Invisible, but foundational, in any classroom is the teacher’s conception of their students, how learning and development happen, and their role as teachers in supporting it. How we conceive of language development impacts the way we organize instruction, how we prompt and interact with students, and the thousands of split-second decisions we make over the course of a teaching day.
Core to SISL’s approach is the understanding that language is a social practice. It is something we use to act as agents in the world—to communicate our needs, develop relationships, understand new ideas, express our thinking to others, and make meaning with others. In doing so, we use particular language structures—particular words, phrases, grammatical forms, and ways of organizing our ideas—but those discrete elements of language are tools for getting things done and not the end goal of teaching. Rather, our goal as teachers is to support our students in developing their capacity to do meaningful things with language, leveraging a range of linguistic resources.
In the science classroom, our students are developing their ability to use English to participate in a community that is engaged in scientific inquiry and sense-making. Students develop competence with science and language by doing the real work of scientists. The NGSS emphasize engaging students in eight Science and Engineering Practices as they investigate compelling scientific phenomenon:
The SEPs are rich opportunities for language development, as students raise questions and wonderings, work together to investigate phenomena, make sense of experiences and data from investigations, learn from texts and videos, and defend their emerging theories with evidence. This approach can be applied to other content areas—any teaching of content should involve bringing students into the core practices of the discipline.
Also foundational is how we see our students, particularly our students who are designated as English learners. SISL sees our students as agents engaging with others in a community of practice that is working together to understand scientific phenomena. Students actively construct their understandings of science and expand their language competencies as they engage in collaborative scientific inquiry. It is essential that even our newcomer students who may have very emergent English are seen as agents who have a wealth of experiences and social, academic, and linguistic resources that they draw on to engage in collaborative sense-making.
As teachers, our role is to scaffold students’ active participation in these disciplinary practices. Teachers play an essential role in creating and facilitating a classroom environment that has affordances, or opportunities, for both science learning and language development. Learners assert agency in perceiving and taking up affordances in order to participate and contribute to the class’ scientific inquiry. To scaffold students’ participation—particularly for English learners—teachers use purposeful routines and structures and intentional in-the-moment moves and scaffolds.
Additional Components of the SISL Approach