Productive struggle : the instructional scaffolds of exemplary reading teachers of middle school emergent bilinguals
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This exploratory study examines the instructional scaffolding practice of six highly-regarded teachers working in one large, urban district serving a high percentage of emergent bilinguals (students formally classified as English Language Learners). All six teachers had been nominated as "exemplary" by school and district administrators, who knew their work well. The overarching research questions that guide this dissertation are: During 60 lessons of reading instruction with emergent bilinguals, 1) What is the range and variation of scaffold use by teachers who were nominated as exemplary? 2) How did teachers explain their goals, decisions, and uncertainties about how to use scaffolds? 3) How did students appear to respond to scaffolded instruction? Primary data sources included 10 audiorecorded and videorecorded observations of each teacher's instruction over the course of one academic year (60 total); 3 semi-structured interviews with each teacher (12 total), and students' pre and post-assessment in reading and English language proficiency. Instruction was analyzed for the presence/absence of hard and soft scaffolds, in addition to evidence of additional features of instruction. Sociocultural discourse analysis (Mercer, 2004) of a subset of reading lessons closely examined teachers' turn-by-turn use of soft scaffolds in classroom talk and students' responses to scaffolding. Findings indicated that all six teachers chose from a range of hard and soft scaffolds and used scaffolds in order to provide students access to rigorous, middle school-appropriate, reading instruction. Teachers relied on complex pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986). Teachers' selection and use of scaffolds varied by the composition of the class as individual teachers assessed the range of possible scaffolds--their effectiveness, availability, familiarity, and ease of enactment. Fine-grained analysis of turns of talk in two English Language Development classes revealed that the two teachers' patterns of scaffolding provided their students with different opportunities for student talk and higher-order thinking. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications for conceptualizing scaffolding as a pedagogical tool and how teachers can effectively reduce scaffolding over time so emergent bilinguals can assume greater independence.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Johnson, Erika Moore |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Education. |
| Primary advisor | Aukerman, Maren (Maren Songmy) |
| Thesis advisor | Aukerman, Maren (Maren Songmy) |
| Thesis advisor | Grossman, Pamela L. (Pamela Lynn), 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Martínez, Ramón, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Valdés, Guadalupe |
| Advisor | Grossman, Pamela L. (Pamela Lynn), 1953- |
| Advisor | Martínez, Ramón, 1972- |
| Advisor | Valdés, Guadalupe |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Erika Moore Johnson. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Erika Moore Johnson
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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