Making research on instructed SLA relevant for teachers through professional development

Abstract

This article recounts three studies that portray an evolution from research examining the effects of researcher-designed instructional interventions to research examining the impact of helping teachers to design their own instructional interventions. Study 1 investigated the effects of an instructional treatment designed by the research team on students’ ability to accurately assign grammatical gender in French. The treatment yielded positive outcomes and evolved into an instructional model employed in two subsequent researcher-led professional development (PD) initiatives (Studies 2 and 3). The PD in Study 2 aimed to engage teachers with instructional practices considered effective for integrating language and content across their classes in French L2 and social studies classes taught in French. Study 3 had biliteracy instruction as its primary goal, aiming to make connections between French and English classes, specifically with respect to derivational morphology. Together the three studies point to the benefits of developing a synergy between teachers and researchers as a means (1) to support teachers in their implementation of pedagogical insights yielded by instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) research and (2) to strengthen ISLA itself in its endeavor to improve language teaching and learning.

Keywords

content and language integration counterbalanced instruction form-focused instruction instructed second language acquisition professional development

I Introduction

The program of research I have undertaken with various graduate students over the past 15 years in instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) has evolved from examining the effects of researcher-designed instructional interventions to examining the impact of helping teachers to design their own instructional interventions. The latter were inspired by the former, in the sense that the earlier research yielded an instructional model that emerged from both theoretical and empirical accounts of ISLA and was then made accessible to teachers through researcher-led professional development (PD) initiatives. It is this evolution that will be described in this article, with a view to illustrating various ways in which research on ISLA can be made relevant for teachers.

The three studies described herein were all driven by the underlying question of how teachers can most effectively integrate a systematic focus on language in classroom settings that are primarily meaning oriented. The issue of integrating a language focus into a primarily meaning-oriented curriculum was, for the most part, operationalized as the integration of language and content. The integration of language and content is to some extent related to Long’s (1991) construct of focus on form but, to a greater extent, the integration of language and content in these studies drew on Spada’s (1997) characterization of form-focused instruction (FFI) as ‘any pedagogical effort which is used to draw the learners’ attention to form either implicitly or explicitly … within meaning-based approaches to L2 instruction [and] in which a focus on language is provided in either spontaneous or pre-determined ways’ (p. 73). This is because, in contexts of content-based instruction, there is insufficient evidence that an exclusively incidental approach to focus on form – whereby teachers ‘overtly draw students’ attention to linguistic elements as they arise incidentally in lessons whose overriding focus is on meaning’ (Long, 1991, p. 46) – serves to move learners’ second language (L2) production abilities forward. There is much more evidence of the relative effectiveness in content-based instruction of integrating FFI – owing to its intentional and proactive design – along with ongoing support from a more incidental focus on form (Lyster, 2007).

The institutional participants in these studies were public English-language school boards in the Canadian French-speaking province of Quebec, either in the Montreal area (Quebec’s largest urban centre) or in the Sherbrooke area (Quebec’s fourth largest urban centre). The participating teachers came from a range of programs, including mainstream English programs (80% English, 20% French), early total French immersion (80% French, 20% English), early partial French immersion (50/50), and mainstream English programs with social studies taught through French as a second language (FSL) by the FSL teachers (75% in English, 25% in French). All participating teachers had training in elementary education but only a small number were specialized in L2 teaching.

II Why is the integration of language and content important?

Years ago, Swain (1985, 1988) noted that students can achieve some comprehension of content without having to engage at the same time in syntactic processing of the language. She proposed that content teaching on its own was not necessarily good language teaching and needed to be complemented and manipulated in ways that enable students to notice form–meaning mappings in the L2. Yet, early observations of immersion classrooms found that it was relatively rare for teachers (1) to refer during content-based lessons to what had been presented in a grammar lesson and (2) to set up content-based activities specifically to focus on form related to meaning. As Lightbown (2014) argued, separating content and language in this way ‘may deprive students of opportunities to focus on specific features of language at the very moment when their motivation to learn them may be at its highest’ (p. 30). This separation of language and content has been invoked to explain some of the shortcomings noted in French immersion students’ L2 development, especially with respect to grammatical accuracy. Owing to their engagement with content taught through the L2, they develop relatively high levels of communicative ability and comprehension skills but remain nonidiomatic in their production abilities.

The integration of language and content continues to be a challenging task for educators to accomplish both in instructional practices and program design: hence the importance of teacher education and ongoing PD opportunities. Indeed, a common thread running through research on additive bilingual programs is the important role played by professional learning opportunities for their continued success. A pivotal question that remains open for further investigation in this respect is how teachers can most effectively scaffold content learning while ensuring continued development in the L2.

