Papers by Mary Schleppegrell
Reading in secondary content areas: A language-based pedagogy
Journal of Literacy Research, Sep 1, 2006
Developing academic, or school-based, literacy poses a significant challenge for many students, b... more Developing academic, or school-based, literacy poses a significant challenge for many students, because the language through which academic subjects are presented is markedly different from the social language that students use in everyday ordinary life. This article focuses on one aspect of academic language, the functions of nouns and nominal structures in constructing knowledge in different subject areas and the challenges they present for comprehension of academic texts. Using a functional linguistics framework and analyzing written texts from language arts, science, and history, at elementary and secondary levels, we illustrate the ways nominal expressions expand the amount of information in a clause, establish and maintain reference, and enable information to be distilled and further expanded. We also show how the semantic features of the nominal elements vary in different academic registers, as texts introduce grammatical "participants" of different types according to the purposes of the text. We suggest that the notion of linguistic register offers a means of transcending debates about academic language, enabling a pedagogy that can raise students' consciousness about specific grammatical resources and how those resources function to construct knowledge in the language of schooling.
Supporting a Language-Focused Approach to Close Reading
Voices from the Middle
Reflective Literacy
ABSTRACT: Classrooms around the world are becoming more multilingual and teachers in all subject ... more ABSTRACT: Classrooms around the world are becoming more multilingual and teachers in all subject areas are faced with new challenges in enabling learners ’ academic language development without losing focus on content. These challenges require new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between language and content as well as new pedagogies that incorporate a dual focus on language and content in subject matter instruction. This article describes three professional development contexts in the U.S., where teachers have engaged in language analysis based on functional linguistics (for example, Halliday & Hasan, 1989; Christie, 1989) that has given them new insights into both content and learning processes. In these contexts, teachers in history classrooms with English Language Learners and teachers of languages other than English in classrooms with heritage speakers needed support to develop students ’ academic language development in a second language. The functional linguistics met...
Discussion in Diverse Middle School Social Studies Classrooms: Promoting All Students’ Participation in the Disciplinary Work of Inquiry
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2021
Background/Context: Although calls for rich discussion and argumentation about disciplinary texts... more Background/Context: Although calls for rich discussion and argumentation about disciplinary texts and content are frequent, research indicates that in classrooms such discussions are rare. When discussions do happen, few students tend to participate. Purpose/Focus of Study: We look to exemplar teachers’ classrooms where a range of ethnically, racially, linguistically, and academically diverse students participated substantively in discussions throughout social studies inquiries to understand what those teachers do to support broad and substantive student participation in discussion, knowing that discussion promotes student learning. Research Design: Using video recordings of class sessions, we conducted discourse analysis and used case study methods to examine classroom discourse over 20 days of inquiry across an academic year within the context of a larger, design-based research project. Findings: We identify how two teachers build toward and facilitate three types of disciplinary,...
Student-teacher interaction in CLIL and non-CLIL elementary education
Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education, 2021
This study analyzes interaction in a primary school science classroom. We compare the verbal scaf... more This study analyzes interaction in a primary school science classroom. We compare the verbal scaffolding strategies used by a teacher during lessons from the same instructional unit taught in CLIL (English) and regular (Spanish) contexts. Results show that although there was no difference in the amount of information (‘content’) made available to students through the interactions, different verbal strategies were used (precision, justification and recall were more frequent in Spanish and exemplification in English) and that students were more active in engaging with science knowledge in the Spanish context. We discuss these findings in relation to the level of abstraction the teacher supported in interacting about science in the regular session, with implications for supporting children in learning both content and language in CLIL contexts.
The Peace Corps and Non‐Formal Teacher Education: Factors for Success
Teaching Education, 1993
Series Editor's Foreword
Language Learning, Mar 1, 2012
At Last: The Meaning in Grammar
The ESP Journal, 1985
This paper presents an application of the theory of comprehensionbased teaching to materials deve... more This paper presents an application of the theory of comprehensionbased teaching to materials development in the English for Special Purposes context. The program described here, called English for Economists, was developed for Egyptian economists participating in a joint research project with Americans. It was designed to build on students' existing reading skills and their background knowledge of economics in order to improve their listening comprehension and writing skills through exercises which provided them with comprehensible input for acquisition. Essential elements of the program were the utilization of materials derived from the research projects in which the students were engaged and a lesson format which focused on development of the receptive skills. Features which contributed most to program success are evaluated and the applicability of this approach to other ESP contexts is discussed.
Journal of Pragmatics, 1997
This response to Goatly (1996) r,eviews his and Halliday and Martin's (1993) perspectives on how ... more This response to Goatly (1996) r,eviews his and Halliday and Martin's (1993) perspectives on how nominalization affects the vcay we construe the world. Research on the language of environmental education is then reported, which indicates that nominalization has a negative impact on middle school students' understanding of environmental issues. However, expressing the nominalization as a full claase also fails to provide information about social agency when linguistic agents are expressed through the generic and indeterminate use of people or human. An informative representation of social agency is the more critical issue in discussion of the relationship between language and ecology, at least for pedagogical contexts.
