Learning an Additional Language Through Dialogic Inquiry

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Learning an Additional LanguageThrough Dialogic InquiryMari Haneda a & Gordon Wells ba School of Teaching and Learning, Ohio State University, USAb Department of Education, University of California, SantaCruz, USA

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Learning an Additional Language ThroughDialogic Inquiry

Mari HanedaSchool of Teaching and Learning, Ohio State University, USA

Gordon WellsDepartment of Education, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

It has been increasingly recognised that classroom discourse plays an important socialrole as a semiotic mediator of knowledge construction with respect to curriculum con-tent. The assumption is that through active verbal engagement with a topic of interest,students are enabled to master the modes of language use associated with schooling– the various genres and registers specific to the different school subjects. In thisconceptual position paper, we examine how appropriate these assumptions are in thecase of school-aged English as additional language (EAL) learners who are learningEnglish as the language of instruction. In the first part, we will make the case for theimportance of dialogue in learning, both first and second languages and the need foran inquiry orientation to the curriculum in order to promote dialogic interaction. Inthe second part, drawing on examples from our research, we will present three instan-tiations of dialogic inquiry involving EAL learners in elementary and intermediategrades and discuss issues concerning dialogic inquiry and second language learning.

doi: 10.2167/le730.0

Keywords: English as an additional language, dialogue, inquiry, classroomcommunity

It has been recognised that classroom discourse plays an important social roleas a semiotic mediator of knowledge construction with respect to curriculumcontent. In particular, it has been argued that knowledge is most effectivelyconstructed through dialogue arising from jointly undertaken inquiry (Beach &Myers, 2001; Gutierrez et al., 1999; Rosebery et al., 1992). The assumption is thatactive verbal engagement with a topic of interest will help students to transitionfrom ‘everyday’ to ‘scientific’ concepts and master the modes of language useassociated with schooling, that is to say, the various genres and registers specificto the different school subject (Christie & Martin, 1997; Schleppegrell, 2004).Classroom discourse also mediates the construction of identities, both those of‘successful’ students and those of students who are deemed to be ‘unsuccessful’(Ballenger, 1997; O’Connor & Michaels, 1996).

In this paper, we are concerned with how appropriate these assumptionsare in the case of students learning English as an additional language (EAL),when this is the language of instruction. Under what conditions might effectivedialogic interaction be enacted in classrooms involving EAL students and whatforms might it take when the majority of students have limited proficiency in the

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Learning an Additional Language Through Dialogic Inquiry 115

target language? What characterises effective dialogic interaction with respectto EAL students of varied levels of proficiency in the target language? It is thesequestions that we will try to address in this paper with reference to studentswho are learning English as the language of instruction.

Theories of language learning and use are rather sharply divided accordingto whether they treat the forms of language (grammar and lexis) as indepen-dent of the uses to which language is put (Chomsky, 1972) or whether theyapproach language in terms of the functions it serves and see knowledge ofthe formal structure as the result of subsequent reflection on the patterns thatoccur in spontaneous speech (Halliday, 1975; Tomasello, 2003). Certainly, thelatter approach seems to accord better with children’s learning of their first lan-guage (L1), since in most cases, the family members from whom they learn havelittle or no explicit knowledge of the language they use to communicate witheach other. According to Krashen (1985), the same is true of untutored secondlanguage (L2) learning, although most formal teaching of additional languagestends to place considerable emphasis on the mastery of language form out of thecontext of meaningful use. This is perhaps understandable when the learnershave no occasion to use the additional language outside the classroom, but itmakes much less sense when they are learning the language as part of theirenculturation into the wider society in which they are growing up. It is thislatter situation with which we are concerned on the present occasion.

Before they enter school, whatever their home culture, children develop theirL1 through engagement in jointly undertaken activities with significant othersin familiar cultural settings, and they learn their L1 as an intrinsic aspect of be-coming competent members of their families and local communities. Throughthe numerous social interactions that make up the patterns of everyday life,they learn how to communicate appropriately with others in a variety of set-tings, and as they participate competently in routine activities that require thecoordination of language and action, they unreflectively take over the culturalnorms and assumptions that govern life in their immediate communities (Heath,1983). These early experiences provide plentiful opportunities for exposure toappropriate language modelling by caregivers, other adults, siblings and peers.Indeed, L1 learning occurs not only in a socially supportive environment butalso with sufficient repetition for learners to learn their L1 at their own pace.As a result, when their schooling takes place in their L1, by the time they startschool, such children already have a rich repertoire of language that is imbuedwith situated personal meanings.

Learners of a second or additional language, on the other hand, do not havecomparable early language experiences in the language used at school, eventhough it is likely that they will have had culturally appropriate experiences inlearning the language used in their homes. Thus, for these children, given theirlater start in learning the language encountered at school, it seems clear in prin-ciple that, in order to be successful, it is of the utmost importance that frequentopportunities are provided for them to engage in dialogic interaction in thelanguage of instruction with peers as well as teachers. However, learning an ad-ditional language at school can take place under very different conditions. WhenEAL students are in a class that includes a substantial number of L1 speakers ofthe language of instruction, it is relatively easy to create conditions for them to

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116 Language and Education

engage in dialogue with L1 peers. When all the students in the class are learnersof the language of instruction, on the other hand, the situation is very different,since there are no L1 peers with whom to interact. A key question, therefore,is whether, in these latter circumstances, it is possible to create conditions fordialogue in the target language, that is to say the language of instruction.

Why Dialogue Is Essential in Learning LanguageWhen children first learn language, they listen and talk as an intrinsic part of

sharing their interests with family members and of engaging in joint activities,ranging from getting dressed to helping with household tasks. In the process,they learn the forms and patterns of the language of their community and, atthe same time, they learn how to make sense of their experience in the sameway as those with whom they interact. However, in such everyday conversa-tional exchanges there is no overt teaching about language. As Bakhtin (1986)emphasised, language is not encountered or learned as an abstract system ofdecontextualised rules and definitions. Rather, language occurs as dialogue. Ut-terances are constructed and understood in relation to the specific purposes andconditions of the activity in which they occur and in relation to the utterancesthat both precede and follow. As he puts it, ‘the forms of language and the typ-ical forms of utterances ... enter our experience and our consciousness together,and in close connection with one another’ (p. 78).