An effective way to conceptualize content and language integration is to consider reactive and proactive approaches to integration as complementary and thus to be implemented in tandem. A reactive approach to integrating language and content includes scaffolding techniques such as elaboration questions and corrective feedback in response to students’ language production that serve to support student participation while ensuring that classroom interaction is a key source of both content learning and L2 development. A proactive approach to integrating language and content entails planned instruction that interweaves noticing and awareness activities with opportunities for practice. A proactive approach is crucial to classroom learners who would otherwise be required to process the target language exclusively through content and meaning-based activities. This is because attention to language that is only incidental is too brief and too perfunctory to convey sufficient information about certain grammatical subsystems, and thus unlikely to make the most of content-based instruction as a means for learning language.

Important to appreciate is that some features require instruction more than others and, in fact, many target features do not necessarily require any instructional emphasis at all because they can be easily acquired through exposure to content-based instruction. For example, phonologically salient and high-frequency lexical items with syntactic patterns congruent with a learner’s L1 are known to be acquired with relative ease through rich exposure to content instruction (Harley, 1994). That not all target features are equally easy or difficult to acquire results from a complex interaction of their structural properties and occurrence in classroom input with a learner’s own developing system of linguistic representations and cognitive processing (Long, 1996). Considerable research conducted on the interlanguage development of French immersion students has effectively served to identify prime candidates for FFI, including the verb system, pronominal reference, grammatical gender, word order, and derivational morphology. As aptly suggested by Han and Selinker (1999), ‘A serious empirical pedagogy would have interlanguage analysis central to pedagogical decision-making’ (p. 248).

In addition to implementing a form-focused approach to address problematic features of their students’ interlanguage, immersion teachers can adopt a functional approach by emphasizing the ways in which linguistic features of discipline-specific language construe particular kinds of meanings. This involves making students explicitly aware of (1) the academic language functions they need to understand and communicate in specific academic disciplines (e.g. describing, comparing, explaining, hypothesizing, predicting) and (2) the conventional text structures or genres that are characteristic of particular disciplines (e.g. science reports, historical accounts, math problems, essays) (see, for example, Llinares, Morton, & Whittaker, 2012). Unlike many interlanguage features that are negatively influenced by the L1, however, students’ ability to use academic language functions and to engage with different text structures and genres has proven less problematic, arguably because academic language functions and genres are similar in their L1. Research has consistently shown that French immersion students perform as well as or better than their peers studying the same content areas in English L1. Research has also shown that their discourse competence in French (i.e. their ability to understand and produce discourse in a cohesive and coherent manner) is on a par with that of native speakers of French of the same age (Harley, Cummins, Swain, & Allen, 1990) as measured by tasks requiring them to orally convey the narrative of a silent film, to participate in a role play involving argumentation and persuasion, and to write a letter of persuasion. Whereas immersion students were shown to perform similarly to native speakers on such measures of discourse competence, they were clearly less proficient on most grammar variables, which included verb and preposition usage, and on all sociolinguistic measures, especially in their use of singular vous and the conditional to express politeness. There are thus good reasons for implementing FFI in immersion settings to target morphosyntactic forms, which have long been recognized as the most difficult grammatical forms for L2 learners owing mainly to low salience (Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2001; Mackey, 2006) and superficial lack of communicative value (Han, 2004).

III Study 1: Form-focused instruction and feedback in immersion

The first study, ‘Differential effects of prompts and recasts in form-focused instruction’ (Lyster, 2004a), was initially motivated by many previous studies – most of which had been conducted in laboratory settings – investigating the effectiveness of recasts. Following a set of observational classroom-based studies conducted in Montreal (Lyster, 1998a, 1998b; Lyster & Ranta, 1997), it seemed important at the time to compare the effect of recasts in classrooms to that of another type of feedback, namely prompts. The linguistic target of the 5-week intervention of the 2004 study was grammatical gender attribution in French, with a particular focus on noun endings as predictors of grammatical gender.

What grew in importance as the study was designed was how best to incorporate into the students’ content-driven curriculum a focus on noun endings as predictors of grammatical gender: a morphophonological target with no meaning at all. We did not want to focus on grammatical gender in decontextualized grammar lessons because these were considered to have minimal effect on students whose exposure to the target language was primarily message-oriented and content-based (Swain, 1996). Thus, what began as a corrective feedback (CF) study evolved into a study of the effects of reactive FFI (recasts, prompts, or no CF) in the context of proactive FFI (comprising noticing, awareness, and practice activities). Moreover, the study became not only a quasi-experiment investigating the effects of FFI with either recasts, prompts, or no feedback, but also an investigation of how to integrate into meaningful contexts of subject-matter instruction a focus on a grammatical subsystem that is pervasive yet inconsequential with respect to meaning.

