| Federal legislation now requires that all children participate in large-scale, statewide assessments in English in an effort to increase accountability and bolster student achievement (Abedi, Hofstetter, & Lord, 2004; Hass, 2002). Students labeled as "English language learners" (ELLs) consistently score dramatically lower on English language and literacy assessments than their native speaking peers (Au & Raphael, 2000; National Center for Educational Statistics, 2011). Additionally, most mainstream teachers are not adequately prepared to meet the linguistic challenges that ELLs face in classroom settings (Lucas & Villegas, 2011).;Reading aloud to bilingual students, specifically using components of a shared reading model (Holdaway, 1979), potentially provides an avenue for meaningful language and literacy development. While a corpus of research exists about reading aloud with English-speaking students, there has been limited research on its use with bilingual students in classroom settings. Drawing on a sociocultural theoretical framework (Gee, 1996; Vygotsky, 1978), the Output Hypothesis of second language acquisition (Swain, 1985), ethnographic perspectives (Heath & Street, 2008), action research (Stringer, 1999) and discourse analysis (Bloome et al., 2008), this qualitative study examined the practice of four pre-service elementary teachers reading aloud English texts (fiction, expository, and poetry) to small groups of bilingual students across four grade levels. The research was conducted to study pre-service teachers' language and literacy teaching practices and pre-service teacher-bilingual student interaction patterns in read aloud contexts to better understand their potential for bilingual student language and literacy learning. Additionally, the study provided beginning teachers with professional development geared towards helping pre-service teachers to meet the unique language and literacy needs of bilingual students.;It was found that pre-service teachers consistently strived to develop students' word knowledge and support text comprehension. In doing so, teachers utilized a variety of teaching practices and linguistic patterns of interaction during read alouds which varied across teachers. The argument is made that these various teacher moves and discourse patterns led to qualitatively different types of interactions and affordances for bilingual student learning. Implications for mainstream classroom teachers and teacher education programs are provided. |
