This work would not have been possible without the financial support of the Bonsal Applied Education Research Award, which funded data collection efforts, nor the contributions of the teachers who completed the surveys and interviews. It was also helped immensely by the emotional and intellectual support of my cohort: Samantha Marshall, Alexis McBride, and Lauren Vogelstein. I am grateful to all members of my dissertation committee who provided me with extensive personal and professional guidance: Dr.
Mancilla-Martinez, Thank you all for your generosity with your time, your thoughtful feedback, and your helpful guidance. Finally, I thank my family: my husband and best friend, Charles David McClain, who assured me that I could do it even when it seemed impossible; to my sister, Emily Brown Seal, who walked with me through the darkness; and to my children, Samson and Vera, who reminded me that learning is a source of joy. BICS Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills CALP Cognitive Academic Language Skills CCSS Common Core State Standards.
Introduction
Teachers filter their opinions about academic language teaching through their language ideologies – or socially constructed knowledge and belief systems (Ahearn, 2012), which they often are. Therefore, learning to implement equitable academic language teaching may require 'unlearning' basic assumptions about language (Kumashiro. However, research on teachers' academic language ideologies is still scarce (for an exception, see Heineke & Neugebauer, 2018; Neugebauer & Heinecke, 2020). .
What follows in this dissertation are three manuscripts that address the relationship between teachers' academic language ideologies and equitable academic language instruction with language-minority students. Although distinct in their aims and methods, the findings from all three manuscripts address tensions in teachers' academic language ideologies, as well as the discursive relationships between teachers' lived ontologies, teachers' language ideologies, school and classroom supports and constraints, and constraints theirs. approval of language learning. Finally, Manuscript 3 further contextualizes the findings from Manuscript 2 through a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews, allowing for deeper exploration of the relationship between teachers' lived ontologies, school supports and constraints, academic language ideologies, and instructional implementation .
Identify patterns of academic language ideology among K-12 educators in the United States and the demographic variables that predict these patterns.
Equitable Academic Language Instruction and the Access Paradox
For critical educators, the paradox of access is the socially constructed nature of academic language. Much current research on the characteristics of academic language falls under the access paradigm and has its roots in genre theory (Martin, 2009) and systemic functional linguistics (Gebhard & Harman, 2011). Diversity paradigm research emphasizes the “conflictual, contested, and plural nature” of academic language (Lea & Street, 1998) and argues that it should be “addressed in the plural.
It is therefore not enough to teach students the characteristics of academic language as if it were a static, transferable entity. So far I have presented four paradigms for critical conceptualization of academic language: academic language as racial linguistic ideology (dominance), academic language as register (access), academic language as situated practice (diversity) and academic language as dynamic socialization (design). . In the sections that follow, I propose guidelines for equitable academic language teaching that synthesize understandings drawn from each of the four paradigms of critical literacy.
You can…': An examination of language-impaired learners' development of metalanguage and agency as academic language users within a multivocal instructional approach.
A Regression Analysis of Patterns and Predictors of Teachers’ Academic
Others argue that academic language is an extension of hegemonic standard or monoglot language ideologies (Baker-Bell, 2020; Flores 2020; Flores & Rosa, 2015; MacSwan, 2018). Indeed, the role of academic language teaching in addressing racial and linguistic inequality in the classroom is widely debated in existing literature (Jensen and Thompson, 2020). As teachers gained knowledge about academic language, their value for professional learning about academic language increased.
On average, the teachers who participated in their study agreed that academic language is important and demonstrated relatively high personal self-efficacy in teaching academic language. Furthermore, teachers with bilingual endorsement reported higher value for academic language and greater self-efficacy in teaching academic language (Neugebauer & Heineke, 2020). The Teachers' Academic Language Ideology (TALI) pilot survey collected items from other studies of self-efficacy and language belief (Duguay et al., 2016; Mancilla-Martinez &.
The initial pilot project included 4 parts: 1) 60 Likert scale items .. addressing beliefs about academic language and academic language teaching;. On average, teachers mostly agreed with the belief that academic language is valuable (Table 4). The item cross-loaded on two separate factors: negatively on valuing academic language and positively on concern about student motivation.
Given the scant literature specifically focused on teachers' academic language ideology, this review contributes to identifying general heuristic patterns of academic language ideology among US K-12 teachers. This suggests that the academic language ideologies of many teachers operationalize standard language as opposed to academic language. . This finding is consistent with Neugebauer and Heineke's (2020) findings that specialized training increases teachers' self-efficacy in teaching academic language.
