What STEM Teachers Need to Know and Do for English Language Learners (ELLs): Using Literacy to Learn

Abstract

A growing concern for STEM teachers is the responsibility of having students who do not speak English pro ciently in their content area classrooms. This paper gives a background of how STEM literacy and English language learner (ELL) literacy can be used productively together as well as strategies for STEM teachers to help all students learn. Strategies for ELL literacy are good strategies for all students. We discuss speci c strategies that STEM teachers can use that bene t all students in developing academic language and conceptual understanding in STEM content using a hands-on STEM experiment, “Why do I need to wear a bicycle helmet?” that incorporates Newton’s rst, second, and third laws of motion.

Full text

Journal of STEM Teacher Education
Volume 51
Issue 1 Fall Article 9
2016
What STEM Teachers Need to Know and Do for
English Language Learners (ELLs): Using Literacy
to Learn
Lisa Ho$man
Indiana University Southeast
Alan Zollman
Indiana University Southeast
Follow this and additional works at: h=p://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/jste
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Recommended Citation
Ho;man, Lisa and Zollman, Alan (2016) "What STEM Teachers Need to Know and Do for English Language Learners (ELLs):
Using Literacy to Learn," Journal of STEM Teacher Education: Vol. 51: Iss. 1, Article 9.
Available at: h=p://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/jste/vol51/iss1/9

83
Journal of STEM Teacher Education
2016, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 83–94
What STEM Teachers Need to Know and Do for English Language Learners
(ELLs): Using Literacy to Learn
Lisa Hoffman
Indiana University Southeast
Alan Zollman
Indiana University Southeast
abstract
A growing concern for STEM teachers is the responsibility of having students who do
not speak English prociently in their content area classrooms. This paper gives a
background of how STEM literacy and English language learner (ELL) literacy can be used
productively together as well as strategies for STEM teachers to help all students learn.
Strategies for ELL literacy are good strategies for all students. We discuss specic
strategies that STEM teachers can use that benet all students in developing academic
language and conceptual understanding in STEM content using a hands-on STEM
experiment, “Why do I need to wear a bicycle helmet?” that incorporates Newton’s rst,
second, and third laws of motion.
Keywords: Academic language; Cultural and linguistic diversity; Content-specic
instructional strategies; English language learners; Language minority students; STEM
literacy
“How am I expected to teach the same content to every student when some kids in the class
don’t even understand English? I’m a content area teacher, not a language teacher.” We hear this
many times from STEM teachers.
Nationwide, student demographics reveal that the number of English language learners (ELLs,
who are also known as ESL, ENL, EL, LEP, or LM students) in schools across the country continues
to rise (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). A 2015 Migration Policy Institute report
indicates that 13% of the U.S. population is currently immigrants. A total of one quarter of the
nation’s population is either rst- or second-generation immigrants (Zong & Batalova, 2015).
In the last decade, states with the largest percent growth of immigrant population were South
Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas (Zong & Batalova, 2015), none of which
have traditionally had high levels of immigration. One elementary school in our southern Indiana
community counts 34 languages spoken by its students, and one school district in our region totals
over 100 languages. These growth patterns indicate that even teachers in regions with traditionally
low immigration need to build skills in teaching content material to students who are also learning
English.
Consider for a moment a demonstration that we share with teachers. We would show you
a paragraph on a specic concept that is written in Arabic. The teacher would slowly read it
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aloud to you, utilizing excellent teaching skills such as voice modulation, eye contact, gesturing,
questioning, and wait time. Would you know what was being taught? Would you understand it
even if the teacher repeated this three times? Or would you learn better from the teacher who has an
understanding of your situation as an Arabic language learner and possesses specic skills that aid
your comprehension? Imagining this scenario provides teachers with a sense of what ELL students
experience for most of the school day, which they spend in mainstream classrooms rather than with
ELL specialists or ELL-certied teachers.
Connections Between STEM Literacy and ELL Literacy
When the term STEM was rst coined in 2001 by Judith Ramaley, the Assistant Director of
the Education and Human Resources Directorate at the National Science Foundation, it referred to
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. STEM now has a broader meaning, including
agriculture, environment, economics, education, computer science, and medicine (Zollman, 2011).
