Teacher talk and writing development in an urban first-grade: English as a second language classroom

This case study employs qualitative and quantitative methods to describe the writing development of 20 first-grade English Language Learners (ELLs) and the shifting characteristics of their teacher's talk during writing instruction over the school year. The study also presents the teacher's first-hand account of her talk and assessment strategies.; Teacher talk during two writing lessons and four writing conferences was examined early and late in the school year, using ATTELL (Analysis of Teacher Talk to ELLs Literacy Learners) (Yedlin, 2001).; Children in the class had access to the types of input and interaction recommended to promote second language and literacy development. Teacher talk about language and writing provided access to academic discourse. Facilitative verbal strategies such as self-repetition and lexical elaboration were used to make language input more comprehensible and patterns more noticeable. Moreover, the teacher adjusted her strategy use to developmental differences in children's language proficiency. Many teacher utterances facilitated clarification and expansion of children's oral and written language.; Children's November and May journals (40) were examined and compared using a coding system based upon the first-grade writing standards (New Standards Primary Literacy Committee, 1999), L2 writing research, and the teacher's instructional emphases. The average length of journal entry increased by an average of 14 words per entry from November to May. The variety of different words used also increased over the course of the school year, and children's writing became grammatically more complex as more verbs were used. Topic diversity also increased, with more children writing on a greater range of topics later in the year.; The teacher's account of her verbal strategy use was elicited by interviewing her viewing videotapes of her teaching. Taped lessons and student journals provided evocative stimuli for probing her knowledge. She identified strategies used to orchestrate multiple concurrent zones of proximal development for the wide-ranging proficiency levels in her classroom, and pointed out the ways in which informal assessment of written and oral language helped her adjust the content and level of her talk from moment to moment in an effort to facilitate children's comprehension and language development.