Expanding on the dialogic nature of language use, Bakhtin drew attentionto what he called its essential responsivity, and to the closely related concept ofaddressivity. In conversation, the hearer is not passive. When she or he listens toand understands the speaker’s utterance, she or he ‘takes an active, responsiveattitude toward it . . . Sooner or later what is heard and actively understoodwill find its response in the subsequent speech or behavior of the listener’ (pp.68–69). Therefore, for speakers, responsivity works in both directions. Not onlyare their utterances directed towards someone and shaped in anticipation ofthat person’s uptake and response (addressivity), but they are also responses topreceding utterances, expressing the speaker’s attitude to them as well as to thetopic of the current utterance (responsivity). Thus, ‘any utterance is a link in avery complex organized chain of other utterances’ (p. 104).

But language use is not just an exchange between individuals on a particu-lar occasion. Every conversation presupposes the existence of a community ofspeaker/listeners who use the resources of language in very much the samemanner, selecting ways of talking appropriate for the purpose and participantsinvolved. Bakhtin referred to these ways of talking as speech genres. As he putsit, though imbued with an individual speaker or writer’s individuality and thesubjectivity of her present concerns, every utterance is ‘shaped and developedwithin a certain generic form’ (1986: 78), which takes the form it does becauseprevious participants, over many generations, have developed functionally ef-fective ways of talking for the goals, both social and practical, that they aretrying to achieve. In fact, the match between situation and speech genre is soclose that, by listening to what participants say and how they say it, one canvery quickly recognise how they understand the situation and what they areattempting to do together.

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The range of speech genres that are in daily use is numerous, corresponding tothe diversity of activity settings in which linguistic communication takes place.Nevertheless, simply by engaging in activities with others, over time childreneffortlessly learn how to converse appropriately and to produce and compre-hend utterances that achieve their intentions. And this is possible because ofthe dialogic nature of conversation, with its collaborative and co-constructedmaking of meaning to get things done together.

Language in the ClassroomIn some essential respects, language use in the classroom is very similar to

its use in the wider community. When students are working collaboratively ingroups, they co-construct meaning over successive utterances in order to getthings done together. However, the expectation of reciprocity between listenerand speaker assumed in Bakhtin’s work does not apply in all situations, as isthe case in most situations where the teacher is interacting with the whole class;here, the teacher typically makes both the first and the last move in the three-partexchanges (teacher initiates; student responds; teacher follows up) that Lemke(1990) called triadic dialogue.

However, further developing Bakhtin’s thinking about dialogue, Lotman(1988) argued that a ‘text’ (spoken as well as written) serves two functions.The first aims to have the listener/reader receive and accept exactly the mean-ing intended by the speaker/writer, while the second is concerned to elicit aresponse in the way described by Bakhtin. Of course, both functions alwaysapply to some extent, but they can be thought of as lying at the two ends of acontinuum with a range of possible relative emphases on one or the other inbetween. Lotman characterised the first function as serving to transmit acceptedinformation, norms and values in the interest of maintaining the stability of asociety or organisation. As he pointed out, when this function is emphasised,the text is presented as authoritative and no form of response other than accep-tance is expected. In the case of the second function, however, it is precisely theexpectation of response that is uppermost. When this function is dominant, atext serves ‘to generate new meanings’ and so functions as ‘a thinking device’(1988: 36–37). In what follows, we shall refer to the two different functions asmonologic and dialogic, respectively.

This distinction is useful when considering the variety of discourse genresthat occur in classrooms, for they can be seen as lying on a continuum frommonologic to dialogic, according to the kind of roles that the teacher sets up forstudents to play and the extent of control that he or she exercises as managerof the discourse. In particular, it is the kind of expectations that the teacher setsup for students as responders within the macro-genre of triadic dialogue thatmost strongly determines the degree of dialogicality of the discourse. Situatedtowards the monologic end of the continuum is what might be called transmis-sionary teaching, where the teacher primarily asks closed, known-informationquestions, expects students to provide the predetermined correct answers, andevaluates their performance. On the other hand, the teacher can enact a genrethat is more dialogic by choosing to exercise her authority as a teacher in adifferent way. For instance, the teacher may ask open-ended questions, inviting

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students to offer their own ideas, opinions or conjectures and encouraging themto respond to each other’s contributions by adding to, or challenging, what hasbeen said. In any given day, however, it is likely that the same teacher will drawon a range of discourse genres, depending on a variety of factors in the totalsituation.

Of the multiple factors that influence the choice of discourse genre, one of themost important is the goal of the activity selected (e.g. introduction of a concept,discussion of the results of an experiment, revisiting material already learned).For example, prior to science inquiry, the teacher may choose to give a mini-exposition about the specific science concepts involved (a monologic genre).Following that, she may use a more collaborative discourse genre in which sheencourages students to explore these concepts. Finally, she may use a questionand answer genre (monologic) to recap what has been learned. However, whilethere are relatively distinct, stable subgenres of triadic dialogue, some moremonologic and some more dialogic, discourse is always emergent in the momentas it progresses from one move to the next.

EAL Students and Dialogic InteractionAs we described earlier, in the learning of their L1, children’s development

takes place most effectively when they have many opportunities to engage indialogic interaction with those around them. Naturally, there are also occasionswhen a more monologic function is appropriate, for example when the child’ssafety is at risk or when he or she is behaving in an unacceptable manner. Butas a comparison of children whose language development occurs more or lesssuccessfully shows, it is the frequency of dialogic interaction that is the bestpredictor of rate of development (Wells, 1986). Ideally, therefore, the classroomwould also provide many occasions for dialogue, with the teacher fosteringit through her or his choice of curricular activities and management of theinteraction involved. This would certainly provide excellent opportunities forlearning language and also, as Lotman argues, for encouraging thinking and forgenerating new meanings.

