A Meaning-Oriented Model of Language for the Classroom

Lee Hartman: Good afternoon, good evening, and good morning, and welcome everyone to
Perspectives on English Language Learning. My name is Lee Hartman, and
as Danny said, I'm a research associate with WestEd. And it's my pleasure to
welcome you to another installment of this series of conversations that Aida
Walqui is having this summer with researchers, educators and scholars from
all over the world around the education of English learners. These
conversations include many perspectives across a wide variety of settings.

Lee Hartman: And much like the work that has defined Aida's career up to this point, they
bring together research and practice that hopefully help us to explore current
knowledge, with the goal of expanding our views. And of course, improving
the educational opportunities that we can offer to our English learner
students. The series is brought to you by WestEd. A nonprofit development
and service agency that works to improve the educational outcomes for all
students, especially those that traditionally have been most underserved.

Lee Hartman: And specifically from within WestEd, by the Quality of Teaching for English
Learner initiative or QTEL, which Aida founded some 20 years ago with the
ambitious vision of focusing on developing educator expertise to serve
English learners, not only in their linguistic development, but in the rigorous
development of disciplinary and analytic practices as well. Our series is also
sponsored by a new National Research and Development Center to Improve
Education for Secondary English Learners, which is funded by a five-year
grant from the Institute for Education Sciences to the National Center for
Research, for Education and Research.

Lee Hartman: This new center, which Aida is leading as well, will focus on understanding
the needs of English learners in today's context and implementing new and
innovative solutions to improve the learning opportunities that we, as
educators can offer them to lead towards their achievement in the secondary
setting. So, welcome again to today's conversation and it is my pleasure to
introduce my mentor and turn it over to Aida Walqui who will introduce
today's special guest. Thank you.

Aída Walqui: Thank you so much Lee. Lee is one of those wonderful accomplished
students that we have, and that you know one day will be way bigger and
louder than we are in the field. And stronger, of course. Our guest today,
really, is probably the one foreign expert that needs the least introduction
 because Beverly, especially Beverly's pink book is a book that absolutely
everybody should have and everybody that I know has in their bookshelves.
Beverly Derewianka is a Professor Emeritus in Linguistics from the University
of Wollongong in Australia.

Aída Walqui: I would like to highlight three aspects of her work. First, her teaching.
Through a substantive career that spans over four decades, Beverly has
taught at the secondary level, she has taught at the elementary level, and
she has also taught at the university level. And we have been very honored
in the QTEL initiative to actually have had her teaching institutes for
American colleagues that we ourselves sat in. And she is a stellar teacher.
The second aspect is her scholarship. Beverly does not only know language
deeply, but, as she will I'm sure explain through our conversation, she
recontextualizes notions that are complex and sometimes even arid in terms
of language, and she makes them relevant to the lives of teachers and
relevant to the development of students.

Aída Walqui: She has published many, many books, but more importantly, she really
travels the world of policy, practice and theory, which is quite astounding.
The fact that she has made a dent on policy is... there's a testament to that in
all the work that she has done in curriculum development, not only in
Australia, but in Hong Kong, and many other places. Finally, as a prolific
writer, as I said, she has that pink little book that we all love, but she also has
11 other books in different colors. And you have a received in fact one of her
articles and a chapter from a wonderful, wonderful book as well. So, I
shouldn't talk anymore because time runs fast. Beverly, welcome to this
conversation today.

Beverly Derewianka: Aída, thanks... Oh! Oh, I was just... You go ahead.

Aída Walqui: Okay, well no, I was just going to get straight into the conversation. So, tell us
a little bit about the approach to language that you have taken personally
when working with educators? How would you describe it?

Beverly Derewianka: Well, how many days have we got? What I was going to say is thank you so
much for inviting me into this series of conversations. And I think it's a very
valuable initiative and well done in getting it going. It's been very interesting
so far. So, so the model of language that I draw on, I thought I might give you
a bit of context of what was going on in Australia at the time. We had been
through the structural periods, structureless period where we were all in our
language labs and doing our drills. And then we had a very brief flirtation with
Chomsky and his rebellion against structuralism. So we were all drawing out
tree diagrams and trying to make it relevant to students.

