By the Center for the Success of English Learners (CSEL), led by Davis Francis at the University of Houston and Sharon Vaughn at the University of Texas at Austin.
HEDCO Institute Blog 16- Dec. 4, 2024
In FY 2020, IES invested $20 million in two R&D centers to improve opportunities and achievement for multilingual learners (MLs) in secondary school settings. One of the R&D centers, called the Center for the Success of English Learners (CSEL), , is undertaking a focused program of research aimed at developing and testing interventions to improve instruction for MLs who are currently classified as needing English language support in secondary schools. This blog discusses the work that they are doing to improve outcomes for MLs in social studies.
MLs are expected to acquire the same important content knowledge and skills as their mono-lingual English-speaking peers while they simultaneously develop English skills across language domains and disciplines. There is a widely held misconception that students must be proficient in the English language to interact with peers, text, and content. The reality is to the contrary: to develop language and literacy skills within a discipline, MLs must be provided daily opportunities to participate in challenging grade-level tasks.
An instructional approach that has shown promise for all students, and MLs in particular, in the disciplinary area of social studies is the adapted World Generation (WorldGen) program, developed for middle grade classrooms by CSEL. Through iterative design experiments, the CSEL social studies team at The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk worked with master teachers to integrate language and literacy-based enhancements into existing instructional materials, Social Studies Generation (SoGen). The goal was to make grade-level social studies content more accessible and engaging while having all students, inclusive of MLs of varying English proficiency, practice the disciplinary literacy skills that are outlined in contemporary standards.
WorldGen draws heavily from its predecessor, SoGen, which emphasizes student dialogue, the development of argumentative skills, and social perspective taking (i.e., the ability to understand the thoughts/perspectives of others). Such skills are integral to students’ social studies content acquisition and the development of communication skills in social studies.
Core Principles of WorldGen Instruction
- Foregrounding Content to Build Language: In WorldGen, content serves as a vehicle for teaching complex social studies ideas. By engaging with challenging disciplinary tasks, MLs utilize and expand their academic language capabilities. The curricular materials are structured around debate questions related to historical and geographical contexts, supplemented by various informational texts that encourage active discussion and analysis.
- Connecting Content to Students' Lives: To increase relevance and engagement, WorldGen includes digital tools like timelines and Instagram-like photo albums that connect historical settings to contemporary lives. Additionally, instructional activities like Reader’s Theater integrates modern dilemmas with a comparable question to the unit debate question, helping students develop their disciplinary skills within relatable content.
- Team-Based Learning (TBL): TBL is used to foster collaborative academic discussions within diverse groups made up of students with varying levels of English proficiency. This method not only promotes content understanding but also supports language development as students assume specific roles in debates and group discussions, ensuring active participation and deeper investment in learning.
Findings from both an initial study and replication study of WorldGen suggest that the instructional approach significantly enhances the way MLs access social studies content. Teacher and student feedback has been instrumental in refining the curriculum, with reported improvements in usability and the efficacy of instructional practices. These enhancements are aimed at supporting and enriching the learning environment for all students, providing them with the tools to co-construct knowledge in social studies while developing disciplinary literacy skills.
Social studies teachers face increasing pressure to “cover” extensive content, and even when teachers have access to professional learning on effective instructional practices (for MLs and others), there is limited support for integrating these practices into existing curricula. This may be why the practice of lecture-style instruction persists in many classrooms.
WorldGen stands as a robust model that social studies teachers can adopt, with evidence-based practices intentionally woven through the curriculum materials. This study highlights an important shift toward more equitable and effective educational practices for adolescent MLs by inviting them to interact with content and peers and by scaffolding their participation in disciplinary activities.
The success seen in implementing WorldGen materials; however, underscores the challenge of supporting content teachers’ learning and use of such instructional practices within their existing curricula, which is the CSEL team’s next endeavor. It is essential that we translate research findings into classroom reality to allow MLs to leverage their cultural and linguistic resources to support the development of disciplinary language and literacy skills and to empower teachers to support deep understanding of big ideas in social studies for all students.
This post originally appeared as a blog on the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition on November 1, 2024.
Sources:
Martinez, L. R., Fishstrom, S., Vaughn, S., Capin, P., Carlson, C. D., Andress, T. T., & Francis, D. J. (2024). Supporting knowledge and language acquisition of secondary emergent bilinguals through social studies instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 59(3), 349–370. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.541
Hogan, E., Fishstrom, S., Andress, T. T., Martinez, L. & Vaughn, S. (2024). Instructional practices for secondary social studies teachers: Describing a curricular program designed to improve language, content knowledge and literacy outcomes for emergent bilinguals. TESOL Journal, 00, e866. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.866
Strategic Education Research Partnership. (n.d.). Social Studies Generation: Disciplinary literacy strategies in action. https://www.serpinstitute.org/sogen