Purpose
The purpose of this study was to investigate the communicative strategies used by two effective first grade teachers whose students came from lower SES communities marked by a high incidence of school failure. One school was in Akko, Israel and one was in New Jersey in the US. In both settings, the teachers taught lessons in a language that was not the home language of the students. In Akko, the teacher taught using formal Arabic while the children were familiar only with informal Arabic. In New Jersey, the teacher taught using English while the students were largely from Spanish-speaking homes and came to school with only a limited knowledge of English. In both cases, we were interested in understanding how the teachers adjusted their use of language in order to communicate more effectively with their students so as to promote greater learning and academic success.
Theoretical Framework
Initially our research was motivated by understanding the practices of teachers identified by their supervisors as effective with non-native language learners.Lee Shulman’s (1987) early seminal paper about the kinds of knowledge and behaviors that teachers need to possess and use in order to be effective practitioners emphasized comprehension, reasoning, and reflection. In this paper Schulman observed that up to that point research on effective teaching had focused on generic relationships – that is, teacher behaviors that were associated with student success regardless of subject matter. In order to determine what specific knowledge and behaviors distinguished effective teachers in the content areas, Shulman called for research that was based on actual observations in the context of specific teaching and learning situations of novice and expert teachers. To date, this call has not been heeded.
One of the obstacles for the non-native language learner is that they are placed in regular classrooms where they are expected to learn in the dominant language of the school (Md-Ali, Mohd-Yusof, & Veloo, 2014). This places the burden on the classroom teacher to devise ways to ensure the students comprehend the content, “Talk in the classroom involves the talk of the teacher and the talk of the learners, and, as in any relationship, the one can have a deep impact on the other, for better or worse” (Hendersen & Wellington, 1998, (p.35).
Bloome et al (2008) used discourse analysis to examine language and literacy events in classrooms where they incorporated local classroom conversations with larger cultural and social relationships. This type of analysis enables the researcher to examine language events that occur holistically: “Any word or utterance needs to be understood within the context of people acting and reacting to each other” (p.11). Because it is difficult to understand language use in short responses, we have focused on larger segments of classroom exchanges to fully evaluate the effectiveness of teachers’ communicative strategies. In addition, to focus on both literacy and math lessons we adapted what Bloome and Clark (2006) call discourse-in-use, “to ask who is using language… to do what, with whom, to whom, when, where and how” (p.3). This process also permits us to take into account other means of communication such as, body language; voice inflection, visual representations, and manipulation of materials.
Our research was guided by the following questions:
1) What types of communicative strategies are employed by effective primary teachers with
non-native language learners?
2) What do effective primary teachers’ use of communication strategies to facilitate the learning
process during reading/language arts and mathematics lessons have in common?
3) How do community, culture, and language impact effective teachers’ use of language
during reading/language arts and mathematics lessons?