“There is a general consensus that everyone needs to be STEM literate, but there is a difference
between literacy and being literate. STEM literacy should not be viewed as a content area but as
a shifting, didactic means (composed of skills, abilities, factual knowledge, procedures, concepts,
and metacognitive capacities) to gain further learning” (Zollman, 2012, p. 12). Literacy in STEM
goes beyond understanding, communicating and applying, “going beyond ‘learning to know and
learning to do’ to ‘learning to live together and learning to be’” (p. 15), “from learning for STEM
literacy to using STEM literacy for learning” (p. 12).
Table 1
Comparing ELL Language Needs With STEM Literacy Needs
English language learning needs STEM literacy needs
Multiple opportunities to hear and use both social
and academic English
Multiple opportunities to hear and use language to
express STEM understandings
Rich contexts to help language comprehension,
and the opportunity to engage and contribute to
the interactive learning community
Rich contexts to help illustrate STEM concepts,
and the opportunity to engage and contribute to
the classroom STEM learning community
Instructional supports for written and spoken
language—e.g., intentional student grouping,
multiple representations, scaffolding strategies for
different tiers of English vocabulary
Appropriate supports for STEM concepts—e.g.,
hands-on student engagement, multiple represen-
tations, scaffolding strategies for STEM-specic
vocabulary
Acceptance of “awed” language for example
non-standard English grammar in earlier stages of
language learning
Acceptance of “awed” language--for example,
non-scientic language
Note. This table is adapted from Riley and Figgins (2015) and is used with permission from the authors.
Teaching students who are learning English is intimidating for many teachers, but seems to
be especially daunting to many STEM teachers who often have limited training in working with
language learners. Regardless of their content area specialty, we believe that all STEM teachers—
and their students—benet greatly from knowing some basic information about teaching English
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language learners. Table 1 shows a comparison of ELL students’ needs and students’ needs for
STEM literacy. As Bennett and Ruchti (2014) assert, STEM teachers can increase student learning
by integrating common practices.
In order to model what STEM teachers need to know and do, we offer the following example
activity, “Why do I need to wear a bicycle helmet?” (Teaching Channel, 2016), which incorporates
Newton’s rst, second, and third laws of motion in a real-world problem situation. In this activity,
students rst predict, then observe, and then experiment with placing a egg in a toy car and letting
it roll down an incline plane until the car hits a brick barrier causing the egg to y out of the car
and break on the oor.
What STEM Teachers Need to Know
Using literacy to learn is a valid method for ELL students, for STEM students, and, in fact,
for all students. The following are suggestions of what STEM teachers need to know about ELL
students in order to facilitate learning for all students.
Students Are Learning Two Types of English to Be Successful in School
“I hear him speaking uently with his friends out in the hall, so his lack of achievement must
not be a language barrier.” Complaints like this represent comments that we often hear from
teachers who assume that because a student speaks English well, the student’s struggle or failure
to perform in class is not related to language prociency issues. The most common misconception
about language learners is that if a student can speak English, then the student knows English.
However, much like learning in the STEM areas, language acquisition is not a linear process.
Successful students must acquire two different types of English, social language and academic
language, which Cummins (1984) referred to as “basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS)
and cognitive/academic language prociency (CALP)” (p. 136).
BICS, or social language, is less cognitively demanding and often includes nonverbal cues
and context clues to meaning; for this reason, students often become procient in social language
within 1–2 years of being in schools in the United States (Thomas & Collier, 2002). CALP, or
academic language, is much more cognitively demanding and often appears in situations without
many context cues (such as a nonillustrated reading passage or a lecture-style lesson without visuals
or manipulatives.) This more difcult type of English encompasses general academic language that
students are unlikely to hear in social situations (phrases like “select the most likely response from
the following options” or “multiply by the conjugate”) as well as content-area technical terms
(including STEM terminology with multiple meanings; e.g., plane or receptacle). How quickly
students acquire academic language varies widely due to multiple factors ranging from students’
prior educational experience to the quality of teaching. However, research over the past 2 decades
has indicated that students generally take 4–7 years—and sometimes up to 10 years—in U.S.
schools in order to acquire academic language prociency (Thomas & Collier, 2002). Given the
complexity of the task of learning academic English, it is no surprise that students who have
already acquired uent conversational English skills often still need language support for several
more years to reach grade-level expectations in the STEM content areas.