Teacher Research through Dialogic Inquiry
The Canadian Modern Language Review, 1997
As teachers engage in research to improve their teaching practice and inform their pedagogical pr... more As teachers engage in research to improve their teaching practice and inform their pedagogical programs, they need appropriate tools for collecting and analyzing data. This paper shows how dialogic inquiry through problem posing is a tool for teacher research in the interpretive tradition which helps teachers develop a richer knowledge base regarding students' backgrounds, motivations, cultures, and the strategies they use to learn English. In addition, dialogic inquiry can inform curriculum and materials development by providing teachers with information about students' responses to potential curriculum topics. The process of engaging students in structured, open-ended inquiry provides data which teachers can analyze from both content and linguistic perspectives. Outlined are the steps in dialogic inquiry and examples of how teachers have used it to inform their classroom practice and improve their curricula.
How SFL can inform writing instruction: The grammar of expository …
Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) offers useful tools for analyzing texts and identifying gra... more Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) offers useful tools for analyzing texts and identifying grammatical and lexical elements that are functional for achieving a particular text’s purposes. This article analyzes an English language learner’s expository essay, demonstrating how the tools of SFL can illuminate areas of difficulty and needed growth. Through textual, interpersonal, and ideational analyses, it identifies elements of the academic register that are functional for the essay writing task and examines how this particular student makes grammatical and lexical choices that approximate that register. The article provides a set of questions that teachers can ask students to use to analyze their own writing from a SFL perspective
Grammar for writing: Academic language and the ELD Standards
Report for University of California Linguistic …
Final report for UCLMRI grant #01-02G-D, “Grammatical and discourse features of the target genres... more Final report for UCLMRI grant #01-02G-D, “Grammatical and discourse features of the target genres in California's English Language Development (ELD) Standards.” ... This report was supported by a grant from the University of California Linguistic Minority Research ...
Problem-Posing in Teacher Education
TESOL Journal
Grammar as resource: Writing a description
Research in the Teaching of English
This article presents a functional grammatical analysis of the writing that 128 sev- enth and eig... more This article presents a functional grammatical analysis of the writing that 128 sev- enth and eighth grade students produced in response to their science teacher's directive to describe a picture. It identifies the register elements of this task, demon- strating that relational verbs, ...
ERIC digest
The greatest obstacle to older adult language learning is the doubt--in the minds of both learner... more The greatest obstacle to older adult language learning is the doubt--in the minds of both learner and teacher--that older adults can learn a new language. Most people assume that "the younger the better" applies in language learning. However, many studies have shown that this is ...
Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 2015
Reviewed by Mary Schleppegrell Ruqaiya Hasan's research is based in an understanding of society a... more Reviewed by Mary Schleppegrell Ruqaiya Hasan's research is based in an understanding of society as 'the condition for language' (p. 232). The subtitle of this third volume of her collected works draws attention to its main theme, the social nature of meaningmaking and the role of education as a socialization process. Her arguments here help us understand how 'the power of language is simply a potential', and that its meanings come when it gets 'semiotic energy' from a 'socially positioned speaker' (p. 230) who in every case is also ideologically positioned to understand and respond in particular ways. Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and Bernstein's sociology provide the theoretical foundations for her inquiries. SFL is itself a description of how social uses of language relate to the internal systems of language, putting langue and parole in a dialectic relationship. The SFL grammar is distinctive in linking language and context by identifying those features of the context that the language inevitably activates, construing the field, tenor, and mode of discourse as speakers make particular linguistic choices that evoke socially consequential meanings. The fact that language systems and language use have evolved together and continue to co-evolve means that language has the potential to meet all speakers' needs for all facets of social life, continually evolving as the meanings to be made change over time and context. As Hasan points out, this perspective argues that the 'social' cannot be just tacked onto a linguistic theory, but needs to be intrinsic to the theory of language. Several of the chapters in this volume illustrate how SFL analyses enable us to recognize social meanings in language use.
Language Learning Strategies for Peace Corps Volunteers
... Record Details. Full-Text Availability Options: ERIC Full Text (490K). Click on any of the li... more ... Record Details. Full-Text Availability Options: ERIC Full Text (490K). Click on any of the links below to perform a new search. ERIC #: ED348877. Title: Language Learning Strategies for Peace Corps Volunteers. Authors: Schleppegrell, Mary; Oxford, Rebecca. ...
Discussion in Diverse Middle School Social Studies Classrooms: Promoting All Students’ Participation in the Disciplinary Work of Inquiry
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2021
Background/Context: Although calls for rich discussion and argumentation about disciplinary texts... more Background/Context: Although calls for rich discussion and argumentation about disciplinary texts and content are frequent, research indicates that in classrooms such discussions are rare. When discussions do happen, few students tend to participate. Purpose/Focus of Study: We look to exemplar teachers’ classrooms where a range of ethnically, racially, linguistically, and academically diverse students participated substantively in discussions throughout social studies inquiries to understand what those teachers do to support broad and substantive student participation in discussion, knowing that discussion promotes student learning. Research Design: Using video recordings of class sessions, we conducted discourse analysis and used case study methods to examine classroom discourse over 20 days of inquiry across an academic year within the context of a larger, design-based research project. Findings: We identify how two teachers build toward and facilitate three types of disciplinary,...
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Papers by Mary Schleppegrell