Beverly Derewianka: And by that stage, traditional grammar had kind of disappeared from the
curriculum. After the Dartmouth conference, it was deemed to be not helpful
at all for improving students' literacy. So, we didn't have any model of
grammar really to draw on. And at that point, we did have our communicative
functional notional period where we were all again doing lots and lots and lots
of functions of inviting people and apologizing and making hotel bookings
and all that kind of thing. And so, it was in that context that in Australia, we
had the fortunate experience of Halliday arriving with his wife, Ruqaiya
Hasan.

A Meaning-Orientated Model of Language for the Classroom 2

Beverly Derewianka: And it's at Sydney University. And there was a real sense of excitement that
he brought with him, and myself and Jenny Hammond, that we met a couple
of days ago, and Pauline Gibbons were fortunate enough to be in one of his
very early lecture series. So that's how we were introduced to it. It really was
a, almost like a burst of electricity that went through the profession at the
time. And then very soon after, Jim Martin joined Halliday from Canada. And
so, he brought with him an educational linguist's point of view. So, he was the
one that really I think got it more embedded into the school contexts. So, that
was the context in which we started to think about, to rethink about language,
not from a traditional grammar point of view, not from a structuralist point of
view, but one that connected much more with meaning.

Beverly Derewianka: So, at this point, I might show some slides if you don't mind because it is a
complex model of language. So, I would start by emphasizing that Halliday
saw language as a system, as a system of resources. So very rich... So a
rich resource. And the emphasis was on a resource for making meaning. So,
I think this was going against how we tended to think of language as just a
set of rules and a set of... parts of speech I guess, in syntax, but rather
thinking of as a resource that we draw on in making meaning. And the
system consisted of an array of choices, and that those choices were not
ones that some linguist had dreamed up, but choices that had evolved over
centuries in various cultures, to serve our needs.

Beverly Derewianka: Most importantly, Halliday emphasized that the choices that we make interact
with the context. So, depending on the context... Depending on the context,
we, hang on, I'm just going to go backwards for a second there. The choices
in any particular culture, in any particular situation will vary depending on
such factors as, what's our purpose for using language, what job is it doing?
Who are we interacting with? What's the topic, what's the subject matter,
what's it about, and what mode are we using? Now, this is hinted at in your
Common Core State Standards, where the knowledge of language element
refers to applying knowledge of language to understand how language
functions in different contexts to make effective choices for meaning or style.

Beverly Derewianka: So, Halliday has had an enormous influence, not only in Australia, but in a
number of countries internationally. I think in the Common Core, it doesn't
really go into in any systematic way, what that looks like in terms of the
language itself. There are hints at it, but nothing really systematic. As
opposed to your elements of vocabulary in the conventions which are in
some great detail. So, this is where it does get complex. And it is a complex
model of language, Halliday refers to it as extravagant. And that's both a
benefit and a drawback in terms of teaching. It's a benefit because it is a
model that is very rich, and you can keep mining it and mining it and I still go
back to Halliday's early works and find things there that even though I've read
them several times, I just keep coming across new layers of meaning.

Beverly Derewianka: But it is complex in terms of translating that into a teaching context. And so,
that's what we've been doing over the last 40 years or so. A number of us,
there's a whole community of scholars, educational linguists, researchers,
who've been working hand in hand with teachers and students in classrooms,
trying to see how we can make this accessible to both the teachers and the
students. So, when we think about language as a system, what Halliday
brought to it which was something a little bit new is that first of all, we're

A Meaning-Orientated Model of Language for the Classroom 3

 thinking about model of language, not a model of grammar, even though of
course it involves grammar. But it's a model of language in context. And it
goes from the whole text right down through to the sentence and below the
sentence.

Beverly Derewianka: What he had suggested is that language has evolved to perform three major
functions in our lives. And that the language system is organized in terms of
these little bundles of resources. One of those bundles of resources is to
enable us to represent our experience of the world. So how do we share our
experience, our observations, our understandings of what's going on. So, in
terms of representing our experience in school, in schools, we're going from
the everyday experiences of students and shunting between those everyday
experiences and, in school context, how we also need to represent what's
going on in terms of the academic content of learning. So, we're shunting
constantly between the everyday and the academic and disciplinary
language.

