar approach. To study the teacher’s enactment over the course of a year, I employed qualitative data collection methods including field notes, video recordings, interview, and teacher artifacts. Data analysis drew on constant comparative methods and discourse analysis. This study demonstrates how functional grammar analysis provides a metalanguage with which teachers can facilitate discussions about key ideas that are central to the meanings in text. Through iterative readings of select text excerpts and visual representations of students’ emergent understandings, teachers can scaffold the analysis of word meanings and clauses to help students build causal relations while reading narrative texts and logical/referential relations while reading informational science texts. This study also reveals challenges, such as making metalanguage useful for analyzing characters and teaching both the individual stages of an argument and how the stages should ultimately cohere. For teachers and researchers interested in how we can promote the advancement of English learners’ literacy development, this study illustrates how a linguistic orientation to meaning-making can be translated into a literacy and language pedagogy.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] English language learners

[关键词] Elementary literacy and language arts;English language learners;Reading comprehension instruction;Systemic Functional Linguistics;Meaning-making through text-based discussions;Embedded case study;Education;Social Sciences;Educational Studies