Instructional practices for scaffolding emergent bilinguals’ comprehension of informational science texts

Abstract

In the telling case presented here, the instructional practices an exemplary teacher used to scaffold fourth-grade emergent bilinguals’ comprehension of a challenging informational science text are identified, analyzed, and discussed. Data sources included observation field notes, video and audio recording of 11 hours of instruction, the teacher’s post-teaching written reflection log, and two interviews. The findings yielded from systematic, iterative qualitative data analysis and constant comparative methods suggest that in the context of text-based discussions with informational texts, teachers can employ an array of instructional practices to scaffold emergent bilinguals’ construction of conceptual understanding. In particular, iterative readings, explicit attention to language, and engagement with multimodal representations of core concepts can create multiple opportunities for students’ analysis of both the language and meaning in informational science texts.