1 Instructional intervention

The study was funded by a 3-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which enabled the research team to devote the first year to designing the instructional materials. Drawing on key constructs from SLA research, the FFI included three interrelated pedagogical components: (1) noticing activities employing typographically enhanced texts; (2) awareness activities employing inductive rule-discovery tasks and metalinguistic explanation; and (3) production activities ranging from guided to autonomous practice. The treatment unit was based on the children’s commercially produced curriculum materials, which integrated language arts, history, and science into monthly dossiers. For the purposes of this study, the dossier for the month of February was selected, and the research team created a 33-page student workbook, a copy of which was provided to each student and teacher in the treatment groups.

The treatment materials served to supplement the students’ regular curriculum in two ways. First, the workbook contained shorter versions of texts found in the students’ commercially produced materials. The shorter versions did not simplify the content but did simplify structural aspects of the text by (1) reducing the number of embedded clauses to create a greater number of simple sentences that were rewordings of complex sentences and (2) reducing the number of word tokens while increasing the frequency of word types in order to recycle target vocabulary items and delete peripheral items. Second, these revised texts provided a meaningful context related to content in which to draw students’ attention to a set of 15 noun endings as predictors of grammatical gender.

2 Study design and results

Prior to the FFI intervention, three treatment teachers (of Groups 1, 2, and 3) participated in a daylong workshop. The first half of the morning session was devoted to the patterns of grammatical gender targeted by the FFI, while the second half of the morning session was devoted to the treatment materials, which were presented activity by activity. The afternoon session was devoted entirely to different types of CF, using examples to illustrate each type from previous classroom observation studies. At this time, teachers were given the opportunity to select the feedback conditions that best suited their own teaching style. Interestingly, the three teachers had little difficulty in selecting their feedback condition, as they concurred that their respective selection reflected their preferred interactional style.

The student participants consisted of 179 children in Grade 5 distributed across 4 groups (2 classes per group). Group 1 received FFI plus recasts; Group 2 received FFI plus prompts; Group 3 received FFI without CF; Group 4 served as a comparison group, continuing with its regular program of study, which included the same commercially produced curriculum materials used in the treatment classrooms minus the instructional unit designed for this study. The comparison group was not exposed to the FFI but received the same subject-matter instruction in French as the treatment groups, in order to ascertain whether mere exposure to subject-matter materials replete with target features is sufficient to effect any change in students’ ability to correctly assign grammatical gender

All groups participated in pretests, immediate posttests, and delayed posttests five weeks after the intervention, each of which included two paper-and-pencil tasks (binary choice and text completion) as well as two oral tasks eliciting spontaneous production (picture description and object identification). Regarding the effects of the different feedback conditions relative to the comparison group, the comparison group was significantly outperformed by the prompt group on all eight measures, by the recast group on five, and the no feedback group on four. Comparisons of the three feedback conditions showed that, in written tasks, students receiving prompts significantly outperformed students receiving recasts, who performed similarly to students receiving no feedback. In oral tasks, however, all three treatment groups performed similarly, owing arguably to a large task effect resulting from the individualized administration of oral tasks to a subsample of participants (for details, see Lyster, 2004a).

The test results also showed that, relative to the comparison group, the experimental classes all demonstrated significant long-term improvement at the time of delayed post-testing on both oral measures and on the binary-choice test, and had also shown significant improvement on the text-completion task at the time of immediate post-testing. These results confirmed that FFI improves students’ ability to accurately assign grammatical gender and that, without instruction designed to draw attention to co-occurrences of gender attribution with particular noun endings, students are unable to simply infer the patterns from content-based input and thus to improve their ability to accurately assign grammatical gender. Moreover, the study confirmed the feasibility of integrating FFI in content-based lessons and contributed to the development of a prototypical instructional sequence for doing so. This paved the way for subsequent PD projects undertaken with teachers.

IV Theoretical interlude: Counterbalance

The Lyster (2004a) study was the fifth in a series of ISLA studies conducted in French immersion classrooms, with relatively positive but variable effects. The others include Harley’s (1989) study targeting the functional distinctions between two past tenses (i.e. passé composé vs. imparfait), Day and Shapson’s (1991) study targeting the conditional mood, Lyster’s (1994) study targeting second-person pronouns, and Harley’s (1998) study targeting grammatical gender.

