Building Disciplinary Language and Literacy in Elementary Teacher Training

Abstract

The authors share an adaptable curriculum for apprenticing elementary preservice teachers into disciplinary language and literacy instruction.

Work descriptions written by third-graders: An aspect of disciplinary literacy in primary craft education education

“…However, as pointed out by Carney and Indrisano (2013), if teachers had this type of capacity themselves, they could provide effective pedagogy, not only for the content, but also for the ways of reading, thinking, and knowing that are germane to a discipline. To develop this knowledge teacher education should offer pre-service teachers different strategies for focusing on the language demands of disciplinary activities (Siffrinn & Lew, 2018).…”

“…(2015) explored how preservice teachers construct the meaning of disciplinary literacy in dance and drama. Furthermore, Siffrinn and Lew (2018) have modelled how elementary preservice teachers can be apprenticed into disciplinary language and literacy instruction, and Colwell's (2018) study has supported teachers in choosing disciplinary texts in English, history and social studies, mathematics, and science.…”

Understanding reading teachers’ self-directed use of drama-based pedagogy in an under-resourced educational setting: A case study in China

“…This means that (1) in the process of self-directed development, reading instructors need a multimodal and interactive knowledge-building tool as such a tool can draw their students’ interest by offering them a contextualized and vicarious understanding of a scenario related to their learning(e.g. reading materials as well as an understanding of the language resources used in the material) (Ewing, 2012; McMaster, 1998); (2) reading instructors also need to raise their students’ awareness and learning of both meaning/content and language use, both of which constitute the core of reading literacy (Siffrinn & Lew, 2018).…”

“…English reading instruction in under-resourced educational contexts offers an apt example of the foregoing. In many educational contexts, reading teachers focus primarily on the teacher-dominated interactions, teaching vocabulary, or the structural features of each sentence in a text, or translating a text into their students’ first language, such as in classrooms for English as a foreign language (EFL), to help their students comprehend the text they are reading (Siffrinn, & Lew, 2018; Zhang, 2017). With this kind of reading instruction, the students display a limited passion for learning both in the class and outside it (Nurhayati, 2016).…”

An Exploration of Teacher Preparation Practices with Foundational Knowledge of Literacy

“…Discipline-specific literacy processes comprise the unique ways in which literacy occurs in different disciplines (Moje, 2008). Thus, preservice teachers in all grade-level bands should plan instructional tasks that provide students with opportunities to develop and use highly specialized literacy processes that are specific to each discipline (Gabriel & Wenz, 2017;Siffrinn & Lew, 2018). For example, student learning within the disciplines should be supported with academic word lists that develop vocabulary (Picot, 2017), published texts that illustrate characteristics of writing (Håland, 2017), and verbal discussions that construct collaborative understandings (Alston & Monte-Sano, 2020).…”