Teachers and even parents can easily mistake a student who speaks social English uently as
being procient in English overall—even though that student may need to increase their academic
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English prociency a great deal in order to succeed in grade-level content area work. One helpful
analogy for the way language acquisition works is to think of the different types of language that
we all use in different social situations (language registers). Two students talking to one another in
the hallway often use very different word choices and grammatical constructions than those same
students use with their teacher in the classroom.
Teachers also may recognize a parallel between the development of social and academic
language among English learners and among native speakers. Many English-only students
whose spoken language is perfectly functional for social situations do not have the academic
vocabulary necessary to complete grade-level tasks in Standard English—even if they speak no
other language. Adults use different vocabulary, sentence structure, and discourse parameters
when speaking to a supervisor, in a faculty meeting, with young children, and with close friends.
Academic language is not a set of skills that English learners can “soak up” from the environment
but rather is learned through scaffolding and contextual support and is facilitated through explicit
teaching.
Teachers Already Have Resources on What to Expect From Students Learning English
Each U.S. state’s department of education has procedures in place to monitor and support
language learning. These procedures also benet content area teachers, but many teachers are
unaware of the resources. Most states use a home language survey to indicate if a student enrolling in
school speaks a language other than English; every student who indicates that they speak a language
other than English is given an assessment of their prociency in reading, writing, listening, and
speaking English (Zacarian, 2012). The results of that assessment determine whether the student is
considered “limited English procient” and eligible for language support services. Under federal
mandates, local education agencies must assess an identied English language learner’s (ELL)
language prociency annually until 2 years after a student has demonstrated English prociency
(Zacarian, 2012). The results of this annual language prociency test can help STEM teachers
know what students should be able to do at each level of development in reading, writing, listening,
and speaking English.
Figure 1 provides a visual representation of how knowing a student’s language prociency
levels can help teachers know what they can expect from a student. These “Can Do Descriptors”
are published by WIDA, an organization that includes a consortium of 35 states that jointly use
resources to comply with federal mandates for educating English language learners (WIDA, 2013).
The WIDA language prociency standards and instructional recommendations are built upon a
strong research base and are a useful and recommended resource even for educators in states
that are not members of the WIDA Consortium. The gure that we have included here indicates
what a student at each level of English prociency can be expected to do in the areas of listening
and speaking in content area classrooms. STEM teachers can use this gure as a reference when
planning lessons and modifying expectations for assignments based on the type of language
students can produce and comprehend at a particular stage of English development. For example,
a teacher doing the egg experiment may design assignments with the expectation that a student
writing at Level 3 can be expected to produce short paragraphs but may not yet be able to state
opinions orally because of a Level 2 speaking prociency.
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Figure 1. “Can Do Descriptors” for English language learners. WIDA Can Do Descriptors © 2009 Board of
Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, on behalf of the WIDA Consortium—www.wida.us (used
with permission from WIDA).
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The second signicant resource that you may have in your school is a licensed ELL specialist.
With their specialized training in scaffolding strategies and second language literacy, teachers
with an ELL certication are experts in supporting academic language and differentiating
instruction. Yet, too often, ELL teachers are viewed only as interpreters. Using this licensed teacher
only as an aide is not utilizing his or her skills to their full potential. Some of the reading and
vocabulary learning strategies that ELL specialists use regularly in language classes can be used by
content-area teachers to great effect—and to the benet of all the students in the STEM classroom.
STEM teachers can maximize their personnel resources by collaborating and using strategies and
scaffolding methods that the ELL teacher can model.
Language Support Teachers Provide to English Learners Benets Other Students Too
The research-based best practices for teaching English learners offer two signicant additional
benets: (a) They also help English-only students develop academic language, which is particularly
important for struggling readers and students with learning differences (Center for Applied
Linguistics, 2015); and (b) they help all students learn STEM content (National Science Teachers
Association, 2015). Literacy in language acquisition for ELL students is not the end product but a
process for further learning of the STEM content areas.
