Accessing the Language of Language Functions

Yesterday as Steph and I were planning for our 'supervision through student-centered coaching' study, we found ourselves digging into the challenge of teaching academic language demands. Our goal was to generate a series of probing questions that would help students uncover the language function and associated demands relative to their lesson focus. While I thoroughly enjoyed Heineke & McTighe's Understanding by Design in the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classroom, we found this resource to be far more useful for our own planning as opposed to our students' planning. To put it plainly--there's just too much 'going on' for the planning templates to be useful for our preservice teachers. In other words, it is beyond their zone of proximal development. So we needed to build some more reachable scaffolds that would help to push them along without overwhelming them from the start.

 As we talked further, we realized the challenge to our understandings and interpretations when applying these concepts outside of our preferred contexts, which is reading instruction for Steph and writing instruction for me. This discussion was particularly productive, though, as it allowed us to create two working examples that were authentic to student classrooms and challenging to think through. Most importantly, this allowed us to move beyond the stale and repeated examples (which also tend to be more obvious) that are often used to talk about language function and demands within TPA prep materials. 

So here is where we ended up in a nutshell:
In this example, the preservice teacher has been asked to teach a lesson on editing for spelling in a first grade classroom. A question series might build in the following way:

• What is the learning goal?
• How will students demonstrate their ability to meet the learning goal?
• So how will students need to use language to demonstrate their ability to meet the learning goal? 

In these types of lessons, PSTs will typically begin by stating that students will need to show they can edit their writing. Edit is then seen as the language function rather than merely a stage in the writing process. What is important in the learning goal is not the fact that students are editing, however, but what they are editing for. Instead, use of language needs to focus on students' ability to create invented spellings which relies on identifying and matching phonemes and graphemes. In this way, the language function is more along the lines of identify/match/label because that is how language is operating within this lesson which takes place during the editing stage of writing.

A similar case can be made for revision. If students in a sixth grade classroom are revising their writing to include more sensory details, then the language function is their ability to use language to describe--not to revise. This distinction should become apparent once you dig into language demands, because choosing edit or revise would elicit vague demands that are impossible to scaffold. Genre and writing strategy matter, and in order to account for them within the language demands, the language function must speak to the purpose of language in the writing.

Most importantly, as students dig into how language is actually being used this correlates  nicely with assessment criteria, another area where preservice teachers can struggle to get traction. Logic often follow the pattern above: I will know students can meet the goal if they edit their writing. What we really want to know, however, is how often, in what cases, and to what degree students are able to edit their spelling. We need to determine what a range of this skill would look like and then analyze the assessment to determine how such evidence would be generated through its components.

So in a round about way, by honing in on the language function we are also able to hone into the assessment criteria....which allows us to circle back to the overarching question of whether or not the assessment is aligned to the learning goal (ie will it generate the information we need to interpret what students understand and can do)?