Clearly, it is important for all students to develop the discursive competenceto participate in a range of classroom discourse genres across the curriculum(Hawkins, 2004). And to do so, they need multiple opportunities to engageactively in using these genres. However, participation in dialogic interactionis particularly beneficial for EAL students for a number of reasons. First, as ameans of encountering the additional language in use, dialogic interaction pro-vides not only ‘comprehensible input’ (Krashen, 1985) but also opportunities tolearn how to engage in the genres of the different academic disciplines so thatthey may become academically competent participants (Colombi & Schleppe-grell, 2002; Scarcella, 2003; Schleppegrell, 2004). For example, knowing howto appropriately engage in a discussion of literature or of science experimentsis an important participatory competence that EAL students need to develop(Gibbons, 1998, 2002; MacSwan & Rolstad, 2003); this goes beyond what Bakhtincalled ‘the forms of language’ (grammar, lexis, phonology). Furthermore, whenthey are called on to play a major role in the co-construction of curriculum knowl-edge, EAL students are likely to have opportunities to produce longer and more

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complex contributions as they assume the role of active participants in discus-sion, leading to the production of ‘comprehensible output’ (Swain, 1995, 2005).

Second, in using their language resources to contribute to the ongoing class-room talk, they simultaneously learn the social and communicative strategiesneeded to access the academic content (e.g. when to contribute, how to ex-press their ideas clearly using appropriate discourse strategies). As noted byGreen and Harker (1988), curriculum is tripartite in nature, posing academic,social and communicative demands. Put differently, EAL students need to learnhow to communicate with others in an interpersonally appropriate manner ina particular situation and how to express social relationships, while at the sametime learning the academic content (Verplaetse, 2000). In a related vein, whenEAL learners are given significant interactive roles, they become recognised aslegitimate members of the classroom community (Cummins, 2000, 2006; Au-thor, in press). Interaction determines the nature of co-membership a studentexperiences within the group; in other words, students develop their identi-ties as particular kinds of person within the classroom community through theinteractive roles they take on or have assigned to them (Gee, 2000).

Third, as they contribute to the ongoing construction of knowledge, EALstudents are likely to encounter alternative perspectives on the topic underdiscussion, expressed by students as well as the teacher. Such opportunitiesto listen to differing perspectives expose them to diverse language models(e.g. different ways of expressing ideas and the language of negotiation, suchas agreeing/disagreeing with someone) (Echevarria & Powers, 2006; Warrenet al., 2001). That is to say, instead of being exposed mostly to teacher talk, in dia-logic interaction EAL students have opportunities to observe and/or engage inthe interactive use of language and to experience what Bakhtin (1986) called theinteranimation of voices – a more heteroglossic use of language. This also createslinguistic redundancy, providing EAL students the repeated language practiceneeded to develop a high level of communicative competency. Thus, if the goalof L2 learning and teaching is to help EAL students to become competent mem-bers of a classroom community, both socially and academically, there is a strongcase for engaging them in dialogic interaction as much as possible.

In the remainder of this paper, we present and discuss particular cases of EALstudents in different classrooms. In each classroom, they experienced a rangeof discourse genres, some more monologic than others. However, given ourpurpose here, we shall focus our discussion on instances of the more dialogicgenres.

The Need for Inquiry as Orientation to CurriculumDespite the desirability of engaging students in dialogue, the genres of dis-

course just discussed tend to occur rather infrequently in most classrooms, asnumerous surveys and observational studies have shown (Galton et al., 1999;Nystrand, 1997; Williams, 2003). Unfortunately, this is equally true of class-rooms in which second or additional language instruction is taking place (vanLier, 1996). On the other hand, there have been a number of reports in recentyears that show that students from the early years of schooling onwards arequite capable of participating effectively in various genres of dialogue, if they

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are given the opportunity, including students learning a second or additionallanguage. A key characteristic of most of these classrooms is the adoption ofan inquiry orientation to curriculum, in which students engage in ‘hands-on’investigations as part of curriculum units ranging from science (Gallas, 1995;Gibbons, 2002; Palincsar et al., 1998), maths (Cobb, 1995; Lampert et al., 1996), toliterature (Davis, 2001; Donoahue, 1998; McMahon et al., 1997).

Starting in 1991, the present authors were involved in a collaborative action re-search project that included an investigation of the relationship between inquiryand dialogue. Over a period of seven years, more than ten teachers voluntarilyjoined the project, with the objective of exploring ways of creating communitiesof inquiry in the classroom. When a comparison was made between early andlate observations in each teacher’s participation in the project, it was found thatin every case there were significant changes in the direction of the occurrence ofmore dialogic interaction (Wells & Mejia Arauz, 2006). And in an earlier report,it was found that the features that characterised dialogue were significantlymore likely to occur in curricular activities that were concerned with planningfor, carrying out and interpreting the results of inquiries, in which students hadconsiderable responsibility for choosing the specific topic and the method fortheir investigations (Nassaji & Wells, 2000).

We were not surprised by these findings concerning the relationship betweeninquiry and dialogue. For true dialogue to occur, the participants must be in-terested in the topic, have personal beliefs and opinions about which they careenough to wish to voice them, and believe that the group conclusion will takeaccount of all contributions. These conditions are most likely to arise when acurricular unit has an overall theme which is of interest to all, or at least a major-ity, of the students, when they work in groups on self-chosen topics under thetheme, and the teacher does not assume the role of primary knower with respectto the conclusions to be reached. In addition, the ethos of the classroom com-munity must be such that all students listen respectfully to the contributions oftheir peers and offer relevant justifications for their agreement or disagreementwith what others have to say.

Stated thus, it is perhaps not surprising that these conditions are rarely met inthe prevailing political climate, in which it is scores in tests of factual informa-tion rather than understanding of the key concepts and their relationship to theevidence gained through investigation and from personal experience that aregiven the greatest weight by politicians and educational administrators. Nev-ertheless, there are many teachers who, with support and encouragement, arewilling to try to achieve them in the manner that they feel most effective for theparticular students that they teach.

This was the case for the teachers in the Developing Inquiring Communitiesin Education Project (DICEP) that we have just described. Working together asan inquiring community ourselves, we met regularly to discuss the projects inprogress of individual members, to explore common findings, and to preparepresentations of our individual and collective work (Wells, 2001a). What isparticularly significant in the context of this paper is that all the classrooms ofthese teachers contained students who were learning English as a second oradditional language. In most cases, these EAL students were fairly advancedand able to participate in both practical activities and the discussions to which

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these gave rise. However, over the course of the project, there were several newarrivals who spoke no English but who were placed in ‘mainstream’ classroomsfor all or most of each day. In the following section, we will describe somecritical events in these students’ progress in adjusting to the use of English asthe language of instruction.

