| This study takes theories and perspectives from social semiotics, multimodality, sociocultural developmental perspective, social constructivism in science education, and second language acquisition to examine the science discourse in a sixth grade sheltered classroom. The study aims to answer the following two questions: 1. what is the nature of multimodal communication in the middle school sheltered science classroom? 2. how does science learning as well as literacy development in the classroom occur from a multimodal perspective? Using qualitative research methods, the study shows that the classroom discourse featured limited opportunities for English Learners to express their understanding of science content through multimodal communicative means such as oral language, written language, and visual products. The classroom discourse resulted in limited science learning and language development. |
