Academic Literacy Practices in the Context of
High-Stakes School Reform: An SFL
Perspective
Dr. Meg Gebhard with the ACCELA Alliance
University of Massachusetts Amherst
TESOL, 2009
Denver, Colorado
Academic literacy and high-stakes school
reform in the United States

Demographic changes
 Policy shifts aimed at standardization and
accountability
– No Child Left Behind legislation
• High-stakes testing practices
• State curriculum frameworks
• Mandated textbooks and scripted instructional practices
– English-only mandates in many states

New demands on all teachers and teacher
educators, not just ESL teachers and teacher
educators in TESOL and Applied Linguistics
New questions:

How can teachers support all students in using
disciplinary language (and passing mandated
high-stakes exams), but do so in ways that
maintain spaces for reading and writing about
topics students and local communities care
about?
 How can teachers and researchers track changes
in students’ academic literacy practices over
time in ways that inform instruction and
equitable school reform?
ACCELA

UMass/urban district partnership designed to support
professional development of stakeholders engaged in critical
educational reform
– Federally funded (Title I and II)
– Courses offered on-site in the districts
– Courses are inquiry-based and research driven
• Bachelor’s Degree of General Studies for 20 bilingual
paraprofessionals (Theresa Austin)
• Master’s Degree and State ESL/Reading License for 65 teachers
(Jerri Willett & Meg Gebhard)
• Fellowships for 15 school- and district-level administrators
working with ACCELA teachers (Pat Paugh)
• Fellowships for 15 doctoral students who work with ACCELA
participants and UMass faculty in designing and conducting
longitudinal case studies of classroom literacy practices

See http://www.umass.edu/accela/ for references
Ethnographic study of
literacy practices in Amy’s
fourth-grade class
Jennie’s 4th grade


City: “Milltown”
– Former industrial midsize city
in New England
“Parker Elementary School”
– 441 students in grades K-5
– Nearly all eligible for free or
reduced lunch
– Nearly all Latino
– Nearly half report their home
language is not English
– Nearly all struggle to pass the
state’s high-stakes exams in a
language they are still acquiring
• 44% of students “failed” and 46%
scored “needs improvement” on
the English Language Arts state
exam

Focus teacher: Amy
– ACCELA courses completed prior to
the case study
• Practitioner Research
• Principles of Second Language
Acquisition
• Supporting L1 and L2 Literacy
Development
• Spanish for Educators (I and II)
– Completed during the case study year
• Teaching Content for Language
Development
• Multicultural Education with a
Focus on Puerto Rican Children’s
Literature
• Systemic Functional Linguistics
– Completed after the case study year
• Language Assessment
• Language Development and
Reading
• Diagnosing Reading Difficulties
• ELL Practicum
• Consulting Teacher of Reading
• Reading Practicum (optional)

Focus student: “Eloy”
–Reports speaking only Spanish at home
–Received bilingual instruction in
grades K-3
–“Mainstreamed” for grade 4 as a result
of English-only mandate
Data: Samples of Eloy’s narratives in October and May
ACCELA’s conceptual framework

Based on Halliday and the work of Australian educational linguists:
–

Focuses on analyzing the linguistic choices that ELLs learn to use to
accomplish cognitive, academic, social, and political work in and out
of schools:
–
–

Halliday; Christie; Cope & Kalatzis; Derewianka; Gibbons;Hasan & Williams;
Kress; Luke; Martin; Thompson (see Hyland, 2003; Schleppegrell, 2004, review)
Not drill and practice in decontextualized rules of “correctness”
Not “natural development” that will happen in due course, but a function
of socialization into communities of practice
Heightens awareness of the array of complex contexts in which ELLs
participate in and out school and the types of linguistic choices they
need to make to:
–
–
–
Enact relationships with peers, family members, and teachers
(interpersonal function of language)
Construct everyday and school knowledge (ideational function of
language)
Communicate through face-to-face, computer-mediated, and print modes
(textual function of language).
ACCELA’s conceptual framework



Analyze high-stakes disciplinary genres that ELLs are expected to read
and write in school:
– narrating an event, providing definition, writing description,
describing a process, providing an explanation, making an argument
or critique
Focus on linguistic choices that operate at the phonological, word,
clause, and organizational levels in students’ texts and reflect the
degree to which students have been socialized into and wish to align
themselves with valued ways of knowing and being in school
– Differences are even greater and more significance as students are
required to read and write about unfamiliar topics using technical
language and drawing upon meaning-making resources that differ
from the language practices used at home or valued by their peers
Support students in becoming meta-linguistically and politically aware
of the differences between everyday and content-based language
practices and support teachers in critically apprenticing students to
using academic language to accomplish academic, social, and
political work in schools
Text/Context dynamics shaping Amy’s teaching and Eloy’s writing
Competing ideologies regarding the schooling of ELLs in the U.S.
Context(s) of culture/Disciplinary, grade-level genre practices
Context(s) of situation/Register expectations regarding
disciplinary literacy practices in local contexts
Student’s textual
practices
Findings: Changes in Amy’s teaching practices
A movement away from “ventriloquating”
the voices of the authors of the teacher’s
manual to authoring her own curriculum
and instruction (Bakhtin, 1981, p.299)
 A greater ability to negotiate state and
federal policies by adapting mandated
curriculum to meet the needs of local
ELLs

– A greater use of Puerto Rican children’s
literature (e.g., My Name is Maria Isabel,
Grandma’s Records)
– Writing projects designed for wider and
more specific purposes and audiences

A greater understanding of the genre and
register features of written narratives and
of SFL pedagogy (e.g., explicitly teaching
ELLs to notice and appropriate the genre
and register features used by more expert
Puerto Rican authors; greater use of
scaffolding techniques)
– “Kids CAN analyze text”
Changes in Eloy’s texts



Produced narratives for a broader range of functions
– To comply with institutional demands, to please Amy and his
mother, to entertain himself, to compete with and gain recognition
from male peers
Produced narratives to enact a broader range of relationships and roles
within and outside of the classroom
– Good student, competent writer, entertainer
Exhibited greater use of words and phrases to signal specific genre
moves found in written narratives (e.g., use of lexical items and
phrases that signal the orientation, sequence of events, resolution, and
coda)
– Greater Use of “temporal connectives” to communicate the
sequences of events (e.g., one day, next, then, suddenly, in the
end)
– Use of “logical connectives” to express the purposes, causes, or
effects of actions (e.g., because, although, so)
Changes in Eloy’s texts

Texts shifted from an oral to written register
–
–
–
–
Fewer clauses initiated with “and”
Use of “and” as a conjunction
Greater use of narrative past
Greater and more varied use of punctuation marks (e.g., periods,
exclamation marks, quotation marks) to support readers in pausing
between clauses and reading with intonation
– Predominance of declarative S V O sentence pattern, but a greater
use of adjectival and adverbial clauses
– Fewer unconventional spellings
Implications


Potential of SFL in the United States to support the praxis
of teacher education, critical literacy research, and critical
school reform
• The praxis of documenting and analyzing
transformations in teaching practices and
transformations in students’ textual practices
• The praxis of engaging in sustained, collaborative
research and professional development with urban
classroom teachers to support critical school reform
K-12 teacher education and SFL
• Brisk (Boston College); de Oliveira (Purdue), Harman (University of
Georgia); Ramirez (Rhode Island College); Shin (SUNY Brockport)