The Adaptive Expertise for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction (AEDLi) enhances teacher language awareness to foster science teachers’ professional development.

The Adaptive Expertise for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction (AEDLi) Framework for Science Teachers

How the Adaptive Expertise for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction (AEDLi) Framework can Help Science Teachers:

This framework:

• Characterizes science teachers’ adaptive expertise (AE)¹ in enacting disciplinary literacy instruction (DLi)
• Comprises 17 indicators across the dimensions of:
  1) Flexibility
  2) Deliberate Practice
  3) Deep Understanding (Yoon, Koehler-Yom, Anderson, Lin, & Klopfer, 2015)

 

How does it work for science teachers’ professional development (PD)?

• Surfaces key areas for training in science language support.
• Enhances capacity for DLi in science.

¹Adaptive expertise (AE) denotes the abilities to ‘apply knowledge effectively to novel problems or atypical cases in a domain without glossing over distinctive features or factors’ (Crawford, Schlager, Toyama, Riel, & Vahey, 2005, p.5).

Why is the AEDLi Framework for Science Teachers Important?

Learning the language of science is important as language serves multiple functions in science classrooms:

1. communicative
2. epistemic
3. rhetorical

However, the language of science has many distinctive features and can be challenging to learn. Hence, there are calls for more explicit disciplinary literacy instruction (DLi) in science classrooms.

In teaching the language of science, science teachers face numerous demands, such as knowledge about integrating language and content learning in multilingual classrooms.

An earlier project (OER 16/16 SLH) has:

• Demonstrated that enhancing teacher language awareness (TLA) can be an effective way of building capacity for DLi
• Observed that the teachers exhibited different levels of adaptive expertise (AE)¹ in their DLi

The AEDLi Framework for Science Teachers was hence motivated by a drive to enhance our understanding of science teachers’ development of AE in DLi.

Researchers first worked with teachers on improving their teacher language awareness (TLA) through different interventions, including workshops and researcher-teacher collaborative inquiries of students’ science writing.

The Adaptive Expertise For Disciplinary Literacy Instruction (AEDLi) Framework was subsequently developed to guide this study using two methods:

What can the Adaptive Expertise for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction (AEDLi) Framework be used for?  

1) Assess science teachers’ capacity for DLi with 17 Indicators

• The 17 indicators are derived from:
  • Three AE Dimensions: Flexibility, Deliberate Practice, and Deep Understanding (Yoon et al., 2015)
  • Three Lesson Components: Agenda Setting, Activity Design, and Discursive Support

Below is a visual representation of the AEDLi framework in relation to the dimensions of AE, lesson components and 17 indicators:

• Analysis of lessons using the AEDLi framework gave rise to 3 distinct tiers for these 17 indicators:
  • The lower the tier, the more professional development (PD) support is required by the teacher.

(2) Inform science teachers’ DLi with 6 design principles

The 6 design principles on DLi are:

1. Clearly explicate fundamental literacy (F-Lit)² objectives to students, in addition to content objectives
   • F-Lit objectives should be:
     • responsive to students’ spontaneous language needs,
     • adequate in coverage, and
     • aligned to the materials and discursive support

2. Embed language learning within the context of learning of science content with emphasis on the form-function relations of language used
3. Provide ample opportunities for extended language production by students
4. Incorporate adequate, regular, and responsive scaffolding and feedback to support students’ fundamental literacy
5. Adopt consistent, accurate and strategic use of metalanguage that can enhance students’ language awareness and use
6. Adapt lesson materials and activities in response to students’ language needs

² The fundamental literacy (F-Lit) objective is used to denote lesson objectives related to developing students’ DL. The term ‘fundamental literacy’ came from Norris & Phillips (2003), who differentiated between fundamental literacy and derived literacy. The latter refers to the knowledge of science while the former relates to the use of language in science and include literacy practices such as reading and writing.