Beverly Derewianka: So, in our national curriculum, English curriculum, this is referred to as
Language for Expressing Ideas. Halliday refers to it as the Ideational
Function of Language. Ideational means how we use language to ideate, to
think about the world, to reason about things. And so, quite often when we're
thinking about academic language, we think about technical vocabulary. And
quite often, that's where it stops, almost at the word level. But it's a lot more,
of course that's important, but it's a lot more than that. In terms of the
grammar, we can start with how do we represent the events and states in our
lives? And that's what the job of the clause is. So it has the function of
representing our experience in terms of the kinds of events that we want to
talk about.

Beverly Derewianka: But then, and so that's the job of the clause, the function of the clause is to
do that, but then we can also combine clauses to enable us to reason, to
logically think about the world. So, we get our clause complex, our connected
clauses, our complex sentences, etc. We can then move up to the text level.
And that's where we get patterns of meaning in a text, experiential meaning.
And so, we get patterns of compare and contrast. We get patterns of cause
and effect. We get patterns of class, subclass, patterns of whole and its
parts. So, that's one of the main functions of language, to enable us to
represent what's going on.

Beverly Derewianka: But an important one that I think we often neglect when we're teaching
English language learners is the interpersonal function of language. How we
use language to engage with other people, to enact social relationships, and
at the very basic level, we would probably think about being able to use to
make statements, to share information, to ask questions, to request
information, to give commands, to tell somebody to do something.

Beverly Derewianka: So that's the very basics and that's of course, part of what Halliday would
include, but it goes a lot beyond that. Jim Martin, in particular, introduced
what he calls the appraisal model where we talk about how we engage
various strategies that we use to engage with our reader or our listener.
Things like modality for example. How we allow spaces for different
possibilities and different perspectives. How we express our feelings and
amplify them or downplay them. How we give opinions, how we make

A Meaning-Orientated Model of Language for the Classroom 4

 judgments about people's behavior. And that shades into a critical literacy.
So how language can be used to manipulate other people.

Beverly Derewianka: So, a very important role that language plays, a very important function of
language that again, I think, of course we do bits and pieces here and there,
but we don't really focus on the language that our, I keep saying EAL
because that's what we use in Australia, your EL students need in order to
become part of the community and the academic community in terms of
interpersonal relationships. And the last function is the textual function and
that's where it provides resources for forming text, for shaping up our
experience into texts. And of course, that involves spoken texts and written
texts, and importantly, multimodal texts because Halliday's functional model
is also used to explore how we represent meaning in visual form.

Beverly Derewianka: So, the textual function is where we go, shunted again between the spoken
and the more written. Moving students towards the kind of language that they
need in order to accomplish the kinds of written tasks that they need to do in
an academic context, which are going to be much more heavily crafted, more
dense, more with its own complexity of course, more compact. And this is
where we're looking at such resources as cohesion and, cohesion in a very
broad sense, and coherence, making our texts coherent with, looking at how
the information flows through the text. So, it's again, looking at very complex
texts and making sure that students have the resources to engage with that
complexity, not only in their writing, but also in their reading. Importantly, all
three functions operate at the same time.

Beverly Derewianka: So, anytime we use language, we are representing some experience of the
world. We are interacting with our listener or reader. And we are using
language to form text, whether it's the spontaneous, spoken kind of
language, or whether it's the much more constrained, much more complex, I
guess in a way, written language.

Aída Walqui: Beverly. Sorry, go ahead.

Beverly Derewianka: Right. So, coming back to you.

Aída Walqui: Okay. I mean, this is a very complex model, you're right. And Halliday himself
would smile and he would say this is an extravagant model, right? And it's not
easy. It's not the kind of thing teachers get in our workshop. That's why the
focus on the little things. If I can talk about vocabulary, that's something I can
grab and understand. And they fail to see that a good model begins the way
you showed us. Begins with the macro aspects and then slowly moves into
understanding the layers that sustain that purposeful way of using,
communicating, right?