Joining the Community: Learning EnglishLing-Li arrived in Canada from Mainland China at about the age of eight and

was placed in the combined Grades 3 and 4 class of Ms Lee, one of the DICEPteachers, who had herself learned English as an additional language. This classcontained a number of other Chinese-Canadian children as well as childrenfrom other countries, all of whom were relatively fluent in English. Throughouther first year, Ling-Li attended a class for EAL learners for about an hour of eachday, but the remainder of the time was spent in the ‘regular’ class, where shewas, from the beginning, included in all the ongoing activities. In the winter ofher first year, we observed the whole of a curriculum unit on the theme of timeand were able to make several observations of Ling-Li’s increasing participation(Wells & Chang, 1997).

Early in this curriculum unit, the children worked in groups to determinewhich of several variables affected a pendulum’s rate of swing. Ling-Li joinedseveral other girls in an experiment to find out whether weight was a relevantvariable. While she rarely spoke, she joined the others in attaching washers tothe length of string that formed the pendulum and in counting the number ofswings completed in 30 seconds on each trial. At one point, the knot that securedthe washers came loose and Ling-Li pointed this out, saying ‘Uh-oh. that notway to tie it on’. She then helped another girl to tie it more securely.

On another day, she worked with two other girls, Emma and Veronica, tofind out whether rhythmic counting, as they banged two plastic cups together,was an accurate way of measuring time. For this experiment each girl filled anidentical bottle with water to the same level and then poured out the contentswhile the other two girls counted how long it took. Ling-Li, who went first, tookfour claps. Emma and Veronica each emptied theirs in a count of three. Emma,also a Chinese-Canadian, who had assumed the role of group leader, pausedfor a moment’s reflection (In this and all following transcripts, the followingconventions apply: [indicates overlapping talk; <> marks a portion of speechthat is uncertain; * indicates a word that was inaudible; - indicates a restart or acontinuation of a previous utterance;. pauses are indicated by a period for eachsecond; CAPS indicate words spoken with marked stress; ( ) are annotationsmade by the transriber).

Emma: I know, me and Veronica are tied. Do you know why you were slow?(to Ling-Li)

When Ling-Li does not answer, Emma puts the question again in a differentform:

Emma: What we did . what we did was we . did a method by timingNow, d’you guys think it was a fair match?

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Veronica: YehEmily: Do you? (doubtfully)Veronica: Cos we each did the same . <thing>

Emma is less certain and asks again why Ling-Li ‘lost’ and then proposes anexplanation.

Emma: Probably she poured it- probably . she poured it slow.Veronica: Like she goes like this (demonstrating howLing-Li had held her

bottle at a ninety degree angle while pouring whereas she andEmma had turned their bottles completely upside down)

While Veronica is speaking, the teacher joins the group to find out how theyare getting on. Emily and Veronica describe what they have been doing, endingwith a summary of their recent conversation. The teacher’s follow-up questionprompts Emily into a statement that recognises that, for the test to be fair, theangle of pouring must also be controlled.

Teacher: OK, so you- so that is a good observation- you observed . that Ling-Li’s count . was more . than both of you . and you figure that it’sbecause of the way she poured it . . now, how can you make sure .that it’s a fair test between all three of you?

Emily: Well. a fair test- well I don’t really think it’s fair now because . it wasfairWe put it the same size of the cup by the measuring cup, but I don’tthink it was fair because we poured it- we turned it right over . andLily just poured it like this, kind of so I don’t think it was fair . (T:Uh-huh) I- I think that’s why she . um- . was slow

Although Ling-Li did not speak during these interchanges, she clearly under-stood what was being discussed, because when they carried out a second trial,she held her bottle at the same angle as the other girls and, as a result, emptiedher bottle on three claps just like them. As has frequently been observed, in theinitial stages of learning an additional language there is typically an extendedperiod in which learners participate by observation and listening with increas-ing comprehension before they start to speak – as is also the case in learninga first language (Halliday, 1978). Thus, we would argue, these brief vignettesprovide clear examples of Ling-Li learning English through participation inmeaningful joint activities (Dalton & Tharp, 2002).

But a major breakthrough came some weeks later, when the class had carriedout a variety of further activities, which included making a time-measurer oftheir own design. At the end of the unit, the teacher gathered the children to-gether to review and reflect on what they had done and what they had learned.After a recapitulation of the various experiments they had carried out, the rela-tion of time measurement to the movements of the earth and sun was discussed,and this led into the issue of time zones. Blanca starts this thread by recountinga conversation with her sister in which they estimated what time it would bein Scotland, from where they had recently immigrated, when it was 10 in theevening in Toronto.

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While another child was recounting a similar experience in relation to herfamily in Hong Kong, Ling-Li raised her hand. As the teacher immediatelyrecognised, this was an important moment, as Ling-Li was usually very reticentabout speaking in front of the whole class. On this occasion, however, she clearlyfelt her experience was sufficiently important for her to request an opportunityto tell it. In the following extract it can be seen how the teacher shows immediateuptake of Ling-Li’s first contribution and, by providing supportive scaffoldingthrough expanding and extending it, enables her to continue to participate.

Ling-Li: When I was in China . my Mum always called me at thenight and er- and I- I don’t like- I don’t er I don’t wantto wake up and my- my Grandmother say ‘You have towake up, your mother on- in the phone.’ So I have tolisten to him

Teacher: That’s right . she says- Ling-Li says that when she wasin China . where’s China? You show me (to Ling-Li, whopoints to the position of China on the globe)

Arthur: Er you just-Teacher: There, China’s over here . (pointing) and her Mum was

in . [CanadaLing-Li: [CanadaTeacher: -her Mum called at say two o’clock in the afternoon, say

now, cos the sun is there two o’clock I would say it’sroughly here . is she still asleep?

Children: YehBlanca: Two in the morning, **Teacher: Now, it’s really not as much as Hong Kong, * slightly

less, but she’s still asleep . so that’s why she was tellingus her grandmother said ‘Your mum is on the phone, getup! Your Mum is calling you’ - which means phoning foryou - and she says ‘Why does she phone me at night?’But is it night for your Mum?

Ling-Li: [NoChildren: [NoTeacher: No, it’s daytime . and say if Ling-Li comes over- the

earth moves here and it’s daytime and Ling-Li calls herMum (i.e. in China). Ling-Li phones her Mum, wouldher Mum be awake or asleep?

