Beyond Sentence Frames: Scaffolding Emergent Multilingual Students’ Participation in Science Discourse
By Laura Alvarez, Sarah Capitelli, and Guadalupe Valdés
Alvarez, Capitelli, and Valdés propose that the overuse of sentence frames with MLs can stifle meaning making discussion between students and hinder learning of both content and vocabulary. Their research, which is demonstrated in transcripts from fifth-grade science classes, shows that other methods can be more productive. They argue that, In order to develop a second (or in some cases, a third or fourth) language, emergent multilingual students need frequent experiences interacting and participating in joint activity with their peers and teachers. Science classes are an excellent venue for this since students need to collaborate to conduct experiments, ask questions, talk about their observations, and explain their findings. Through this, the focus is not only on the final product, but also on the process.
One of the transcripts exemplifies how introducing a sentence frame to “help” a student complete their thought interrupts the process of expressing meaning. Instead, the authors propose that a curriculum that involves a project, a classroom ritual, or tasks that progress over a period of time that foster students’ collaboration is better for language development. The teacher models how these options are to be completed. Then after students have figured out what they say or write, appropriate sentence frames can be used for the final product.
The experiments were conducted with four teachers at different schools in one California district. The article contains detailed descriptions of two of the science units used in the study and transcripts of students’ conversations using sentence stems like I see, I think, or I wonder.
This is followed by this list of guidelines of methods for scaffolding students’ comprehension and language development.
- Provide ample opportunities for small group discussions throughout the inquiry process as students generate questions, investigate, read, and co-construct models, explanations, and arguments.
- Engage students in hands-on investigation and extended small-group discussions grounded in their investigations.
- Leverage multimodal resources, such as videos, images, text, and talk.
- Encourage students to draw on a variety of communicative resources to engage in collaborative sense-making, including gesture, drawing, writing, and their home languages, rather than insisting on predetermined or prescriptive notions of what it means to talk “like scientists” using sentence frames.
- Intentionally sequence opportunities for students to move between writing for themselves and discussion with peers so they have time to process and formulate ideas through multiple modalities.
The authors conclude that What emergent multilingual students do not need is ‘watered down’ curriculum or an insistence that they use ‘academic’ sentence frames—they need frequent opportunities to participate in intentionally planned and facilitated sense-making discussions in which they can leverage and expand their multilingual and multimodal repertoires.
Huynh and Skelton explain how Teachers can carefully chunk information to support newcomer students in learning grade-level content while developing their English proficiency. They name this strategy the input-output loop. Lesson planning begins with establishing the goals of the summative assessment. Based on these goals, lessons are designed that require students to read, listen, speak and write frequently. Content and academic vocabulary are taught through explicit instruction.