Aída Walqui: Through language. So, how have educators and teachers, how did they
initially take this complexity, and what has been your experience in terms of
educators? And of course, this also has implications for the education of
teachers, right? And for the professional development of teachers. So, if you
could kindly comment about that, that would be really helpful to us.

Beverly Derewianka: Sure, yeah, yeah. In terms of the pre-teaching, before they get out into the
teaching force, there are many universities who will offer this introduction at

A Meaning-Orientated Model of Language for the Classroom 5

 least to a functional model of language. And of course, post-graduate as well
in Masters courses. But we can't rely on that. So there are a number of
intensive courses over a number of, usually over a full term, so, you know,
10, 12 weeks, that are offered mainly by different educational systems,
whether it's the Department of Education in various states or whether it's the
Catholic education system or whatever.

Beverly Derewianka: So, these courses, very intensive courses, are sponsored by various state
systems. And a lot of teachers enroll in those, some of them to become
tutors, so they do a much more intensive course, and other ones to you
know, become familiar enough to engage with it in the classroom. And they're
very practical courses. They draw on research and in terms of how it has
been taken up by schools. It is ideally a whole school approach that we
encourage because there's no point doing a little bit of grammar in one year
and then forgetting it in the next. And so it's in our syllabus as well, so our
national English syllabus.

Beverly Derewianka: So, it's reinforced all the way through. And with the EAL students, English as
an Additional Language we call them in Australia, with those ones, with the
teachers, the specialist teachers of EAL, they are much more familiar with it
than a lot of the mainstream teachers. So, it's through these intensive
courses, it's through some undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, but
also through the teachers themselves, just having a go at one little thing. We
don't ask them to implement the whole thing at once. But, you know, they
might think that cohesion is of interest to their students, or they might think
that modality's very interesting. It's funny the way that people pick up on their
little favorite things. Some people just love the noun group or the noun
phrase as you would call it. So just getting them to start with just something
that they're familiar with and that they think the students will benefit from.

Aída Walqui: And do you find that discipline-specific teachers also get excited about
certain aspects and then they evolve and grow with their understanding of
language use?

Beverly Derewianka: That's a funny one. Because I think it's actually the PE, with what we call the
physical education teachers that we wouldn't expect to be interested in
language and literacy, they're very excited about it. And the science teachers
and the history teachers who you know, the science teachers would normally
just focus on technical vocabulary, but once they see what they can do with
it, then they get excited about it. The most resistant ones are the English
secondary teachers. Which is not what you would expect but that's been our
experience.

Aída Walqui: Well, perhaps because they're more married to more traditional ways of
teaching grammar, right?

Beverly Derewianka: Oh no, no, no, no, no. No grammar at all. No, they, they've been, in Australia,
there was a whole period of a couple of decades where grammar was not
taught, traditional school grammar, no grammar was taught. So, we've got a
whole generation of teachers who are really not very confident about their
fairly traditional grammar. So, they just don't teach it, they don't see it's
relevant.

A Meaning-Orientated Model of Language for the Classroom 6

Aída Walqui: Yeah, well that's, that is an issue and that is why it's so important to have the
same kind of language education for EAL teachers or regular classrooms
subject matter teachers. This is both really essential. So, what would you say
are some of the aspects of language? Because we agree that the education
and the professional development of teachers needs to be ongoing. They
cannot get it all at once. So they need to learn a piece, try it, feel comfortable,
and then tackle the new horizon in terms of their work. But what would you
say are some of the elements that teachers absolutely need to have to work
effectively in classrooms? And then later on I'll ask you so what does that
work in classrooms look like?

Beverly Derewianka: I think that, as I said, they tend to be selective from each of the meta
functions. And I think when they get to having drafted a text, to then go back
and make sure that that text is coherent. So, looking from the point of view of
the genre, so Jim Martin's notion of genre as a goal-oriented use of language
to achieve your purpose, and so I think we always start with genre. So, that's
just taken for granted these days. It's in all of the syllabuses, it's in all the
textbooks if they use them. Every teacher will know how these various
genres are structured, the most common ones.