Ling-Li and Others: Asleep

As in learning their L1, what prompts children to take risks in using thelinguistic resources they are learning in an additional language is so often thecombination of having something they feel it is important to say and an audiencewho will be interested to hear it. This is what happened here. The teacher hadwillingly accepted Bianca’s introduction of a personal experience involving timezones and had encouraged other children to contribute similar experiences. Inthis collaborative dialogue, Ling-Li felt empowered to join in by offering herexperience. But, as the previous extracts show, Ling-Li’s ability to speak outon this occasion owed much to her ongoing opportunities to participate in

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meaningful activities with others, in which she was able to contribute on apractical level and at the same time gradually to learn how to talk about theseand other matters of shared interest and importance. Significantly, by the winterof the following year, Ling-Li was a full participant in all classroom activities,speaking English at a level that was almost indistinguishable from that of otherchildren who had been in Canada since before they started school.

A few years later, Ms Lee was teaching a class of 12-year-olds in a differentschool when, again, shortly after the beginning of the school year, a very recentimmigrant from China, YaXiang, joined the class. On arrival YaXiang spoke nomore than a few words of English but she was a fluent reader and writer, as wellas speaker, of Mandarin. YaXiang came with an excellent school record and wasable to understand much of what her peers were doing in the various activitiesin which they engaged; she was also quick to contribute non-verbally whenshe could assist in problem-solving. But what most accelerated her languagelearning was that she was discovered to be an expert at chess. Other studentswere keen to take lessons and so YaXiang had multiple opportunities to converse– through signs and demonstration as well as through speech – about manytopics in addition to chess.

As in her previous school, Ms Lee involved the class in a variety of inquiry-oriented projects, to which YaXiang was well able to contribute from her generalknowledge. In addition, when the group she was working with came to preparea report, she was invited to play a major role in the preparation of labelleddiagrams, graphs and other numerical representations. She was also encouragedto write in Mandarin when what she wanted to communicate was beyond hercurrent capabilities in English.

Not surprisingly, YaXiang made rapid progress and by the end-of-year pre-sentation that the class made to parents, teachers and other classes, she was upto the level of fluency in English of other Chinese-Canadian students. This pre-sentation arose from a science project in which YaXiang’s class had collaboratedwith classes from schools across North America to prepare for a ‘virtual’ expe-dition to Mars by designing/creating the various necessities for the trip. Whileother classes concentrated on developing ways of growing food hydroponicallyand collecting ice to create a water supply, YaXiang’s class had the responsibilityfor designing and making models of the vehicles that would be needed. Thisthey did with great success. YaXiang worked with a group of other students, allEAL learners, to design and make a scale model of a vehicle to collect ice.

Here is a transcript of YaXiang’s answers to the questions posed by one of thevisitors to the Class Open Day:

Visitor: Could you please tell me about what you have madeYaXiang: This is our electric car . <it works with the> battery and the solar

powerThis is our camera. It can swivel through 360 degrees . and this[the car] can go fore and back (she demonstrates, using the remotecontroller)And here’s our satellite . that is part of our communication system .and here is our solar panel that is to collect the solar energy . anddown here are these *- here are the bathroom, the locker and <the

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air machine> . and we have a tube through here and this is thesecond floor and here is the first floor

Visitor: So is there wind on Mars?YaXiang: Yeah . it (the car) doesn’t use wind energy but like use the solar

energy

YaXiang’s remarkable progress in developing oral fluency in English undoubt-edly owed much to her previous education in China, which had prepared her tounderstand the content of the curriculum in Ms Lee’s class. However, this wouldhave benefited her little without the frequent opportunities to work collabora-tively on group projects with her peers, in which she was able to contributefrom her own understanding of the problems to be solved – at first non-verballyand then, more and more by appropriating and using the oral language of herco-participants. In addition, as in her previous classroom, Ms Lee encouraged aninquiry orientation to learning and included frequent whole-class discussions inwhich students put forward and debated alternative perspectives on the issuesunder consideration. These too provided models of the language to be learnedfrom which YaXiang was able to appropriate the genres of ‘academic language’relevant to different school subjects, together with the discourse strategies forparticipating in such discussions.

As these two brief cases show, an inquiry-oriented curriculum provides acontext with great potential for learning, not only for native speakers, but alsofor EAL learners. In such a context, the projects being undertaken create op-portunities for those who are not yet fluent in the language of the classroom tocontribute productively in various practical and nonverbal ways; at the sametime, the many occasions of dialogue that occur – with small groups of peersas well as with the teacher – in planning, carrying out, reporting and reflectingon the various activities involved provide language learning opportunities verysimilar to those experienced by children as they learn their L1.

This form of learning through immersion is clearly effective in classes wherethe majority of students are already competent speakers of the language of theclassroom and of the wider society around the school. In such a context, EALlearners have multiple occasions to attempt to use the language they are learningfor purposes that are significant for them; they also have multiple models andproviders of assistance. The question we address in the next part of this paperis whether a similar context can be provided in a class in which all the studentsare new to the language of instruction.

Creating a community of inquiry among English learnersIn this section, drawing from the first Haneda’s research (Haneda, 2005, 2008;

Wells & Haneda, 2005) in California, we present a case where the classroomcommunity involves only EAL students. Classes consisting solely of EAL stu-dents can be found in different settings: immersion, foreign language, ESL andsheltered instructional classes. Out of these possible contexts, the next exampleis concerned with one particular instantiation: ESL lessons in a Grade 3 transi-tional bilingual class in California. It differs greatly from the earlier examplesof Chinese students in mainstream classes in at least three respects. First, in thisexample, all the children, whose English proficiency ranged from beginning to

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low intermediate, shared the same first language; they were second- or third-generation Mexican Americans whose home language was Spanish (and twochildren of migrant Mexican farm workers). Second, whereas in the Toronto ex-amples, the EAL students were immersed in English throughout the day, in thisexample the medium of instruction was Spanish, with one period of ESL per day.Third, inquiry is interpreted differently in the Toronto and California examplespartly because of the depth of the teacher’s understanding of what is involvedin ‘inquiry’. In particular, in the Toronto case, the teacher independently de-signed her own inquiry units, drawing on a variety of sources, whereas in theCalifornian example the teacher was working from recommended or requiredpublished materials.

