What Teachers Need to Know About Language

Lily Wong Fillmore and Catherine E. Snow

Prologue

A decade and a half ago, we found ourselves together at a conference at which many of the talks were given in Catalan. Unable to follow them, we withdrew to a shady spot where we started to chat about a shared concern — that many teachers had insufficient access to information about language structure, language analysis, bilingualism, and literacy to be able to optimize their instruction or maximize their contributions to discussions about language policy. In response to our concern, we sketched out the text of "What Teachers Need to Know About Language," producing in effect a long list of topics that we argued deserved more attention in teacher education and professional development. We presented those topics in the chapter that opened the previous edition of this work. We return now, some 16 years later, to the same challenge, but with the recognition that the formulation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) (National Governors Association, 2010), the move toward requiring students to read more complex text and to produce argumentative writing, and the persistent failure of policies for educating language minority students have made it both more urgent and more difficult.

In the meantime, though, we think the field has made considerable progress in defining, if not resolving, the challenge. For example, there is now general recognition that adolescents need ongoing instruction in reading to help them cope with the academic language and the discipline-specific discourse forms they encounter in their texts. The study of academic language, which was nascent when we wrote the first version of this chapter and which we referred to only glancingly, has now generated data, theory, tools, assessments, and instructional practices. Researchers have specified discipline-specific features of text, emphasizing that even good basic readers need to learn things about reading texts in history, science, or math that they can't learn from reading narratives.

These advances in the field present even more compelling demands for teachers to be knowledgeable about language than those we addressed when we first wrote on this topic. How might this kind of knowledge contribute to better instruction? We offer an example of linguistically informed teaching to which we will return throughout this chapter. It stands in counterpoint to efforts that respond to the need for more attention to language with explicit teaching of forms (teaching lists of academic vocabulary words, teaching about morphological derivations, teaching the discourse elements of an argument) unhinged from function. The best way to teach language forms, we contend, is to present them in text, where they display their functions, and then to explore with students what the functions are and how the forms fulfill them.

This process is demonstrated here by a teacher working with a group of five third graders who are recently arrived English learners. During this 20-minute session, the teacher takes them on a close walk through a sentence from a science text their class has been reading.

OK — so let me read this first — I'll read it twice — and after that you can read it as many times as you need to before you write down what you think this sentence is saying: The wires behind your wall that carry electricity to lights and appliances are made of metal, usually copper.

After reading the sentence, which is written on chart paper, the teacher hands the students some Post-it notes on which they are to jot down their initial understanding of the sentence, a relatively complex one with multiple modifiers (behind your wall and that carry electricity to lights and appliances) in its subject noun phrase. While the words are neither difficult nor especially technical, some are nonetheless unfamiliar to students who have had only a year or so of exposure to English. Over the course of this short lesson, the teacher guides the students in a deconstruction of the sentence, helping them figure out what each part means and how it relates to the other parts of the sentence.

"What's the subject of this sentence? What is this sentence about?" she asks. "About wires," a student says. The teacher nods, "This sentence is about the wires (pointing to the first two words on the chart). Now we are going to find out what the rest of the sentence is telling us about the wires." The students, guided by their teacher, work out the meaning and function of each part of the sentence, but stumble when they arrive at the word appliances. A student reads: "that carry electricity to lights and uh — uh-pleyshus." "Appliances," the teacher repeats. "I can tell by the fact that you had trouble saying that word that it's probably not a word you are familiar with. Does anyone know what appliances are?"

The students do not. The teacher guesses that the students might also have difficulty understanding other words that make up the sentence, even ones they read correctly. The word appliances presented a special challenge — it denotes a category of household equipment or devices that serves particular functions, and that, in this case, is powered by electricity. The teacher could have simply said just that and been done with defining it, or have had on hand a chart depicting such devices. But she does something far more beneficial: She engages her students in constructing a conceptual understanding of appliances as a categorical term. She guides them to think about devices that are powered by electricity. The students begin by suggesting buses and cell phones as examples. After distinguishing between battery power and the electrical power from the wires that the sentence...