Beverly Derewianka: Of course, there's any number of genres, excuse me, that students need to
be able to develop control over in order to achieve the outcomes of the
curriculum. So, I mean I've counted 30, 40 at least from my investigation of
the curriculum. But there's half a dozen that the teachers feel very
comfortable with and use quite regularly. And teach their students how these
genres are structured, how they're organized in particular ways to achieve
the purposes. So, yes, we would always start with genre.

Beverly Derewianka: And that was a deliberate strategy by Jim Martin, Frances Christie, Joan
Rothery at the time when they were first working with these some 40 years
ago, where they felt that that was something that was accessible to both the
teachers and the students before you got down into the nitty gritty of the
grammar. So, I think that's, that was, we thought that genre was the way in.
So the way in through genre, working from purpose, working from the
context, from the curriculum context, and then going down into further into
the language. I think that...

Aída Walqui: May I just say something? Because I agree that looking at a genre, and I
want to remind our participants that you very kindly share a chapter from your
book with Pauline Jones on recounts, right? So, what is the purpose of a
recount? What is the organization that a recount usually takes? And I think
it's delightful to, for example, if you are not aware of all the little details about
narratives, it's delightful to say, ah, that's what we do. Oh, I didn't know. So, it
makes sense to start there, right? But what does it look like in the classroom?
When you're working in the classroom.

Beverly Derewianka: Well, I think I'll leave that up to a video.

Aída Walqui: Oh good!

Beverly Derewianka: So that people can actually experience what it does look like or can look like
in the classroom. So, this is a class in what we call an Intensive Language
Center. So, when students first arrive, and they might be migrant students,

A Meaning-Orientated Model of Language for the Classroom 7

 they might be refugee students, when they first arrive in Australia, they go
into, most of them would go into an Intensive Language Center. They usually
speak no English. A lot of them have no literacy in their background. They
might have had disrupted schooling. So, they spend several months if not
more, in the Intensive Language Center until they are ready to go into
mainstream classes.

Beverly Derewianka: So, this is a group of students with their teacher, they are lower Elementary.
So you can imagine students who are just arriving quite often from war-torn
countries, and they are learning... from the curriculum, we always start with
the curriculum. In the curriculum in the lower elementary, in the geography
curriculum, they have to learn about the needs of human beings, and shelter
is one of those needs that they have. And so, there's that part of the
curriculum where they learn about housing. And so, the teacher had already
built up their field knowledge about housing. They had thought about what
their houses were like in their homeland compared them, so they did a bit of
compare and contrast work.

Beverly Derewianka: They drew houses, they made models of houses. They read a lot about
houses. So, I am just thinking I might, I might show you some slides before
the video if that's okay, Danny. So, I'll just go to slide mode. So, as I was
saying, you can see me all right? you can see the slides okay?

Aída Walqui: We can see your slides.

Beverly Derewianka: Good, good, okay. So, we start with the curriculum. Language is not taught
as a separate strand. We start with the demands of the curriculum, the
language demands of the curriculum. And so, as I said, this was coming from
the geography syllabus. And we use, it's very common in Australia now,
particularly with EAL students, to use what we call a teaching and learning
cycle. And that's been developed around 40 years ago by Joan Rothery, and
there've been several tweaks and variations of that ever since. And this is the
one that I like using. It's built around the notion of gradual release of
responsibility. It's developed around Vygotskian principles.

Beverly Derewianka: But there's a very strong element of differentiated scaffolding, which is, of
course, very important in your EAL context. And ultimately, it aims for
increasing independence. So strong, dependence on the teacher to begin
with but gradually handing over that responsibility to the learners. So, we
have an element of building students' knowledge about the particular aspect
of learning. They deepen that knowledge, and this isn't necessarily
sequential, but these are various elements that are drawn on at various
points in the lessons.

Beverly Derewianka: So, we also teach them how to read. So supported reading in various ways
where they deepen their knowledge about the content. In this case, housing.
So, the teacher, before we see the video, will already have done a lot of what
we call field building. She will have supported them in their reading, taught
them how to read through activities such as read alouds, shared reading,
guided reading where she works with them in small groups depending on
their needs, collaborative reading and independent reading. And she will
have taught them a little bit about the genre. So, in this case it was the genre
description, describing houses, their own home, etc. and houses in general.