Ms Wilson, a veteran teacher of over 20 years of experience, had alreadyactively participated for eight years in LASERS, a local science professional de-velopment project.1 This experience had led her to believe that an additional lan-guage is learned best through inquiry work in content areas, particularly science,because science inquiry draws on hands-on activities that provide students withconcrete, shared experiences on which they can build through talk and writing,thus connecting language use, action, reasoning, and artifacts in a meaningfulway. At the time of this research the practice of teaching English through scienceinquiry was firmly established in Ms Wilson’s ESL lessons. In fact, this was themajor context in which English was taught; similarly, it was only in the ESL timethat science was taught because, otherwise, in this school science teaching wasoverwhelmed by the emphasis on basic literacy and maths. As the year pro-gressed, the students became familiar with Ms Wilson’s inquiry science routine(the predict–experiment–observe–interpret–reflect sequence) – even though atan elementary level – and were able to draw on it as a tool for learning.

However, despite her success with teaching English through science inquiry,Ms Wilson had not felt able to bring inquiry to bear in other areas of the curricu-lum. It seems likely that this was because she equated inquiry with hands-onactivities and the science routine described above – which is how it had beenpresented in the professional development provided by LASERS – and did notimmediately see how it might be applied to other subjects. However, in theweeks preceding this research, she had been planning how she might adopt aninquiry orientation in her social studies lessons, which she would also teachin English. It was in the context of this new departure for her that we madeour observations in Ms Wilson’s classroom. What we wish to highlight hereis the way in which she provided an explicit focus on English language whileimplementing what she considered to be ‘inquiry’ in social studies.

The unit was based on the California Social Studies Standard (3.1) underthe heading of continuity and change, ‘Students describe the area’s physicaland human geography, and use maps, tables, graphs, photographs and chartsto organise information about people, places and environments in a spatialcontext’ (California Department of Education, 2000). In designing the unit, sheparticularly wanted her students to understand the physical features of thelocal area and develop map-reading skills as well as a basic understanding ofthe concept of community and the changes that take place in a community overtime. She felt that the key to success would be the creation and presentation ofengaging activities that became progressively more complex and text-based. She

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also decided to use the third grade English textbook that the school provided forthis unit, although with some misgivings, since the level at which the majorityof her students were reading in English was at least one level below the thirdgrade level.

Ms Wilson started the unit by introducing the words associated with thephysical features of the region (e.g. valley, mountain range) and explained themeaning of each word to the students. Following that, she gave an exposition ofwhat a community consists of and then asked the students concrete questionsabout their personal experiences: ‘Where do you live?’; ‘What do your parents dofor a living?’; ‘Have you visited other places?’; ‘What do these places look like?’The students responded enthusiastically and Ms Wilson wrote their responseson the blackboard and summarised their contributions in diagrams. In this way,in lieu of the shared experience of a hands-on experiment, she engaged herstudents in the co-construction of a shared discursive space about their localcommunity. She also explicitly focused on language through mini-grammarlessons that were interspersed throughout the unit (e.g. the appropriate use oftense and of proper and common nouns in referring to the geographic featuresof the local area) and through a read-aloud of the textbook, with a focus onboth decoding and comprehension. Particularly emphasised was the learningof key vocabulary, which was reinforced through the use of numerous pictures(e.g. landforms) and games and charts of new words on the wall. Anotherstrategy that she used often was to work with one group at a time, modellinglanguage and interacting with the students more intensively. A short excerpt ofsuch talk in a small group is provided below, where Ms Wilson was teachinga group of students how to read the symbols used on a large laminated mapof the local area. The students walked around the map, touching it and tracinglocal landmarks with their fingers. Ms Wilson explained that squiggly linesthat were close together indicated steep elevation – mountains. She then askedthe children to locate the Cascade River on the map. In response, by scanningthe map with their fingers, the children located the river and traced its course;responding to this action, Ms Wilson explained that the river starts from themountain, cuts across the city and flows into the ocean. After several minutes ofthis map-reading activity, in turn 31 one student made a connection between themap and the local area. Once the connection was made, other children startedto ‘read’ the map, relating it to their existing knowledge about the area.2

29 S3: Teacher I one question, are these- Que es esto? ((What is this?))30 T: This is Riverside Road [so that’s Riverside =31 S4: [Oh oh this is Eastville32 T: = See there’s the high school . yes, all of this is Eastville . all of this

all the way out to here now is Eastville33 S1: I like this (student is pointing to an area on the map)34 S2: Here’s high school35 T: Here’s the high school um there’s the Plaza36 S1: [Plaza37 S3: [The Plaza38 S4: HEY then I must live right here39 S2: Where’s my house?

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40 S3: Mine’s en by x Park Hospital41 T: The hospital, except that’s not really the hospital anymore42 S3: I know, Teacher43 T: The hospital is out by the airport now44 S2: More over [here45 T: [This map is- When this map was made that was the hospital but now|

the hospital is- . let’s see Airport Boulevard (teacher and students arelooking for hospital) Yeah, see here’s Freedom Road is right-

46 S3: Teacher, am I- if- if I am in Pinker Lake where would I live47 T: Pinker Lake is up here . so look look at all this . see this part with all

these lines and over here there’s more lines and all around [these48 S2: [Those are all the Santa Anna Mountains49 T: Not all of them . these are not the mountains. These are like hills50 S3: Hills51 T: And see this part is FLAT because it doesn’t have a lot of wavy lines .

and then this whole area is also very flat because it also doesn’t havelot of wavy lines

As in her science lessons, Ms Wilson provided scaffolding to small groups,since she believed that these EAL students needed more intensive linguisticsupport than the whole class discussion could afford. What we would like todraw attention to here is the frequency of Ms Wilson’s ‘uptake’ of the students’contributions (e.g. turns 32, 35, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51). By uptake we refer toteachers’ responses to students’ contribution that acknowledge and build onthem or invite the same or different students to do so; according to Nystrandand his colleagues (2002), teacher uptake can be interpreted as one of the mainfeatures of dialogic interaction. Also noticeable in this excerpt is the extent towhich there was overlapping talk between the teacher and the children, whichpoints to a positive and collaborative classroom ethos.

