The MLRC Speaker Series highlights current research related to the teaching and learning of multilingual learners. Every first Thursday of the month, a researcher or team of researchers is invited to share insights, findings or learnings from their research. Recordings are posted within one week of the event.
Megan Madigan Peercy, Johanna Tigert, Daisy Fredricks, & Melanie Hardy-Skeberdis, present Leveraging Core Practices to Support Teachers’ Humanizing Pedagogy with MLLs, October 17th
In this webinar, we share an overview of the six core practices for teaching multilingual students that we have developed in collaboration with early career teachers. These practices emerged in response to the gap that Faltis & Valdes (2016) identified regarding the lack of direction offered to teacher educators about “the kinds of knowledge, skills, and inclinations teachers need to develop in order to be good and effective teachers and advocates for students who are speaking a language other than English” (p. 549). We highlight the core practices, share classroom examples, discuss how they support teachers’ humanizing pedagogy with MLLs, offer resources for teacher and teacher educator development, and describe our current and future efforts to further this research.
Jackie E. Relyea presents Multilingual Learners’ Reading and Writing in Content-Rich Literacy Instruction
How can young multilingual learners excel in reading and writing in English while building content knowledge in content-area classrooms? This presentation shares evidence from a randomized controlled trial on the Tier 1 content literacy intervention known as the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE). It highlights the effectiveness of MORE’s integrated approach in improving reading and writing outcomes for multilingual learners and their English-proficient peers.
Representing 10.4% of U.S. schoolchildren, multilingual learners (MLs), especially English learners (ELs), face the dual challenges of learning academic content while acquiring a new language. Often removed from mainstream classrooms for specialized language instruction, there is a growing consensus on the benefits of integrating them into regular content-area classes to ensure equitable learning opportunities (Baker et al., 2016; Goldenberg & Cárdenas-Hagan, 2023). However, rigorous evaluation of the impact of classroom-based content-integrated literacy instruction on the young MLs remains limited
This study assesses the effectiveness of the Tier 1 content literacy intervention, MORE, on improving reading and argumentative writing abilities in Grades 1 and 2 among MLs and their English-proficient (EP) peers. The focus is on “for whom” and “how” the MORE intervention works, exploring the differential impacts by language status and the underlying mechanisms that drive significant outcomes for MLs.
his randomized controlled control intervention study was conducted across 30 elementary schools (307 classrooms) in an urban U.S. school district with 5,397 student participants. In the 10-week MORE intervention with 20 lessons in science and social studies thematic units, the core components included interactive read-alouds with informational texts, vocabulary network building through concept mapping, and argumentative writing and research collaboration. The study evaluated students’ reading (using MAP and DIBELS), science and social studies vocabulary knowledge and argumentative writing abilities, and English oral proficiency (WIDA ACCESS). Analyses focused on moderation (to address the “for whom” question) and mediation (to uncover “how”).
While the intervention did not significantly improve standardized reading proficiency scores, it significantly improved argumentative writing in science (ES = 0.25) and social studies (ES = 0.42) for both MLs and EPs. The MORE intervention impact on reading proficiency among MLs was fully mediated by their domain-specific (science and social studies) vocabulary knowledge and English oral proficiency. A significant indirect effect on social studies argumentative writing through domain-specific vocabulary knowledge was also observed. The content-integrated literacy instruction in MORE, rich in both language and content, promotes equitable learning opportunities for MLs/ELs, ensuring all students have the opportunity to succeed.
Jackie E. Relyea, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Literacy Education in the College of Education at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on the development and evaluation of literacy instruction and interventions designed to improve learning opportunities for multilingual students and enhance their reading comprehension and writing outcomes. Her projects have received support from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), American Educational Research Association-National Science Foundation (AERA-NSF), Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and Friday Institute for Educational Innovation. She is currently an Editorial Fellow of the Journal of Educational Psychology. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and University of Houston.
Haiwen Chu presents Multilingual Learners Co-Constructing Proofs and Representations: Linking Language and Logic
Adolescent students who are bureaucratically designated “English Learners” have immense potential to learn mathematics while they simultaneously develop language to both explore inductively and prove deductively. We share evidence of learning from field trials of a summer bridge course exploring cross-cutting concepts of mathematics. The particular examples of language and learning are from a module about how to represent and analyze networks, including proofs of impossibility, by induction, and by exhaustion.
Secondary students who are bureaucratically designated as “English Learners” are a large and growing population, having increased to over 2 million students in 2020, an increase of 33% since 2009 (Irwin et al., 2024). Yet, such students, who are part of the broader group of Multilingual Learners, have been denied opportunities to ambitious mathematics learning due to systemic barriers and outdated beliefs about language (de Araujo & Smith, 2022). At the same time, there is emerging consensus about best practices for Multilingual Learners, including using meaningful contexts, connecting and creating representations, and varying the intensity of scaffolding (Roberts et al., 2021; Wilson & Smith, 2022; Chu et al., 2023)
Secondary students who are bureaucratically designated as “English Learners” are a large and growing population, having increased to over 2 million students in 2020, an increase of 33% since 2009 (Irwin et al., 2024). Yet, such students, who are part of the broader group of Multilingual Learners, have been denied opportunities to ambitious mathematics learning due to systemic barriers and outdated beliefs about language (de Araujo & Smith, 2022). At the same time, there is emerging consensus about best practices for Multilingual Learners, including using meaningful contexts, connecting and creating representations, and varying the intensity of scaffolding (Roberts et al., 2021; Wilson & Smith, 2022; Chu et al., 2023)
Secondary students who are bureaucratically designated as “English Learners” are a large and growing population, having increased to over 2 million students in 2020, an increase of 33% since 2009 (Irwin et al., 2024). Yet, such students, who are part of the broader group of Multilingual Learners, have been denied opportunities to ambitious mathematics learning due to systemic barriers and outdated beliefs about language (de Araujo & Smith, 2022). At the same time, there is emerging consensus about best practices for Multilingual Learners, including using meaningful contexts, connecting and creating representations, and varying the intensity of scaffolding (Roberts et al., 2021; Wilson & Smith, 2022; Chu et al., 2023)
We provide evidence of students’ work and talk around three kinds of proof: of impossibility, by induction, and by exhaustion. We describe the bidirectional relationship between real-world contexts and representations: 1) students use representations to model real-world contexts; and, 2) students draw upon real-world experiences or ideas to reason about, describe, and stretch their understandings of representations. We demonstrate how their written products reflect multimodal approaches that weave together elements from multiple symbol systems.
Haiwen Chu is a Research Manager for the English Learner and Migrant Education Services content area team at WestEd. He serves a co-Principal Investigator on the National Research and Development Center to Improve Education for Secondary English Learners, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences. Dr. Chu draws upon his experiences as a high school mathematics teacher to design educative curriculum materials to expand the capacity of mathematics teachers across the country to challenge and support their students who are bureaucratically designated as “English Learners”.