In a review of the variable effects of these intervention studies in relation to the various instructional activities comprising the treatments (Lyster, 2004b), I found that the interventions with the most robust results were those that differed the most from other instructional activities going on at the same time in other parts of the immersion curriculum. Specifically, effective interventions included noticing and language awareness activities designed to effect change towards more target-like declarative representations, and practice activities designed in tandem with strategic opportunities for feedback to enable learners to proceduralize their knowledge of emerging target forms. Thus, the intentional focus on language in these FFI interventions served as an effective counterbalance to the meaning-based interaction that was so much more characteristic of immersion discourse.

The notion of counterbalance resurfaced in a study by Lyster and Mori (2006) comparing the different CF patterns observed in French immersion and Japanese immersion classrooms at the Grade 4–5 level. We found that the greatest proportion of immediate learner repair in Japanese immersion settings followed recasts, whereas the greatest proportion of repair in French immersion settings followed prompts. We attributed the effectiveness of recasts at eliciting immediate repair in the Japanese immersion classrooms to instructional features such as choral repetition and activities that emphasized speaking as an isolated skill practiced through repetition and reading aloud: activities which likely served to prime students for repeating their teachers’ recasts. This revealed a form-focused orientation that may have resulted in part from the teachers’ beliefs and behavior as shaped by their professional training and cultural background, and also in part from specific characteristics of the target language – a typologically different, non-cognate foreign language – that served to focus the attention of both teachers and students more on form than would a typologically similar, cognate L2 such as French.

We put forth that students in form-oriented classrooms with regular opportunities for focused production practice and an emphasis on accuracy are primed to notice the corrective function of recasts, which in turn enable them to reorient their attentional resources towards meaning in helpful ways that avert an overemphasis on form at the expense of meaning. In more meaning-oriented classrooms, however, where students expect the teacher’s immediate response to confirm or disconfirm the veracity of their utterances, prompts enable teachers to draw students’ attention to form and momentarily away from meaning. In meaning-oriented classrooms that do not usually provide opportunities for controlled production practice with an emphasis on accuracy, students are more likely to detect the corrective function of prompts than the covert signals they need to infer from recasts, and they can benefit from processing the target language through the production of modified output in the form of self-repair.

This led us to propose a pedagogical principle that we called instructional counterbalance, which predicts that interlanguage restructuring is triggered by instructional interventions that orient learners in the direction opposite to that which their target language learning environment has accustomed them. Instructional counterbalance is predicated on Skehan’s (1998) argument for pushing learners who are either form-oriented or meaning-oriented in the opposite direction in order to strike a balance between the two orientations. Instructional counterbalance has since evolved into a pedagogical construct called counterbalanced instruction, which I employ for PD purposes.

Counterbalanced instruction requires teachers to shift the instructional focus between language and content. Counterbalanced instruction gives language and content objectives complementary status, but this does not mean that there is an equal or balanced focus on language and content. Counterbalance entails a shift in emphasis to prevent one of two factors or orientations from exercising a disproportionate influence (see Figure 1). The notion of counterbalance aims to diffuse dichotomous views of form versus meaning orientations and instead to conceptualize them as complementary options that coalesce to optimize L2 learning.

Figure 1.

Counterbalanced instruction.

At a macro level, the shift is toward language if the context is primarily content-driven, and toward content if the overall classroom context is predominantly language-driven. This gives us a useful way to conceptualize the integration of language and content (or form and meaning) across a range of instructional contexts. This is important because ‘focus on form’ and ‘form-focused instruction’ are relative constructs that are significant only in contexts that are already meaning oriented. They lose their relevance in contexts that are already primarily driven by language objectives.

At a micro level, counterbalanced instruction engages students in instructional activities or interactional feedback that require a shift in attentional focus. At the content-driven end of the spectrum, L2 growth in immersion classrooms such as those in the Lyster (2004a) study is hypothesized to result from instruction that incites learners to vary their attentional focus between the content to which they usually attend in classroom discourse and target language features that are not otherwise attended to. The effort expended to shift attention between form and meaning in this way increases depth of processing and strengthens their metalinguistic awareness.

At the other end of the spectrum, students who have been primed by their instructional setting to be form-oriented learners benefit from content-based tasks designed to reorient their attention towards meaning. Counterbalancing their form orientation in this way is expected to contribute to their communicative abilities by averting an overemphasis on form and creating a need to use the target language for purposeful communication. This was illustrated by a study by Cumming and Lyster (2016) conducted in French as a foreign language high school classrooms in the USA. An instructional unit on environmental issues with a predominant content focus and only a secondary language focus served to connect students to the French language more than was usually the case, owing to the use of cognitively engaging and purposeful academic content. Students repeatedly mentioned how motivated they were by the content focus, insofar as environmental issues applied to their own lives and became part of a bigger picture, thus making French a purposeful medium for learning about the world. As one student stated, ‘It wasn’t just for language – it was for science, and our world’ (p. 88).