A Meaning-Orientated Model of Language for the Classroom 8

Beverly Derewianka: So, they were doing what we call a descriptive report. And we'll come in at
the point where she's doing some supported writing, so a little bit about
learning about the genre. And then, a bit on how she supported them in their
writing. Now, what isn't obvious in a lot of these model diagrams of the
teaching and learning cycle is of course, they really important talking to learn
element. So that was very much, a very big part of helping them to talk about
their experiences, their homes, etc. And going back to Jenny's talk from the
other day, of course, this is where you get a lot of your dialogic teaching and
learning going on.

Beverly Derewianka: At the heart of the teaching and learning cycle is assessing students'
progress. So your formative assessment, seeing how they're going,
responding to the needs in the moment. Now, my research recently, I still
work a lot in classrooms, this is what retirement looks like, but I work with
teachers and students almost on a daily basis in classrooms in various
clusters of schools, usually in three-year projects. So again, this is where it
takes three years at least to get it embedded in the school. But what I've
been more interested in at the moment is the cumulative learning across a
unit of work.

Beverly Derewianka: And so, we get them as soon as they know a little bit and can express a little
bit, we get them to write a first rough draft. Now, in this one, this is actually
from a different class of slightly older English language learners. And they
were writing a comparative report, again from geography, comparing two
countries, Spain and India in two different continents. So, that was the first
draft that this student was able to write. And we thought well you know, for an
English language learner, not bad. Then the teacher developed their field
knowledge some more. Did some supported reading with them. And as they
did the reading, they made notes in a graphic organizer.

Beverly Derewianka: And then they went back to their original draft and added in the information
that they had developed from their supported reading. And so, we can see
that draft two, there's a lot more of the experiential there of the content
knowledge. Then they learnt about the genre. So, in this case it was a
compare contrast descriptive report. They learnt not only about how it is
structured, but about the language of compare and contrast, comparison and
contrasting. So, they explored a range of model texts in terms of how they
were structured, but they also dig down into the language and they had to
identify all of the ways in which the language of comparing and contrasting
came through.

Beverly Derewianka: And so now they revisited their evolving draft, and they added in what they
had learnt about the structuring of such a, such a text of how it is, how it uses
the language of compare and contrast, and they also did paragraphing and
topic sentences. They did joint constructions of paragraphs, etc. And so now,
draft three. We've got, and remembering that, you know, these are young
students. This is from mid Elementary. Then, they did a little bit more work on
the final, well, near final draft. And so that was the culmination of this work
that they've been doing. This is not their absolute final because it still had to
be Word processed and a little bit more work done on the conventions. So, at
that point...

A Meaning-Orientated Model of Language for the Classroom 9

Aída Walqui: Before you go into the video to show us Beverly, may I just say, how
wonderful it is that you invite students to write and to revisit what they've
written, expand it and as they expand the writing, they deepen their own
understanding, not just of language use, but they deepen their understanding
of the subject matter, right? And how it's all over a period of, let's say, a week
or 10 days, right? As opposed to what happens frequently in some American
classrooms where, you know, you study three days something and on day
three, you write up. But writing needs to be an ongoing thinking, talking,
working process.

Beverly Derewianka: Yes, and at first we thought the students would be resistant. But, in fact,
when we surveyed them afterwards, and 98% of them said that they really
valued it, it made their learning visible. It was cumulative learning, so they
were supported all the way through. And they didn't just have to try to do it on
their own at the end. Yeah, so you're quite right. So, I thought we might have
a look at this class that was learning about housing.

Aída Walqui: Or the class we're going to see?

Beverly Derewianka: Yes, yes. So, Danny if you would like to start showing that video.

