CRITICAL METALINGUISTIC ENGAGEMENT
Reading and literacy are key drivers of educational attainment, affecting how people engage across multiple sectors of society. One essential component of reading and literacy is language, and in an increasingly multilingual and multiracial society, the importance of language for literacy development cannot be overstated. However, literacy research and teaching in the U.S. too often assume monolingual perspectives in which English language continues to be centered despite increasing student multilingualism. As a result, multilingual students too often have to accommodate the English monolingualism of the districts and schools they attend.
In this work, I am partnering with colleagues in the Chelsea, Massachusetts Public Schools (CPS) to address this national concern. Through the work of this project, CPS practitioners will work with BC researchers to design, implement, and inquire into elementary, middle, and high school literacy instruction that centers multilingualism and multilingual learners. The proposed work is specifically designed to explore, understand, and reorient literacy instruction by centering multilingualism and multilingual learners, while attending to both teacher and student agency in teaching and learning. The project will explore and document multilingual literacy practices within CPS, while simultaneously applying a multilingual lens to literacy research that includes the “science of reading”, which is resurgent in recent years (see Shanahan, 2020), and tends to center monolingual perspectives (Leider & Proctor, 2024).
Research Questions
In this work, I am partnering with colleagues in the Chelsea, Massachusetts Public Schools (CPS) to address this national concern. Through the work of this project, CPS practitioners will work with BC researchers to design, implement, and inquire into elementary, middle, and high school literacy instruction that centers multilingualism and multilingual learners. The proposed work is specifically designed to explore, understand, and reorient literacy instruction by centering multilingualism and multilingual learners, while attending to both teacher and student agency in teaching and learning. The project will explore and document multilingual literacy practices within CPS, while simultaneously applying a multilingual lens to literacy research that includes the “science of reading”, which is resurgent in recent years (see Shanahan, 2020), and tends to center monolingual perspectives (Leider & Proctor, 2024).
Research Questions
- How do teachers of multilingual students make sense of, and implement, Dialogic Teaching and Critical Metalinguistic Engagement instructional approaches in their literacy and content-area classroom instruction? How do their students respond to this instruction?
- Do students enrolled in participating teachers’ classrooms show practical gains on high-stakes state standardized assessments?
- What types of Dynamic Idiolect profiles exist among students enrolled in participating teachers’ classrooms?
- What associations exist between students’ Dynamic Idiolect profiles and their performance on high-stakes state standardized assessments?