Building a Language Toolkit for Teachers

Sally Humphrey, a teacher educator and literacy researcher, has long collaborated with international scholars to research and apply knowledge of grammar and discourse in K-12 schools, pre-service, and professional learning contexts. Many of these studies have informed teaching resources, including reference and workbooks used in international professional learning contexts. Research-based publications that are most relevant to the content of this book are:Humphrey, S. (2017). Academic literacies in the middle years: A framework for enhancing teacher knowledge and student achievement. Routledge.Ruslana Westerlund is an educational consultant, teacher educator, and researcher of disciplinary literacy through Systemic Functional Linguistics with 30 years of experience in the field of multilingual learner education. Her recent Routledge publications are:Besser, S. & Westerlund, R. (2024). Making Language Visible in Social Studies: A Guide to Disciplinary Literacy in the Social Studies Classroom. Routledge.de Oliveira, L. C., & Westerlund, R. (Eds.). (2022). Scaffolding for multilingual learners in elementary and secondary schools. Routledge.Olga Malin is an ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) teacher and an ESOL endorsement instructor with a wide-ranging instructional experience, as well as an educational background in foreign languages and linguistics.

"The recent and growing body of work on a functional approach to language development, especially for teaching multilingual learners, is an area of research that has expanded a focus on the practice of teachers in classrooms in the context of the WIDA 2020 English Language Development Standards Framework. This book addresses specific ways of developing teachers’ knowledge about language and using a functional metalanguage, providing a comprehensive overview of issues and a toolkit for implementation. This book should be a resource in every TESOL practitioner and teacher educator’s library!"- Luciana C. de Oliveira, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, School of Education, Virginia Commonwealth University"Empowering teachers to understand and teach language in functional ways through accessible explanations, examples, and activities makes this book a valuable source for teacher preparation. The distinction among everyday, cross-disciplinary, and technical subject-specific language, illustrated with examples, is valuable because multilingual learners need to learn all those aspects of language. Often books addressing the language of schooling tend to focus just on disciplinary language. In addition, the book embraces students’ everyday language as important in the acquisition of disciplinary language."- María Estela Brisk, Boston College"This book is a vital resource for teachers seeking to develop a strong, shared functional metalanguage for explicitly teaching academic patterns. The functional perspective presented in the WIDA Standards is demonstrated through authentic language resources and task cycles in a clear, logical, and contextually relevant manner. Both experienced and novice teachers are guided to view aspects of language, such as sentence structure and word or phrase usage, in a new way, fostering a gradual understanding of the connection between these elements within larger language units necessary for academic success."- Dr. Andrés Ramírez, Associate Professor, Florida Atlantic University

• Introduction, 1. The functional language toolkit, 2. Language for disciplinary learning, 3. School genres and their structures, 4. Cohesion of language, 5. Density of language, 6. Grammatical complexity 7. Precision of language