Narrator: Barbara's focusing on the genre of description, describing the house and its
various parts. As the language focus for the unit, she introduces the class to
descriptive simple sentences. These represent the people, places, and things
that participate in various processes, taking the form of verbs along with any
circumstances that surround the activity, such as when is it happening?
Where is it happening? How is it happening? We find this in year one of the
Australian English curriculum. In this unit, Barbara is focusing on the
processes, the activities taking place in the house, and the circumstances. In
particular, where they are happening. ♪ There's a mouse running into the
kitchen ♪ ♪ There's a mouse running into the bedroom ♪ ♪ There's a mouse
running into the bathroom ♪ ♪ There's a mousing running over the floor ♪

Barbara: So, what is the thing that we are talking about when we sing this song? What
is the thing in the song?

Student: A mouse.

Barbara: A mouse. So, we're talking about that mouse and what that mouse is doing,
where that mouse is running. So, we're gonna start with, our first verb is
running. Where is the mouse running?

Student: Into the kitchen.

Barbara: ♪ Into the kitchen. ♪ Okay, what are we talking about? Sekora? What is
running into the kitchen?

Sekora: Mouse?

Barbara: Mouse. So, talking about the mouse is the thing. What's the mouse doing?
What's the verb, Sekora?

Sekora: Running.

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Barbara: It's running. And where is it running, Tuntae?

Tuntae: Over the floor.

Barbara: Over the floor.

Narrator: Before the students write their own verse of the song, Barbara provides an
opportunity for them to orally rehearse where their mouse might hide.

Barbara: So, there's other places that a mouse can hide in a house. Have a think,
where else could a mouse hide in a house?

Student: Under the table.

Barbara: Yes. Under the table.

Student: Behind the couch.

Barbara: Behind the couch. Great place to hide.

Narrator: Barbara now supports the students in writing their own verse to the song,
There's a Mouse. They first do a brief for joint construction, And then the
students innovate on the text, writing their own verses collaboratively.

Barbara: Okay. Let's write our own verse. Let's write four sentences about the mouse.
I want you to think about where is the mouse hiding, where is the mouse
running, 'cause we're learning about circumstances of place and now it's time
for you to write your own. So we start with there's a mouse, Yes, Mary? Who
would like to help me? ♪ There's a mouse hiding... ♪ Hmmm, where? You got
to think of a new place for a mouse to hide. ♪ There's a mouse hiding... ♪
Okay, where in the bedroom?

Student: Under there.

Barbara: Under where?

Student: Under the bed.

Barbara: Ooo, under the bed? ♪ There's a mouse hiding under the bed. ♪ It's your turn
to work. Okay? I want you to work with your table partner. You might like to
take some of these charts some prepositions to help you. Under, over,
behind. What's your first sentence?

Student: Behind.

Barbara: ♪ There's a penguin...♪

Student: Hiding in the wardrobe

Barbara: ♪ There's a penguin hiding in the breeze ♪ Yes, good place for the penguin.

Student: do the wiggles.

A Meaning-Orientated Model of Language for the Classroom 11

Barbara: So what are learning about today?

Student: The circumstance of place and the verb.

Teacher: Okay, what does that mean? What does that mean, the circumstances of
place? What are we learning about today?

Student: Place?

Barbara: Great. That means where. Where is the lizard running?

Narrator: The students now perform their verse of the song to the applause of the
audience. ♪ There's a lizard hiding in the wardrobe ♪ ♪ There's a lizard hiding
in the dryer ♪ ♪ There's a lizard hiding in the toilet ♪ ♪ There's a lizard hiding
in the sink ♪

Narrator: After moving through a few more teaching and learning cycles, students are
now writing extended texts, drawing on their knowledge of the field and the
grammar to express that knowledge. When they had written their final draft,
Barbara asked them to find the circumstances of placing in their writing and
to highlight the prepositions that are typically found at the beginning of such
phrases.

Beverly Derewianka: Thanks, Danny.

Aída Walqui: Very nice. That's a wonderful example of how children once again, go from
the whole to then look into the little pieces, right? So...

Beverly Derewianka: And the video really only showed that a tiny fragment of what went on
because this unit of work lasted for probably around six weeks. And so we've
just seen just the tiniest little bit. And, of course, one of the issues is the
actual use of a meta language and the extent to which, particularly with such
young students and new arrivals, newly arrived students, the extent to which
that's useful. She went from meaning, so for a long time she just used where;
we're talking about where, where, where, where. And then she introduced
gradually over time the notion of, we talk about circumstances surrounding
an activity. So where is it happening? Why is it happening, etc? She also
went down into the grammar.