Despite these limitations, this study makes an important contribution to research on teachers' academic language ideologies. Academic language across content areas: Lessons from an innovative assessment and from students' reflections on language.
A Phenomenological Interview Study Contextualizing Teachers’
However, the voices of teachers who are currently doing the work of academic language teaching with minority languages are conspicuously missing from the literature. In short, across research communities, the concept of academic language is rooted in a desire to promote equitable outcomes for language minority learners. According to this theory of change, preparing teachers to teach rigorous academic language teaching fills students.
In addition, previous research on teachers' academic language ideologies focuses primarily on survey data, which does not allow for a rich, contextualized understanding of teacher perspectives. The second interview was focused on how teachers define academic language and operationalize these definitions as the enact instruction. I selected a subsample of four teachers based on their operationalization of academic language within a theory of change that fit with theories.
In the critical analysis, I scrutinize the relationships between the participants' lived ontologies, their language ideologies, and their previously adopted teaching descriptions of what they consider to be effective academic language teaching. In general, teachers conceptualized academic language as a contextualized understanding of vocabulary that students need to be successful in school. Teachers saw academic language support as necessary to ensure student participation in a more rigorous curriculum.
In the following sections, I will focus on a sub-sample of four cases to examine how the teachers' lived ontologies and classroom constraints have shaped their academic language ideologies. The purpose of this study was to explore the academic language ideologies of teachers working with 3rd through 8th grade students in a new immigrant destination state (Gandara & Mordechay, 2017). More specifically, I sought to understand the teachers' experience of teaching a linguistically rigorous curriculum with language-minorized students (the empathic analysis) and the relationship between the teachers' lived ontologies, school supports and constraints and their conceptualizations of 'academic language' and operationalization of 'effective.
It is important to note that the value for academic language is strong. She operationalized academic language as distinct from the linguistic resources that students bring to the classroom and thus was reluctant to make room for those resources in her teaching. Specifying academic language skills that support text comprehension in the middle grades: Development and validation of the construct and instrument of basic academic language skills.
Valuing both language proficiency and pluralism: An exploratory mixed-methods investigation of teachers' ideologies about academic language and its instruction for language minority students.
Conclusions
The quantitative analysis in Chapter 3 showed that teachers strongly affirm the value of academic language and the value of linguistic diversity. This is undoubtedly a very promising finding, given that previous research on teachers' attitudes towards linguistic diversity suggests less openness to stigmatized dialects and languages other than English (Bowie & Bond, 1994; Byrnes et al., 1996). While the quantitative analysis in Chapter 3 showed that teachers' value for academic language exceeded their self-efficacy in teaching academic language, teachers appeared to be somewhat confident in their ability to teach academic language well.
The qualitative analysis in Chapter 4 also confirmed the power of the courses to build a language ideology that supports academic language teaching. However, the qualitative analysis in Chapter 4 complicated the findings from Chapter 3 about teachers' value for linguistic diversity. Theorists who prioritize maintaining linguistic and cultural pluralism, including translanguage theorists, often point to what teachers "should" think, feel, or do without careful examination of the constraints that shape teachers' experiences (Jaspers, 2018).
From cognitively focused Modern Expectancy-Value Theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002), teachers' value of linguistic diversity may be weakened by limited support or incentives to implement instruction that utilizes and maintains students' linguistic resources other than WME. Nevertheless, the findings across this multi-method thesis provide an important starting point for better understanding teachers' academic language ideologies as powerful resources for meaning-making about their practice. Development of the Survey of Teachers' Academic Language Ideologies began with a study of Neugebauer and Heineke's (2020) Academic Language Teaching Efficacy Scale, which revised items from Gibson and Dembo's (1984) teaching effectiveness measure to specifically account for academic language.
Do you think that the language use among the student population at your school has changed since you started teaching. Do you see any connections between the language experiences you described in your language autobiography and your perceptions of students' language use in school. At the end of the first interview, I will inform the teachers that the next interview will be mainly focused on what they see as effective academic language teaching.
I will ask them to bring an instructional artifact (i.e. lesson plan, student work, power point, guided notes, etc.) as an example of a time when they have provided effective academic language teaching. Are you satisfied with the level of collaboration you have with other professionals in your building?
