Building a Language Toolkit for Teachers by Humphrey, Sally; Westerlund, Ruslana; Malin, Olga;

Short description:

This book is designed for pre-service teachers and K-8 educators seeking to develop their knowledge of how language works. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, it serves as a practical language toolkit, offering supportive task cycles that help teachers identify, analyze, and apply language features to support learning.

Long description:

This book is designed for pre-service teachers and K-8 educators seeking to develop their knowledge of how language works. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, it serves as a practical language toolkit, offering supportive task cycles with exercises that help teachers identify, analyze, and apply language features to support student learning.

This book is essential for those looking to develop their pedagogical language knowledge (PLK) to support multilingual students. Through accessible, targeted, task-based resources for pre-service teachers, this guide supports teachers to apply a functional approach for disciplinary purposes of narrating, informing, explaining, and arguing in elementary and middle grade level instruction.

Although this book focuses on unpacking the WIDA English Language Development Standards, it is well suited to support teachers' development of language in any context.

"The recent and growing body of work on a functional approach to language development, especially for teaching multilingual learners, is an area of research that has expanded a focus on the practice of teachers in classrooms in the context of the WIDA 2020 English Language Development Standards Framework. This book addresses specific ways of developing teachers’ knowledge about language and using a functional metalanguage, providing a comprehensive overview of issues and a toolkit for implementation. This book should be a resource in every TESOL practitioner and teacher educator’s library!"

- Luciana C. de Oliveira, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, School of Education, Virginia Commonwealth University

"Empowering teachers to understand and teach language in functional ways through accessible explanations, examples, and activities makes this book a valuable source for teacher preparation. The distinction among everyday, cross-disciplinary, and technical subject-specific language, illustrated with examples, is valuable because multilingual learners need to learn all those aspects of language. Often books addressing the language of schooling tend to focus just on disciplinary language. In addition, the book embraces students’ everyday language as important in the acquisition of disciplinary language."

- María Estela Brisk, Boston College

"This book is a vital resource for teachers seeking to develop a strong, shared functional metalanguage for explicitly teaching academic patterns. The functional perspective presented in the WIDA Standards is demonstrated through authentic language resources and task cycles in a clear, logical, and contextually relevant manner. Both experienced and novice teachers are guided to view aspects of language, such as sentence structure and word or phrase usage, in a new way, fostering a gradual understanding of the connection between these elements within larger language units necessary for academic success."

- Dr. Andrés Ramírez, Associate Professor, Florida Atlantic University

Table of Contents:

Introduction, 1. The functional language toolkit, 2. Language for disciplinary learning, 3. School genres and their structures, 4. Cohesion of language, 5. Density of language, 6. Grammatical complexity 7. Precision of language