Sarah Capitelli’s research while affiliated with University of San Francisco and other places

The discipline of science provides rich opportunities for language development as students engage collaboratively to investigate and make sense of compelling phenomena. Drawing from a design research study conducted in fifth grade classrooms, we describe how teachers can support emergent multilingual students' participation in science discourse. Attempts to support emergent multilingual students in content‐area discussions often emphasize the use of sentence stems and frames. However, we illustrate how an emphasis on sentence frames can interrupt students' collaborative sense‐making when students and teachers focus on language forms and correct written products rather than on the process of dialogic sense‐making. To move beyond sentence frames, we use transcripts to illustrate other more generative forms of scaffolding that support emergent multilingual students' participation in science discourse and disciplinary practices. We describe how teachers can ground discussion in hands‐on investigations, leverage multiple modalities for meaning making, and engage students in moving bidirectionally between writing and talk. These forms of scaffolding center emergent multilingual students in curricular design, rather than conceptualizing scaffolds as ancillary supports provided to certain students.

Situated in sociocultural theories of language and literacy, the authors describe an approach to teaching nonfiction text to emergent bilinguals (EBs) through the strategic use of a reading protocol. The protocol focuses on where reading text is positioned in a learning sequence and how students engage with these texts. Classroom transcripts are used to illustrate how the approach supports EBs to engage productively with nonfiction texts. The authors suggest three key considerations for supporting EBs' productive reading of nonfiction texts. These considerations highlight the equity issues inherent in providing and scaffolding access to these texts for this group of students.

Dialogic, sense-making interactions are critical venues for language development and science learning, particularly for emergent multilingual students. Designing and facilitating such learning opportunities is pedagogically complex work and often requires significant shifts in practice. We report on a design study in which we partnered with 5th grade teachers to pilot inquiry-based science units designed for linguistically diverse classrooms. Through our analysis of classroom videos and teacher interviews, we surfaced ways teachers used the curriculum to create affordances for emergent multilingual students’ language use and development, as well as tensions and recurrent “missed affordances” that emerged in their practice.

In teaching newcomer students, educators must envision how to provide opportunities for language use and development through age-appropriate content instruction. This article describes a design research study, in which we developed and piloted 5th grade science units and studied the participation of two newcomer students in sense-making interactions with peers. By analyzing their participation over a school year, we provide a vision of newcomers’ language development that is integrated with, rather than a prerequisite for, disciplinary work. Newcomers’ language development involved expanding the interactional moves they used to participate in scientific sense-making, including moves that might be considered purely ‘social’, but were essential to collaboratively enacting disciplinary practices. In addition, their positioning in small group interactions impacted affordances for participation and language use. Over time, students shifted their positioning, which coincided with improved participation and collaborative sense-making for newcomers and their peers. We offer implications for how teachers can create integrated classrooms that support newcomers’ language development and disciplinary learning.

This qualitative case study looks closely at an elementary teacher who participated in professional development experiences that helped her develop a hybrid practice of using inquiry-based science to teach both science content and English language development (ELD) to her students, many of whom are English language learners (ELLs). This case study examines the teacher’s reflections on her teaching and her students’ learning as she engaged her students in science learning and supported their developing language skills. It explicates the professional learning experiences that supported the development of this hybrid practice. Closely examining the pedagogical practice and reflections of a teacher who is developing an inquiry-based approach to both science learning and language development can provide insights into how teachers come to integrate their professional development experiences with their classroom expertise in order to create a hybrid inquiry-based science ELD practice. This qualitative case study contributes to the emerging scholarship on the development of teacher practice of inquiry-based science instruction as a vehicle for both science instruction and ELD for ELLs. This study demonstrates how an effective teaching practice that supports both the science and language learning of students can develop from ongoing professional learning experiences that are grounded in current perspectives about language development and that immerse teachers in an inquiry-based approach to learning and instruction. Additionally, this case study also underscores the important role that professional learning opportunities can play in supporting teachers in developing a deeper understanding of the affordances that inquiry-based science can provide for language development.

This article looks closely at a teacher inquiry group and the dilemmas that emerged during the first year of facilitating the group. The author encountered a number of unforeseen dilemmas that challenged previous understanding of teacher inquiry, its processes, and purposes. The author moved from viewing the process of facilitation of teacher inquiry as a “dilemma free” process, to a complex undertaking that continually raises questions about issues of authority and expertise. This article underscores the important role that facilitation plays in teacher inquiry groups and the complexity of the role of facilitator. It also highlights the important role a facilitator can play in allowing teachers to consider how to best improve their practice to advance both English language learners’ content knowledge and their English language skills.