Beverly Derewianka: So, Halliday's model of language doesn't ignore our, what we remember from
traditional grammar, but rather it shows the relationship between meaning
and function and how that meaning is realized through grammatical forms.
So she was using terms like verb and preposition, but only in the context of
talking about the kinds of meanings that they make.

Aída Walqui: That was a very nice, little example. We need to have a singing club so that
we get to show the whole video.

Beverly Derewianka: I have hours of it.

Aída Walqui: Excellent. So...

Beverly Derewianka: It was very hard condensing out those hours of video into a few minutes.

A Meaning-Orientated Model of Language for the Classroom 12

Aída Walqui: I know, I know. But you know, we can't stay too late today. Ohh! And in fact.

Beverly Derewianka: I'm aware of the time.

Aída Walqui: I always shortchange the wonderful colleagues who send us questions. So, I
am going to ask you a question that comes from New York City, and our
good friend, Tony De Fazio. And Tony talks about the chapter that we read
for this session and he says, "In your description of the Captain Cook unit,
"you mentioned that the class consisted "of a mix of EAL students, "some of
whom were recent arrivals. "In describing the lesson, you also mentioned
"that the teacher drew on past language knowledge "students were exposed
to "as part of the mandated curriculum. "Can you walk us through how the
teacher worked, "both with new arrivals and with students "who had already
been in the classroom a little bit?" And how was the status of new arrivals
and kids who had been in Australia, or in Sydney, I'm assuming New South
Wales, for a while.

Beverly Derewianka: I think, first of all, recognizing that even the more recently arrived ones had
had quite a long time in an Intensive Language Center before coming into the
mainstream. So, but there was a great variety of students in that class. And
that's of course where the notion of differentiation comes in. Differentiated
support, differentiated scaffolding. So, depending on the needs of the
students. So, rather than dumbing it down for the more recently arrived ones,
they worked from the curriculum. It wasn't some task, you know, that
was...anyhow, they worked from the curriculum. And in that case, and thank
you, Tony, for actually reading the article that I sent.

Beverly Derewianka: So, they started this time from the history curriculum. They had the, all of the
students were working with the same topic and the same genre. They're
varied, however, the scope of the task for some for some students, the
teacher varied the scope, the number of texts that had to be read, perhaps
the complexity of some of the tasks. She selected different readings for them.
So sometimes she would somehow make the reading a little less complex, or
she would find other readings and supported them, scaffolded them in
reading those. There was, a lot of what Jenny talked about the other day, the
message abundancy, so they were getting input from a variety of sources
from images and videos, and lots of classroom talk, from roleplays, etc.

Beverly Derewianka: And so, they were provided also with support from the EAL specialist.
English, ELL specialist. So, with the team teaching. So, I think that's, I hope
I've answered Tony's question in terms of, you know, wasn't just business as
usual. There was a high degree of differentiation and different levels of
scaffolding.

Aída Walqui: That is right. And there was also very clearly what you call the design in
scaffolding. So, the plan, scaffolding of the lesson, and then a lot of the
contingent scaffolding. So, as students need help, those who need it get just
the right kind of help to move ahead and become autonomous.

Beverly Derewianka: That's right.

Aída Walqui: Beverly, I am so sorry. Time always runs fast when you are having fun, and
you make a language structure so much fun. It's really a very, very special, a

A Meaning-Orientated Model of Language for the Classroom 13

 very special talent I would say. So thank you again for joining us. I want to
remind our audience that next time we go back to the regular hours, so it'll be
nine o'clock Pacific time. And our guest is going to take us back, because we
had this kind of sandwich introductions and then we had our foreign scholars,
and now we go back to the multiple issues that surround the education of
English learners in the United States, and Magaly Lavadenz, our next guest,
is going to weave educational policy, advocacy, and pedagogy. So please
join us, and do the readings if not prior to, afterwards because they will make
so much more sense, and they will really enhance your experience. Thank
you, everybody. Thank you, Bev.

Beverly Derewianka: Thank you, bye bye.

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