Literacy Colloquy: Mary Schleppegrell

“Supporting Students in Moving from Reading to Writing through Discipline-specific Focus on Language”

School subjects represent different cultures of learning and doing, and in this talk Schleppegrell will show how elementary and secondary school teachers can support students’ literacy development by focusing on how knowledge is presented in language in ways that vary across school subjects. Schleppegrell will report on work she is doing with teachers to support talk about text that enables students to draw evidence from what they read in ways that support them in writing arguments.

With a particular focus on English learners, but with strategies that serve all students, Schleppegrell will illustrate how tools from functional linguistics can support teachers and students in talk about how language and meaning in science, history and other subjects in ways that enable students to develop and display knowledge of both language and content.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mary Schleppegrell is professor of education at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research draws on systemic functional linguistics to study the linguistic challenges of learning and language development. With Annemarie Palincsar, she led the Language and Meaning project to support bilingual children’s literacy development across subject areas, and is currently working with Chauncey Monte-Sano to bring a linguistic focus to learning in middle school social studies. She is the author of “The Language of Schooling” (Erlbaum, 2004), “Developing Advanced Literacy in First and Second Languages” (Erlbaum, 2002 with Cecilia Colombi), “Reading in Secondary Content Areas” (University of Michigan Press, 2008, with Zhihui Fang), “Focus on Grammar and Meaning” (Oxford University Press, 2015, with Luciana de Oliveira) and co-author of “The Lifespan of Development of Writing” (NCTE, 2018).