V Study 2: Content and language integration in social studies

This section illustrates how counterbalance became a driving force to help teachers to design their own content-and-language integrated units during a 3-year PD initiative undertaken as a partnership between McGill University and an English-language school board in Quebec. The project was funded by the Quebec ministry responsible for education (MEES: Ministère de l’Éducation et de l’Enseignement supérieur). The funding was granted to support burgeoning or ongoing partnerships between universities and school boards, and was used to release participating teachers from their teaching duties so they could take part in a series of PD workshops. The participating school board does not have a French immersion program, but many of its French L2 teachers teach social studies in French. The purpose of PD project was to equip these elementary school teachers with strategies for integrating language and content across their FSL and social studies classes.

1 Project design

Eight teachers in Year 1 and eight teachers in Year 2 (including two from Year 1) participated in five daylong PD sessions throughout the school year. The first four sessions supported them in designing social studies units with a language focus. The final product resulting from these sessions was an instructional unit designed by each teacher to integrate a language focus of their choice and a content focus of their choice through a sequence of noticing, awareness, and practice activities. The project team providing support included myself and the social studies/FSL consultant from the school board, along with one PhD student and one MA student from McGill University, who were completing their degrees in Second Language Education and had classroom teaching experience.

Following the fourth workshop, participating teachers implemented their units in their respective classrooms while being video recorded by the graduate students. To conclude the PD initiative, a fifth wrap-up session was held during which edited video clips were viewed to initiate stimulated-recall procedures as a means for teachers and team members to assess the success of the interventions and their effects on student engagement.

In addition to the video recordings of classroom implementation, the workshops were observed by project members and some parts were video recorded for analysis. In both Years 1 and 2, teachers completed before and after online questionnaires to assess their experiences. In addition, in Year 1 but not 2, teachers were interviewed either individually or in groups during the first and last sessions.

2 PD workshops

During the morning of Workshop 1, a specialist in social studies from the school board presented an overview of the content and related instructional strategies specific to the social studies curriculum. The afternoon session then gave teachers time to begin conceptualizing their instructional units by reflecting on the specific content focus.

During the morning session of Workshop 2, I made a presentation about the challenges and benefits of a dual focus on language and content, while providing a model sequence for teachers to follow in designing their integrated units. Drawing on Lyster (2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2016), the sequence comprises four instructional phases – Contextualization, Awareness, Practice, and Autonomy – and it is thus called the CAPA sequence for short.

Contextualization phase: establishes a meaningful context related to content by means of a text that has been adapted to make specific target features appear salient and frequent.

Awareness phase: encourages students to reflect on the target features in a way that helps them to discover the patterns governing their use in the text.

Practice: provides opportunities for students to use the target features in a meaningful yet controlled context and to receive feedback.

Autonomous phase: returns to the content area to help students develop fluency and confidence as they use the target features in a discipline-specific or thematic context.

To operationalize the shifts in emphasis that characterize counterbalanced instruction, Figure 2 was presented to illustrate how the CAPA sequence begins with a primary focus on social studies during the contextualization phase then zooms in on language during the awareness phase and practice phase. During the autonomous phase, the instructional focus is again on the social studies content that served as the starting point.

Figure 2.

The CAPA sequence integrating language and content.

The afternoon session of Workshop 2 then devoted time for teachers to begin creating their instructional units by reflecting on potential linguistic targets to integrate with their content focus. Workshop 3 was devoted entirely to further developing the instructional units with support from both peers and the project team. Workshop 4 included time for completion of the instructional units, but began with a short presentation about employing a reactive approach (i.e. questioning techniques and corrective feedback) to support the implementation of the instructional units. Also during Workshop 4, the schedule for video recording the teachers in their classrooms was finalized.

Prior to Workshop 5, the many hours of video recordings were edited to compile a 20-minute video of the salient points in the instructional sequence of each teacher. (In one case, this involved a group of three teachers who collaborated to design one instructional unit that they each implemented in their respective classes.) Together, the teachers participated in stimulated recall sessions, viewing the video clips of each other’s instructional unit, discussing their unit after their clip was shown, and reflecting on the process of planning and implementation. The purpose was to assess their instructional interventions and to reflect on the impact of the PD on their professional growth. They also shared some of the paper-based or digital projects their students had created as a result of the integrated units.