What STEM Teachers Need to Do: Using Literacy to Learn
STEM teachers can utilize the ve following strategies to support language development
among ELLs as well as support literacy among all students: (a) build background of new concepts,
(b) support students’ vocabulary-building skills, (c) model how STEM vocabulary should be
used, (d) encourage student language production through increasing interaction opportunities, and
(e) use different grouping strategies for distinct purposes.
Build Background of New Concepts
STEM teachers know that their content has to have direct connections to the real world.
Teachers also know that these connections have to connect to the student’s real world (e.g., a
YouTube video) not the teacher’s real world (e.g., a VHS tape). Extending this idea, teachers need
connections to ELL students’ cultural real world to make connections and facilitate learning of new
concepts.
In addition to connecting to students’ cultures, students need to have experiences in multiple
representations: concrete with manipulatives, pictorial or graphical, numerical or algebraic, and
real-world applications (Zollman, 2012). This is in accordance with STEM content area standards
and, again, is helpful to English-only students as well as ELLs. Graphic organizers of a variety
of types are particularly useful in helping ELLs understand and communicate understanding of
complex topics (Haynes & Zacarian, 2010).
In our sample lesson, an egg is placed in a toy car and the car is released down an incline
plane with a barrier at the bottom of plane. The egg will y out of the toy car and land on the oor,
breaking the egg. This lesson connects students’ real-world activity of needing to wear a bicycle
helmet to Newton’s laws of motion. It also gives students context for understanding the lesson’s
key concepts, even if they do not yet understand all the language used in class. In contrast to
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the traditional classroom in which lecture and reading are followed by comprehension questions
and a culminating high-interest activity, we recommend that teachers of English learners “teach
backward” by beginning a lesson with an experiment (or interactive experience, or video clip) then
preteaching vocabulary and leading discussion before assigning a textbook reading or delivering
a lecture. This process is analogous to reverse engineering in STEM education. The hands-on or
visual experience—in this case, the egg demonstration—provides context for both the language
and content the students will learn throughout the lesson.
Support Students’ Vocabulary-Building Skills
English learners must learn three tiers of vocabulary. The rst tier is common vocabulary used
in social or daily life interactions. The second tier is the vocabulary needed for school that students
might not encounter in their everyday lives or social interactions; examples might include words
like seldom or classify. The third tier of vocabulary consists of academic content words which
have STEM-precise denitions used in specic situations (Haynes & Zacarian, 2010). Among
third tier vocabulary words, STEM language denitions vary from the English social vocabulary.
For example, the term plane has different meanings depending upon the context of the setting.
In common vocabulary, plane means an airplane to most students (ELL and native speakers.) In
mathematics, plane means the coordinate plane of the x- and y-axis in mathematics. But, in our
activity, plane means an incline plane that stores potential gravitational force. When STEM teachers
are presenting all their students with Tier 3 vocabulary, they can look through their assignments
and see which Tier 2 vocabulary words their ELLs will need to know to complete the assignment
successfully. Preteaching the STEM content vocabulary words, as well as supporting ELLs by
pointing out these Tier 2 vocabulary words, can help speed acquisition of the hundreds of words
that they need to learn to be able to achieve grade-level prociency in STEM content (File &
Adams, 2010).
The notion of considering three different tiers of vocabulary may seem excessive to teachers
who are not language specialists, but consider the following steps in our example. First we have the
students predict what will happen to the egg in lay terms. Later we introduce and model scientic
vocabulary. Still later, we expect students to apply an understanding of Newton’s laws of motion.
ELL students’ understanding of language is a developmental process for conceptual understanding,
much as we guide all STEM students’ understanding of content in a developmental process for
conceptual understanding.
Teachers support vocabulary development in a variety of ways—such as encouraging students
to keep vocabulary journals or creating mnemonic aids—but the key to learning vast numbers
of words is to use the words often in a variety of interactions. Research on language learning in
STEM content areas supports the necessity of students using target vocabulary multiple times in
reading, writing, speaking, and listening in order for students to retain large numbers of new words
(Mancilla-Martinez, 2010; Folse, 2006; Lee & Muncie, 2006). Some research-based methods
of recording and practicing vocabulary include student-created index cards with translations,
denitions, pictures, or mnemonic devices (Katz, 2014); websites and apps such as Quizlet;
interactive word walls; and personal dictionaries that may include translations and graphic or
pictorial representations (Echevarría, Vogt, & Short, 2012). Such tools can be useful, but research
has shown that the timeworn practices of writing dictionary denitions or studying isolated word
lists out of context and are not efcient in helping students retain vocabulary (Echevarría et al.,
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2012); rather, we learn new words through using those words in meaningful ways.
