Responding to the Needs of Language Learners
Margaret H. Szymanski (Paramount USD), Rebecca Simon and Michaele Smith (UC Santa Barbara)

In order to facilitate non-native English speaking children's acquisition of academic English literacy, teachers need to use instructional techniques that respond to student's natural language learning behaviors. Children are naturally motivated to communicate, and they learn language when they engage in meaningful social activity. The challenge facing teachers of increasingly diverse student populations is how to address the language difficulties that arise as their students' use language for academic purposes. This study examines how teachers effectively seize teaching moments that arise from their students' interactions with literacy activities in cooperative learning peer groups. The goal is to characterize the teachers' practices of peer group intervention, so that other instructors of similarly structured curricula may more effectively manage and guide their students' learning activity.

One of the obstacles teachers face in their implementation of a peer group learning instructional format is knowing when and how to intervene in their students' interactions. Not all troubles that arise in student peer groups require teacher intervention; however, it is the interactionally-sensitive instructor that addresses those troubles that present themselves as teaching moments. That is, some troubles that arise in the peer group raise issues that may not be adequately resolved without the input of the teacher.

Over the course of three academic years, a corpus of over 150 hours of video and audio taped sessions were randomly collected from six, third and fourth grade classrooms. The teachers were implementing a cooperative learning language arts curriculum called Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition. In this curriculum, the students engage common reading and writing tasks in small peer groups. Three of the classrooms were bilingual Spanish-English and three were monolingual English.

The videotaped data were viewed to identify segments that involved the teacher's intervention in the peer group. Then these segments were transcribed and analyzed in their interactional detail. From this collection of excerpts, each interaction was individually analyzed then compared and contrasted in order to describe the systematic actions and patterned practices visible across the collection.

The interaction analyses were conducted using a conversation analytic (CA) methodology. Episodes in which the teacher intervenes in the peer group's interactions were examined in a detailed turn-by-turn analysis in order to describe how, before teacher intervention, students' interactions create moments or spaces for teaching action to occur, and how teachers seize these moments by intervening. The interactional domain being considered includes: 1) the teacher as a macro-participant in all classroom interactions, and 2) small groups (3-5 participants) of students as mini-classroom interactional frameworks.

The findings show that teacher intervention in peer group interactions occurs when students are engaged in high interest activities. High interest activities can be divided into two groups: 1) discussions about a troublesome issue arising from the academic task, and 2) talk and interactions concerning the students' collaborations in the group or other interpersonal issues. Interestingly, most teacher interventions occur when students are clearly engaged in these interactionally engaging tasks, whereas it is common to think that during moments of silence or independent student activity, teachers would intervene to bring the group together to talk about or work together on the task.

The most effective teacher interventions were those that show the teacher to pre-assess the current activity in the peer group, since in these interventions, the teacher immediately addresses the issue being raised and discussed by the students. In the pre-assessed intervention, the teacher does not need to orient to the students' interaction by asking questions about the current activity or the problem at hand. Interventions that lack a pre-assessment of the group's activity show the teacher to collaboratively assess the current task with the students by asking questions that update her on the activity at the moment of intervention.

Clearly, the methods for teacher intervention differ according to whether it is a pre-assessed or collaboratively assessed intervention. Assessment of the group's activity prior to intervention guides the teacher's action upon intervention, for he or she can jump in with an appropriate next action to answer or resolve the group's trouble. For this reason, pre-assessed interventions are typically more brief in duration than interventions that require the teacher to size up the trouble at hand. When an intervention occurs without a pre-assessment, teachers predominantly resort to the use of questioning techniques.

The ways in which teachers intervene in the cooperative learning peer group have implications for the participation framework they are interactionally creating. In pre-assessed interventions, the teacher does not disrupt the on-going course of action, and therefore, does not modify the students' peer group participation framework. Since pre-assessed interventions immediately address the students' issue, in a way that is natural to the students' in-progress interaction, the students are able to benefit from the teacher's guidance without slipping into a recitation script model of teacher-student interaction characteristic of questioning-answering activity. The non-pre-assessed intervention results in the latter scenario.

Nowadays teachers are faced with the challenge of meeting the instructional needs of large numbers of students at increasingly disparate levels of academic proficiency. Peer group learning instructional formats provide one way for teachers to create smaller, more manageable instructional situations. However, in relinquishing the traditional role of recitator, teachers may be unsure about how to best help their student peer groups as they independently engage academic tasks. This study combines both research and practitioner experiences to describe the methods by which teachers intervene in student peer groups. It considers the interactional implications of teachers' various intervention methods and examines two significant language learning issues: 1) the important role that social activity plays in language learning in the classroom, and 2) how teachers' instructional responses to students' learning activity is decisive in improving educational outcomes.