In addition to this activity, Ms Wilson had the students colour a copy of a localtopographical map according to its geographical features (e.g. blue for water,yellow for mountain). She also had them use that to guide their making of reliefmaps of the local area, using flour and water dough, and then colour them toshow the same features. In addition, she took them around the school and askedthem to identify those physical features of the surrounding area that they couldsee (e.g. pointing to the mountain range). Thus, she made the abstract task ofmap reading very tactile and concrete for her students.

She also made efforts to make the history component of the unit experience-based by focusing on changes in the local community. In the process, the studentsencountered more new vocabulary (e.g. historians, primary sources) and learnedthe difference in use between the present and past tense as they recounted andcompared events in their own lives. Ms Wilson appealed to many visual aidsto make learning concrete. For example, when discussing the changes that hadtaken place in the community over the years, she compared large laminatedmaps of past and contemporary Eastville. She had the students, in groups,compare old and recent photographs of the same local landmarks and describethe differences between them, using the language structures on which they werefocusing. After the students had gained confidence in describing small sets of

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pictures, she then spread out many more pictures of the local area (old and new)on five tables and asked the students to visit each table and discuss the pictures.Using both Spanish and English, the children participated in this activity withgreat excitement.

This history segment concluded with a field trip to the local historical mu-seum, where the students had the opportunity to listen to docents who explainedthe local history; they also saw many enlarged archived photographs, and vis-ited the replicas of an old school house and a store, where they were allowedto touch historical artifacts and play with them. It was observed that even re-luctant readers were striving to decode the explanatory notes related to variousartifacts in order to understand what they were. On the way to and from themuseum, Ms Wilson took different routes and gave the students a historical tourof Eastville.

At the completion of the unit, Ms Wilson remarked that she had never seenher students so eager to learn social studies and was impressed by the extentto which they seemed to have understood the materials presented. She alsoadded that she would not go back to her old approach of working primarilyfrom the mandated textbook. At the same time it needs to be pointed out thatthe key to the effectiveness of this unit – at least in part – was the sense ofcommunity that had been developed in the classroom over the course of theacademic year and the trust and rapport that the teacher had established withthe students. Without such trust the students would not have felt the ability toparticipate in a completely different kind of social studies unit for fear of mak-ing linguistic mistakes. What also characterised this community was the way inwhich Ms Wilson was able to contexualise the curricular content in terms of thestudents’ life experiences in order to make learning meaningful for them. Fur-thermore, her explicit focus on English language through vocabulary activities,grammar lessons and small group instruction created not only ‘comprehensibleinput’ (Krashen, 1985) but also opportunities to connect language form with itsmeaning in context (Swain, 2000). In these ways, together with the inclusionof a variety of multimodal experiences, created through tactile activities, visualaids, tours of the local area and a field trip, their learning both of English and ofthe curricular content were strengthened (Echevarria et al., 2004; Hentz & Lucas,1993).

Thus, from this account of Ms Wilson’s class, it can be argued that even inthe absence of native-speaker peer models it is possible for teachers to createmeaningful instructional contexts for EAL students to learn the target languagethrough inquiry-oriented dialogue with their teacher and their EAL peers.

Comparing the three casesIn this section we wish to consider the three examples together, pointing out

what they have in common and how they differ. There are some importantsimilarities shared by the three cases, notably the teachers’ inquiry orientationand their commitment to dialogic interaction. Both teachers involved their EALstudents in practical activities that they were initially able to carry out largely in-dependently of the language of instruction; then, as they gained some personalexperiences with respect to the selected topic, more language was introduced.

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Considering science to be a particularly promising subject area in which to ap-prentice their EAL students to language as well as to disciplinary activities,they subsequently built on the confidence developed through science inquiryto embark on inquiries in other subjects, such as maths and social studies. In arelated vein, in classroom interaction, the teachers made an effort to: (1) connectthe curricular topics to the students’ lives so as to make learning personally rel-evant and meaningful, and (2) take up and build on the students’ contributions,leading to positive social and intellectual learning environments (Gibbons, 2002;Nystrand, 1997). Thus, common to all three cases was the positive classroomclimate: students were not afraid to make linguistic errors as they knew thattheir attempts to contribute were valued. Taken together, these three cases showthat dialogic interaction is beneficial for EAL students. In addition, in all threecases, the students appeared to develop positive identities in English, partic-ularly in the case of the two Chinese girls, as they become full participants intheir classroom communities.

However, there were also salient differences between the first two and lastexamples. First, the context in which the learning of English as an additionallanguage took place differed: individual EAL students joining an existing com-munity of English-proficient peers versus creating a learning community amongEAL students. The advantage of the former, as the two Chinese EAL learners’rapid progress in English demonstrates, is that with appropriate teacher guid-ance, an existing inquiry-oriented community allows novice EAL learners toparticipate in community practices as legitimate peripheral participants (Lave& Wenger, 1991) in initially attenuated ways. They encounter many utterances,or language models, from peers and the teacher in relation to the specific pur-poses and conditions of the activities in which they participate. In this way L2learning becomes connected to particular activities and their associated actionsand talk; it is through repeated exposure to such meaningful language use thatnovice EAL students are able to appropriate the target language rather quickly.On the other hand, when a class consists solely of EAL students, the situationis clearly different. In Ms Wilson’s class, all the students shared the same L1and the majority of them were low English-proficient, creating a situation inwhich there were no English-proficient oldtimers to guide novices. What theycould do as a group was therefore likely to be more limited than in the formerimmersion situation. However, Ms Wilson’s example gives some hope as tothe extent to which EAL students can engage in learning of the subject mattercontent in an additional language with thoughtful scaffolding provided by theteacher.

Another difference concerns the way in which inquiry was enacted in theToronto and Californian examples. At the time of research, teachers in the MetroToronto school board were not burdened by the mandated curriculum stan-dards, as was the case in California at the time Ms Wilson’s class was observed.The teacher in the Toronto examples was able to design her own curricular unitsusing textbooks and materials of her own choice. In conjunction with the factthat the majority of her students were proficient in English to a considerable de-gree, Ms Lee was able to let her students choose subtopics of their own interestwhen carrying out their experiments or projects in relation to an overall theme.In contrast, in Ms Wilson’s case, because there was an enormous pressure to

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cover the mandated curriculum, it was the teacher who made those decisions.Thus, the particular sociopolitical contexts under which the teachers workedappeared to influence both the ways in which they enacted their inquiry unitsand the extent to which students could select their own inquiry topics.