3 Teachers’ experiences

One of my MA students working on the project in Year 1 conducted an in-depth analysis of how teachers during Year 1 experienced the PD initiative (Shahsavar-Arshad, 2015). His analysis was based on the data collected from the questionnaires, interviews, and his own field notes during the PD sessions and classroom observations. He uploaded the data into NVIVO software for coding and classification, which helped him to identify the six constituents depicted as directional and interconnected in Figure 3, and summarized forthwith.

Figure 3.

Directional and interconnected representation of teachers’ experiences.

Enthusiasm: Teachers were eager to receive help to attend to language in the classroom in a more productive way; they believed they lacked the pedagogical knowledge, appropriate resources, and time to do so. They were enthusiastic to finally get PD support for teaching social studies in French.

Enlightenment: Teachers expressed feeling enlightened at two key moments: (a) When the social studies specialist explained that the social studies curriculum was simply a guide and that teachers did not have to cover all the material; (b) when I presented the four-phase CAPA sequence for integrating language and content.

Confusion: The teachers felt uneasy, unsure how to proceed, finding it hard to envision how to integrate specific language structures through content material, and doubting whether they were capable of doing so.

Collaboration: Because teachers had more typically experienced the teaching of social studies as a lonely and self-guided affair, collaboration with colleagues during the PD sessions proved to be a key ingredient in the finalization of the teachers’ units.

Satisfaction: The teachers expressed a sense of profound satisfaction regarding both the process and the outcomes of their participation in the PD initiative. The implementation phase of the initiative, which required them to put into practice the units they had designed, proved to be a key source of satisfaction.

Reservation: Before, during, and after, a sense of reservation remained, with two major interrelated concerns: (a) Available instructional resources are typically for L1 speakers, which are usually too difficult for L2 learners to manipulate and comprehend; (b) teachers thus need to adapt these materials for their students, which takes an enormous amount of time.

What teachers expressed appreciating the most was the experience of an instructional approach integrating content and language, and especially the visual and sequential model for its implementation (see Figure 2). They also appreciated the collaborative and supportive network provided by the PD initiative, and felt they benefitted most from the implementation phase. Finally, they were unanimous in commenting on the positive effects that their integrated ‘counterbalanced’ instructional units had on their students’ learning and motivation.

In Year 3 of the project, four teachers from Years 1 and 2 chose to attend from 1 to 3 planning days to refine their instructional units and to continue developing an integrated social studies curriculum. Then the project finale entailed a daylong workshop to which all FSL/social studies teachers in the school board were invited. In the morning session, I presented the counterbalanced approach to content and language integration, and drew on the video clips of the participating teachers from Years 1 and 2 to illustrate the approach. In the afternoon session, the seven participating teachers in attendance were available to share their units with their colleagues in small-group sessions. At the same time, we officially launched the French-language website that we designed for this project (http://www.mcgill.ca/etsb), which is currently home to eight instructional sequences for other teachers to access. Some examples include ‘Jacques Cartier and the passé composé,’ ‘Pirates and prepositions,’ ‘Iroquoian villages and grammatical gender,’ ‘Indigenous cultures and 3rd-person plural verbs’, and ‘Montreal’s first streetcars and the imparfait.’

VI Study 3: Teacher collaboration for integrated language learning

Similar to Study 2, Study 3 was a PD initiative funded by MEES for the purpose of supporting a partnership between universities and school boards. Year 1 served as a pilot study, while Year 2 evolved into a quasi-experimental study embedded in the PD project (Lyster, Quiroga, & Ballinger, 2013). Whereas the primary goal of the Studies 1 and 2 was to make connections between the language class and content areas, Study 3 had biliteracy instruction as its primary goal and thus aimed to make connections across language classes (French/English) and to facilitate collaboration between the French teacher and the English teacher of the same group of students. Counterbalanced instruction still came into play through a dual instructional focus with variable emphases on content and language: the content focus derived from the narratives of a set of illustrated storybooks read in both languages and the language focus targeted derivational morphology (i.e. affixes added to a base morpheme to change its meaning or syntactic category). which had been identified in previous research as problematic for immersion students (Harley, 1992). Immersion students’ insufficient use of derivation in their L2 production has been attributed to the observation that considerable emphasis in immersion classrooms is placed on learning the meaning of difficult words but with little attention drawn to the structural and generative properties of words (Allen, Swain, Harley & Cummins, 1990).

1 Biliteracy instruction

Biliteracy instruction, which targets two languages rather than only one, is backed by research advocating cross-lingual connections that intentionally activate the L1 as a cognitive resource to support L2 learning (e.g. Cook, 2001; Swain & Lapkin, 2013). Cummins (2007) has led with his argument that ‘learning efficiencies can be achieved if teachers explicitly draw students’ attention to similarities and differences between their languages and reinforce effective learning strategies in a coordinated way across languages’ (p. 233). He argues that, because cross-lingual transfer is occurring as a normal process of bilingual development, ‘it seems reasonable to teach for two-way cross-lingual transfer (L1 to L2, L2 to L1) in order to render the process as effective as possible’ (Cummins, 2007, p. 231).

