Box 1.1 Peter's Challenge – Understanding the Nature of Student Language Difficulties
Two weeks after Peter had his first encounters with his Period 2 geometry class, the guidance counselor sent him an initial report from a language specialist regarding one of his students, Andrea. Andrea was not yet officially classified as a student with a particular kind of language impairment. However, since he came to the school district two years ago from Albania, he had had persistent difficulties in academic learning. He was referred to the specialist at the end of eighth grade. The report came to the high school counselor recently, and it contains some of the following information: “Student shows signs of dysgraphia … He has trouble organizing his thoughts … He seems to have impaired phonological memory … He has trouble understanding and producing complex syntax … He also exhibits difficulties in finite verb morphology …”
Peter read this report several times; he still did not understand some of the terminologies used by the specialist. What frustrated him most was that he had no clue how to provide specific instructional support for Andrea in his geometry class based on these linguistic and cognitive issues reported by the specialist. If he had to wait for the official disability classification report, the development of an Individualized Educational Program (IEP), and the assistance from a special education teacher, Andrea would fall further behind …
Peter is between a rock and a hard place. He is supposed to teach ninth grade math, yet the issues that he has to deal with in Andrea's case are far beyond his content area. To be able to help Andrea move forward in geometry learning, Peter must have sufficient knowledge of Andrea's linguistic and cognitive characteristics and know how to provide effective strategies to support him in learning the math content. This is indeed the challenge of teaching diverse students in the inclusive classroom environment.
However, if Peter were knowledgeable about Andrea's linguistic characteristics in the specialist's report, he would have an inkling of Andrea's condition; that is, he might have specific language impairment (SLI). He would have more effectively addressed Andrea's specific issues and utilized some of the instructional strategies recommended for students with SLI such as focusing on developing Andrea's skills in comprehending and producing complex sentences (which are prominent in academic texts; in this case, math reading materials). He could do this by modeling how complex sentence are used and scaffolding Andrea to recast the modeled complex sentences in his own production. Peter's experience reminds us that teachers must develop in-depth knowledge of their students' language and literacy development regardless of what content area they teach. There are at least three important reasons to do so.
Interpreting assessment results from specialist reports
As shown clearly in Peter's case, teachers need to have the ability to interpret specialists' reports and utilize the information to help their students learn. Reports from specialists often include language and literacy assessment results that contain terminologies about students' linguistic characteristics such as phonological abilities, fast naming, phonological memory, letter knowledge, alphabetic principle, sight word knowledge, pseudo word decoding, orthographic ability, morphosyntactic knowledge, and metalinguistic awareness. (Don't worry about these terms at this moment; you will know them after reading this book.) If teachers do not understand the relationships between these skills and the role each of these skills plays in students' learning, they are unlikely to help their students succeed in the content-area learning.
Identifying students' linguistic needs
In addition to knowing how to interpret the assessment results from specialists, teachers need to develop abilities to identify their students' linguistic difficulties and needs, and know how to address them in instruction and assessment. To simply wait for the specialist's assistance will not meet students' immediate learning needs (e.g., Soodak, 2003).
In the classroom environment, students need to have proficient language and literacy skills to function well in various content areas. In other words, language and literacy skills are the basis for content learning. Often, when students have difficulties learning a content area, they are also likely to have difficulties processing information (for example, being unable to comprehend what the teacher says or what is written in the text). Research in the past few decades clearly indicates that learners with linguistic processing difficul...
