Research+Methods+and+Research+Questions

Problem Statements

 * "Research reveals that relationships between language and content or meaning in educational discourse can be problematic rather than transparent and that there is a need for theory-based discourse analysis research which can illuminate these relationships." (Huang & Morgan, 2003, p. 235)


 * "Yet, relatively little research has followed students from ESL programs into mainstream subject areas in the senior secondary (high school) years, or has examined the classroom discourse, activities and assignments as well as the ongoing language-related challenges they encounter there. . . understanding the language and content (L & C) requirements of students in particular subject areas and the levels of support that are -- or are not -- provided will reveal sources of potential difficulty and remediation for ESL students and their teachers." (Duff, 2001, p. 106)


 * Many ELLs will not be able to keep up with the content knowledge required due to their lack of English proficiency. The possibilities are bilingual instruction or CBI. ". . . inquiry-based science is a particularly powerful instructional context for the integration of academic content and language development for English language learners. The development and use of language functions such as describing, predicting, hypothesizing, reasoning, explaining, and reflecting, parallel the processes used in the learning of science. Inquiry science, which promotes students' construction of meaning through exploration of scientific phenomenon, observations, experiments, and hands-on activities, provides an authentic context for language use." (Stoddart, 2002, p. 665)


 * "But CBI recommendations typically deal only very generally with the linguistic issues related to instruction in different disciplines. . . Although such a focus may be useful for beginning students, for students who want to achieve grade-level standards, CBI needs to be enhanced through a greater focus on language itself to help students cope with the complexity of grade-level concepts." (Schleppegrill, 2004, p. 69)

Research Questions
"The study calls for more research on the grammatical and discourse features of particular kinds of school writing so that classroom teachers may gain a better understanding of the intrinsic relationships between meaning and wording in academic writing tasks and thus be better able to help students use the grammatical resources available to them." (Huang & Morgan, 2003, p. 237)
 * How does knowledge structure analysis as a tool for discourse analysis capture both knowledge construction expressed in written discourse and the development of linguistic skill sin science writing?
 * What are the intrinsic relationships between the construction of scientific knowledge and development in science writing? (Huang & Morgan, 2003, p. 237)


 * What are the observed and reported challenges facing ESL students in two SS10 classes, in terms of language, literacy, content, and culture, and how, if at all, are those challenges met? (Duff, 2001, p. 111)


 * How do teachers conceive of science language integration?
 * What are the cognitive demands that underlie the development of teacher expertise in domain integration? (Stoddart, et al, 2002, p. 666)


 * "The main goals of our study were to identify the linguistic challenges that ELLs encounter when learning history in mainstream classes and to design some pedagogical tools to enable content teachers to help students meet these challenges." (Schleppegrell, 2004, p. 70)

Research Methods
"The analysis of the students' written discourse focused on explicitly examining (1) their knowledge of how matter can be classified, (2) whether the semantic relationships of classification is successfully expressed via linguistic devices, and (3) their sophistication (i.e. the ability of successfully using more types and tokens of linguistc features) in the use of the English language to demonstrate knowledge construction." (Huang & Morgan, 2003, p. 244)
 * Knowledge structure analysis - based on Mohan's knowledge framework (Huang & Morgan, 2003)


 * Ethnography, observations, interviews (Duff, 2001)


 * Case study; observation, interviews, text analysis (Schleppegrill, 2004)

Theoretical Frameworks
"A functional approach to discourse analysis can thereby link language and meaning in discourse by identifying the grammatical resources that realize these three kinds of meanings." (Huang & Morgan, 2003, p. 237)
 * Systemic Functional Linguistics -- how forms and meanings are related in discourse (Huang & Morgan, 2003, p. 236)


 * Lave and Wenger's "Legitimate peripheral participation" (to think about how ESL students in mainstream classes remain marginalized) (Duff, 2001, p. 119)


 * Literature on curriculum domain integration, development of expertise in teaching, and cognitive complexity (Stoddart, et al, 2002, p. 666)
 * Curriculum integration - "Huntley (1998) described integration between domains as "synergistic," where each domain complements and reinforces the other, resulting in enhanced learning in both domains." (Stoddart et al, 2002, p. 667)


 * Science-language integration rubric (a possible framework from Stoddart et al, 2002) to look at teachers' attitudes and performance in CBI