Returning to our sample lesson, a word wall of technological terms can direct the scaffolding of
building conceptual knowledge. The teacher can use the word wall to guide the precise denitions
of incline plane, inertia, momentum, acceleration, mass, and force as the students repeat the
experiment and reect upon the lesson in verbal and written form.
Model How STEM Vocabulary Should Be Used
Using literacy to learn means not just having discrete language skills but also being able to
apply and use those skills in order to learn content. Learning new vocabulary is essential for all
students—particularly English language learners who need to learn even more vocabulary to catch
up with their grade-level peers—but knowing the denitions of dozens of words is of limited utility
if students don’t know how to use the words to explain their learning. Learning a language involves
becoming procient at several levels of language usage: the word level (vocabulary), the sentence
level (grammar), and the discourse level (organization and cohesion of ideas; WIDA, 2013). As
an example, consider the student who has learned a number of words in a foreign language but
does not know how to express a complex idea with those words. Even students who speak only
English often do not know how to comprehend or construct complex sentences in academic English
(sentence-level prociency), much less comprehend a large amount of dense text (discourse-level
prociency).
Table 2
STEM Language Functions and Sentence Structure Frames
STEM language
functions
Sentence structure
frames
Sample sentences using
Tier 1 vocabulary
Sample sentences using
Tiers 2 and 3 vocabulary
and target concepts
Sequence First, __________,
then, _________, and
nally, __________.
We saw that rst the car
rolled down the board,
then the car hit the brick,
and then the egg ew out
of the car.
We observed potential gravita-
tional energy of the object at the
top of the incline plane. Then the
object accelerated due to gravi-
tational force and Newton’s rst
law of motion. Finally, the egg-
shell broke because of Newton’s
third law of motion.
Hypothesize If _________, then
______will ______.
If _____, then _____
would have _______.
If we let the egg roll down
the board, it will break
when it hits the brick.
From Newton’s rst law of
motion, we hypothesize that
the momentum of the object
will cause the object to stay in
motion when the vehicle hits the
barrier.
Moving beyond discrete vocabulary words to sentence-level language support may seem like
the realm of an English teacher, but STEM teachers can help increase sentence-level academic
English prociency during the course of a STEM lesson as well. For example, using simple
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cloze-style sentence frames allows teachers to model the types of sentence structures needed for
STEM literacy in a systematic way (Dobb, 2005; Hoffman, 2013). By displaying simple examples
like those in Table 2 and prompting students to follow the template when speaking or writing,
STEM teachers can explicitly teach STEM language without taking time away from content
instruction. With the expectation that students will write in all STEM areas, modeling various
sentence structures empowers students with tools to write across the curriculum. Considering
that many students who speak only English also need practice using standard academic English
sentence structure, this language assistance strategy supports both academic English growth and
STEM literacy for all students. Using sentence frames in class discussions gives students multiple
practice opportunities with listening, speaking, reading, and writing key STEM sentence structures.
Merely posting a template on a board or digital whiteboard has only marginal effect, but repeated
exposure will support all students’ STEM literacy skills if the teacher scaffolds the lesson to deeper
and deeper conceptual understanding.
Encourage Student Language Production Through Increasing Interaction Opportunities
In order to use a language prociently, learners need to engage receptive skills (reading and
listening) as well as productive skills (speaking and writing). Students’ receptive oral vocabulary,
words that they comprehend in listening, often grows more quickly than their productive written
vocabulary, words they can use effectively in writing (Peregoy & Boyle, 2013), so students need
to practice using their newly acquired vocabulary in a variety of ways. Increasing interaction
involves STEM teachers planning classroom activities with an eye toward increasing interaction
opportunities as well as thinking about what language students will need to use to complete the
task—a language objective (Echevarría et al., 2010).