A burning question for teachers, however, is how to effectively encourage students to draw on their knowledge of both languages while developing a sense of linguistic and contextual integrity for each language on its own. They need answers to this question because competition between target languages for time and status in school settings often leads to the habitual use of one language over the other, so the notion of each language having its own space becomes crucial (Ballinger, Lyster, Sterzuk, & Genesee, 2017).

The PD initiative described by Lyster et al. (2013) was designed to address this issue by focusing on collaboration between partner teachers who teach different languages to the same group of students at the Grade 1–2 level. The focus on biliteracy development fit especially well with the evolving demographics of the participating school board, which had initiated the original French immersion program in 1965 with homogenous groups of English L1 children; today there is a blend of L1 speakers of English and L1 speakers of French in this school board, making the context similar in many respects to two-way immersion: except that both target languages are considered to have majority status in the Montreal area.

The partner teachers co-designed and implemented biliteracy tasks that began in one language during its allotted class time and continued in the other language during its class time. In this way, each target language remained the language of communication in its respective classroom, even though borders between languages and classrooms were crossed as students engaged with the themes of the storybooks in both languages and engaged in activities highlighting similarities and difference in derivational morphology between English and French.

2 Project design

Year 1 allowed us to pilot various approaches to the PD component of the project during six half-day PD sessions held at the school board office over the school year. Participants in Year 1 included seven teachers as well as one English language consultant and one French language consultant from the school board, and the project team from McGill (myself and two graduate students). The PD sessions included workshops conducted by my graduate students and me on vocabulary instruction and the use of storybooks as language teaching resources. Other sessions were devoted to creating biliteracy tasks to be implemented in conjunction with various illustrated storybooks.

Year 2 of the project entailed a similar set of PD workshops that were extended to five full-day sessions. Year 2 began with a cohort of ten teachers (five pairs of partner teachers, all with previous teaching experience), in addition to three lead teachers who, having participated in Year 1, agreed to play a mentoring role during Year 2. Other participants in the PD activities during Year 2 again included myself, two graduate students, and the English and French language consultants from the school board. Also in Year 2, a set of pre- and post-intervention measures were administered to assess the effects of the biliteracy instruction over time on students’ morphological awareness.

3 PD sessions

To initiate the five daylong PD sessions in Year 2, Session 1 began with an overview of the project and included a selection of videos from the Bilingual Read-Aloud Project (Lyster, Collins, & Ballinger, 2009) and videos from Year 1. Session 1 then explored the use of illustrated storybooks for teaching language and enhancing biliteracy skills. Session 2 covered two topics: vocabulary instruction and teacher collaboration. Vocabulary instruction was elaborated as a means to focus not only on the meaning of words but also on their structural and generative properties, similar to Han and D’Angelo’s (2009) proposal for a dual approach to teaching reading. Reflection on teacher collaboration was then initiated by viewing a video about collaboration between a language arts teacher and a visual arts teacher. Teachers were then given the opportunity to test the waters of collaboration as they worked together on designing tasks to accompany The three robbers by Tomi Ungerer (in French: Les trois brigands), which they had the option to then use with their students or not. Sessions 3 and 4 were each in turn devoted to collaboration between partner teachers who co-designed biliteracy tasks to accompany their reading aloud to students of two other illustrated storybooks by Tomi Ungerer, first Moon man (in French: Jean de la lune) then Crictor.

Following each of Session 3 and Session 4, our research team made visits to the schools to video record the implementation of at least four lessons (two in each language) that the teachers had co-designed for each storybook. The final session, Session 5, was then structured around viewing the video-recorded lessons, and this initiated a stimulated-recall procedure that allowed teachers to discuss their mutual implementation of co-designed interventions as well as their students’ involvement in both target languages. Also during Session 5, teachers shared artifacts that they had created for use during their interventions or that students had produced as a result; for descriptions of the instructional interventions designed and implemented by the participating teachers, see Lyster et al. (2013).

4 Results

To measure the effects of biliteracy instruction on student outcomes, a French version and an English version of a Morphological Awareness Test (MAT; Quiroga, 2013) were administered to a subsample of students exposed to the biliteracy instruction (i.e. the treatment group) and to a comparison group from two schools in the same school board whose teachers were not participants in the project. The one-way ANCOVAs revealed that the treatment group significantly outperformed the comparison group in French at the time of post-testing.