Another salient difference is related to who the students were. In the case ofXaYiang, the middle school EAL student in the second example, she had beenrecognised as a high academic achiever in China and was highly literate in herfirst language. In comparison, the majority of Ms Wilson’s students were bornand raised in the United States within Hispanic communities, where Spanishwas the language of communication until the children entered school. Thesechildren were simultaneously developing literacy in Spanish and English ratherthan building on preexisting literate knowledge. As Ms Wilson’s inquiry unitswere carried out in English (in which her students were developing both spokenand written proficiency), it was not surprising that she took a more teacher-centered approach.

While the three examples were closely tied to the particular sociopoliticalmilieu and specific population of the students in each case, it can be said thatan inquiry approach creates abundant opportunities for EAL students (and na-tive English-speaking students) to engage in the learning of the subject matterthrough dialogic interaction. Ms Wilson’s example also points to the impor-tance of an explicit focus on the target language for EAL students, who are atearly stages of English language development, through contextualised gram-mar lessons, vocabulary exercises and activities that encourage the use of thelanguage structures and vocabulary being learned in relation to a particularcurricular topic.

Additional Language Learning and Dialogic Inquiry: SomeImplications

In the light of the three examples given, we would like to consider some ped-agogical implications. First, we wish to reiterate the point that we made earlier,namely that dialogic inquiry in its different manifestations has the potential ofaffording EAL students (and all students) the opportunity to use language forpurposes of significance to them in the co-construction of curriculum knowl-edge and also in the establishment and maintenance of the social relationshipsthat enables the development of resilient identities (Wang et al., 1994; Waxmanet al., 2002). Inquiry provides students with incentives for learning through thetaking up of intellectual challenges and the resulting opportunities for mean-ingful interaction about the information and experience gained in the process.It also fosters the making of connections among action, talk and associated text.In this context we would emphasise that, in addition to action and talk, teachersshould make efforts to incorporate relevant reading and writing activities intothe inquiry processes (Palincsar et al., 1998; Varelas et al., 2004); such literacyactivities reinforce students’ understanding of concepts and push them to striveto express their ideas in a linguistically precise manner, assisted by appropriatescaffolding from teachers.

Although the three cases reported here started with a focus on science inquiry,we wish to stress that dialogic inquiry is applicable in other curricular areas. In

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fact, we take the view that inquiry is not a method or routinised activity confinedto a particular school subject, but rather a stance towards learning and teachingright across the curriculum (Alexander, 2006; Wells, 2001b). Nevertheless, ithas to be recognised that the ways in which this stance can be achieved maybe constrained by the different sociopolitical contexts in which teachers workand also by teachers’ confidence in the breadth of their knowledge in differentcurricular areas. However, as Turkanis (2001) points out, a teacher’s unashamedadmission that she or he does not know the answer to a student’s question canbe a great start to a collaborative inquiry.

For many teachers it may initially be daunting to consider incorporatingdialogic inquiry into their classroom practices, particularly where there is anexcessive focus on obtaining gains on standardised test scores, as is the casein much of the United States. However, dialogic inquiry and its key elements,such as promoting students’ intellectual curiosity, agentive participation andinteractive use of language, can be introduced in small steps. For example, con-sider maths. In one classroom that we know of, the basis for student inquirywas created by displaying architectural designs for different kinds of houseson the classroom wall. Using these as a stimulating resource, the teacher de-signed a wide range of mathematical activities, from drawing diagrams of theclassroom that required measuring its dimensions and calculating its area, tostudents’ designing their own ideal homes that required them to consider manyfeatures, from the shape and size of the rooms to the amount of hardwood floor-ing needed for particular parts of the house, and so on. In contrast, Roseberyet al. (1992) recount how EAL students’ complaints about the quality of thewater from the drinking fountain close to their classroom led to a systematicinvestigation of water quality in all the school fountains and a report with recom-mendations for action addressed to the school principal. In both these cases, thesignificance to the students of the topics with which they were concerned gavethem a strong incentive to learn and use the language needed to achieve theirgoals.

Once teachers feel comfortable with an inquiry-oriented approach, they canthen develop activities that extend beyond the school. In the case of Ms Wilson’sunit on community, she could easily extend it to include a component in whichher students become ethnographers of their own community (Eagan-Roberton& Bloome, 1998; Heath, 1983). They could survey the kinds of stores foundin different areas of the town and locate public facilities, such as libraries andschools (Hedegaard & Chaiklin, 2005); using Spanish or English, the studentscould also interview family and community members to learn more about theircommunity and its history, carry out library or internet-based research on thesame topic and produce a culminating project reporting their research. In thisway learning would become more student-directed, drawing on their existingknowledge, skills and life experiences (Gonzalez et al., 2005).

Important to emphasise, though, is that the adoption of the approach wehave been advocating requires teachers, particularly teachers who have EALstudents in their care, to consider the act of teaching in what may be a newlight. That is to say, it assumes that teaching of a language (first or additional)entails creating a language-using community in which students are drawn intotaking part in activities that are – or become – of importance to them and

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are not afraid to express their ideas in whatever ways they are able, even ifthis involves linguistic errors in the target language or codeswitching betweendifferent languages. Indeed, in some circumstances, it may be beneficial forstudents to discuss with others what they want to say in their first languageand then work together to reformulate their intended contribution in the targetlanguage (Turnbull & Arnett, 2002).

In conclusion, based on our experiences, we suggest that if we really wantto ensure that EAL students have the same opportunities as their L1 peersto succeed academically and to become productive and fulfilled members ofthe wider society beyond school, there is a need to focus on the creation ofclassroom communities that value meaningful dialogic inquiry, since this is oneof the most effective ways to enable all students to make progress in achievingtheir full potential. It is also, as Dewey (1966) pointed out, the best way to createand sustain a democratic society.

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to M. Haneda, School of Teach-

ing and Learning, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210-1172, USA([email protected]).

Notes1. The name of the project was LASERS, which stands for language acquisition through

science enquiry in rural schools.2. The following additional transcription conventions were used: (()) is a translation of

a Spanish utterance; = marks a continuation of an utterance. Note that T stands forthe teacher and S for a student.

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Learning an Additional Language Through Dialogic Inquiry

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