Functional Language Instruction and the Writing Growth of English Language Learners in the Middle Years

Australian Catholic UniversityNew South Wales, AustraliaIn this article the authors report on the use of a scaffolding peda-gogy (Gibbons, 2009), informed by systemic functional linguistics, tosupport the writing of English language learners in middle years cur-riculum learning. They focus on the work of one teacher and herEnglish class across the first 18 months of a longitudinal design-basedliteracy research project, Embedding Literacies in the Key LearningAreas (ELK). This 3-year project was conducted in an Australianurban secondary school with 97.5% of students from language back-grounds other than English. A core aspect of the pedagogy imple-mented through the ELK project is the use of a sharedmetalanguage to make visible the patterns of language valued for dis-cipline learning. Analysis of instructional materials, classroom dis-course, and data on students’ achievement on standardized externaland formative internal assessments of writing over 18 months indi-cates that growth in writing is related to pedagogical practices thatinclude consistent use of a functional metalanguage in classroommodeling of exemplar texts and in feedback on students’ writing.doi: 10.1002/tesq.247