Again, we go back to our sample lesson. First, students predict what they believe will occur
the rst time they see the egg at the top of the incline plane. The students then verbally share their
predictions with another student. In later experiments with the egg activity, the teacher guides,
challenges, and edits the students’ scientic terminology in their oral then written communications.
Use Different Grouping Strategies for Distinct Purposes
When teachers ask us how to group students in class when different languages are involved, we
respond by saying, “It depends on the purpose for the cooperative group.” Teachers often arrange
student groupings so that ELL students are grouped with English-only speakers to encourage group
communication in English. This grouping strategy encourages ELLs to practice their language
skills.
However, STEM content teachers should not be afraid of students using their native languages
at times in class. Research supports the value in ELL students using their native language to
clarify and solidify concepts (Echevarría et al., 2010). Many teachers across disciplines have been
misinformed that students should not use their native language at all in school, or that students
and families should be discouraged from using their native language at home in order to facilitate
quicker English learning. However, federal mandates specify that schools may use a student’s native
language to help teach both English and academic content (Zacarian, 2012). As far as students and
parents speaking their native language, decades of research on language learning supports the
importance of retaining rst language use in the home. For example, The National Literacy Panel on
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Language Minority Children and Youth found that literacy skills, concept attainment, and content
knowledge learned in one language will transfer to a new language more quickly if a student can
utilize his or her background in the home language (August & Shanahan, 2006; Cummins, 2000).
Students in STEM classrooms often nd great benet in using their home languages periodically
in order to check their understanding and solidify their learning with peers and teachers who speak
their rst language. Similarly, STEM teachers should take advantage of any print or multimedia
resources available in students’ home languages to use as supplementary teaching materials. In our
sample lesson, we want ELL students rst to use their native language to build the background for
the concepts that will be presented later in the sequence of Newton’s laws of motion.
Connecting What We Know and What We Do
Finally, good instruction for learning is good for every student. We already have three ways to
view ELL students’ learning. First, similar to the STEM research on female students and gender
bias, teachers sometimes assume that a specic group of students (ELLs) are not as capable as other
students and, not wanting to make the students uncomfortable, ask only lower level questions to
those students (Shahrill & Mundia, 2014). We want all students to obtain the Common Core State
Standards for Mathematical Practice (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices &
Council of Chief State School Ofcers, 2010) of Problem Solving, Reasoning, Communicating,
Modeling, Using Tools Strategically, Attending to Precision, and Making Use of Structure. These
standards will not be attained if the teacher expects only lower level responses from the ELL
student. The teacher has a responsibility to all students to challenge them to succeed.
Second, each school district gives an English prociency test on reading, writing, speaking
and listening to ELL students. Students then have an Individual Learning Plan (ILP) or a Pastoral
Support Programme (PSP) plan that delineates accommodations for instruction and modications
for assessments. These seem daunting to a STEM teacher. But think back 10 years ago and receiving
Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) for students with learning disorders. Educators learned
to include IEPs into their lesson planning; in the same manner, educators will become accustomed
to providing scaffolding and language support for ELL students’ needs.
Third, since ELL students are emerging bilinguals (or may already be multilingual before
learning English), ELL students in class are already utilizing more of their brain function than
other students. So, we challenge STEM teachers to view having ELL students in one’s class as
having gifted students in the class. Native English-speaking students benet socially and especially
academically from having interaction with ELL students in their class.
Closing Thoughts
An ELL student may speak with an accent, but this does not mean that the student thinks
with an accent. We know that students achieve more from teachers who scaffold instruction
and activate schema, beginning class with motivating demonstrations, videos, manipulatives,
real-world applications, or laboratory experiments. We also know that beginning class with visual
or concrete clues gives context to learning, helping not only ELLs but also all STEM students—
using literacy to learn is good for all.
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Journal of STEM Teacher Education Vol. 51 No. 1, Spring 2016
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Authors
Lisa Hoffman
Assistant Professor, School of Education
Indiana University Southeast
Email: lhh@ius.edu
Alan Zollman
Associate Professor, School of Education
Indiana University Southeast
Email: alanzoll@ius.edu
12
Journal of STEM Teacher Education, Vol. 51 [2016], Iss. 1, Art. 9
http://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/jste/vol51/iss1/9