The teachers were enthusiastic about the project. They especially appreciated the time to collaborate and were impressed by their students’ positive reactions to the biliteracy instruction, saying that students ‘loved it’ and ‘enjoyed making connections between the two languages.’ Even before the test results were known, the teachers were convinced that the biliteracy instruction focusing on derivational morphology had been effective. An especially positive result of Study 3, as reported by the teachers and captured on the video recordings, was the enthusiasm exhibited by the children during the instructional interventions. Making cross-linguistic connections through teacher collaboration helped not only to create coherence across the curriculum but also to increase students’ engagement with both content and language as they became cognizant of the involvement of two teachers rather than only one.

All teachers commented on the merits of having time to collaborate and to benefit from guidance provided by both colleagues and researchers to support their collaboration. Whereas much of the research on teacher collaboration in language education has focused on collaboration between content and language specialists (e.g. Arkoudis, 2006; Creese, 2006; Trent, 2010), this PD project added a new perspective with its focus on collaboration specifically between teachers of different target languages.

VII Conclusions

This article has looked at three ISLA studies in an attempt to depict an evolution from more researcher-led to more teacher-led endeavors. Study 1 was completely research driven, with a robust statistical design, an instructional treatment designed by the research team, and research questions formulated to compare variables emerging from previous ISLA research: namely, the effects of FFI and different types of CF. The teachers were cooperative and relatively keen to participate but, in retrospect, their engagement as full-fledged partners in the research now seems less than it could have been and certainly insufficient for their own professional growth. Studies 2 and 3 were less robust in terms of research designed to answer theoretically motivated questions, but richer in terms of teacher engagement and possibly even student engagement. The three main strengths of the PD components in Studies 2 and 3 reside in: (1) the support that teachers were given as they designed their own instructional materials, (2) the required implementation phase of the PD initiative, and (3) the wrap-up sessions using video clips of the classroom implementation to initiate stimulated recall and shared reflections. Despite the stress that participating teachers expressed at the thought of being video recorded and then having to watch themselves in the company of peers, there was a collective sigh of relief after watching the videos and unanimity in giving consent to have the videos shown for future PD purposes. The teachers expressed pride in their accomplishments, a sense of professional growth, and a willingness to share with others. One teacher participant in Study 2 summed up the benefits of watching the videos as follows: La théorie est bonne mais de voir les profs en action dans les vidéos, c’est précieux [‘Theory is good but seeing teachers in action in the videos is precious’].

This is the path that my ISLA research has taken me down and I would like to conclude by inviting other researchers to endeavor to include a PD component in their research on ISLA. For teachers to aspire to the pedagogical recommendations yielded by ISLA research, they require a great deal of support and also opportunities to contribute to the research and development through instructional design and classroom implementation. Without this synergy between teachers and researchers, the field of ISLA may be thwarted in its endeavor to improve language teaching and learning.

A case in point is the instructional context with which I am most familiar: additive bilingual programs such as immersion, content and language integrated learning (CLIL), and a range of other content-based instructional contexts. To be effective, these programs need to be well implemented, which entails acknowledgement of the pivotal role played by teachers and the concomitant need for PD to support them in meeting some of the challenges of teaching content through a language that their students know only partially. Specifically, teachers need to be adept at scaffolding content learning while ensuring continued target language development, and stakeholders responsible for program implementation need to appreciate this dual role as the sine qua non of program effectiveness.

Yet this dual role continues to be challenging for teachers. At the secondary level, Tan (2011) reported that teachers’ beliefs about their respective roles as ‘only content teachers or only language teachers’ (p. 325) limited students’ language learning opportunities. At the middle-school level, Kong (2009) reported that content-trained teachers focused mainly on content at the expense of language while language-trained teachers focused more on language but often at the expense of greater in-depth exploration of content. Fortune, Tedick, and Walker (2008) reported that Spanish immersion teachers (Grades 3–6) perceived themselves primarily as content rather than language teachers and yet, at the same time, believed that they were ‘always teaching language’ (p. 77). However, video recordings revealed that they did not attend to language in systematic ways and limited their attention to vocabulary and verbs. As with many L2 teachers, one of the greatest challenges for immersion teachers is to identify which target language features to focus on (Cammarata & Tedick, 2012). This is where ISLA researchers can be of service to teachers.

A challenge for teachers is the linguistic knowledge required to design form-focused tasks that are well integrated across content areas or other meaningful and interactive contexts. A case in point is grammatical gender in French, which was the target of Study 1 and of several of the teacher-led interventions in Study 2. Drawing learners’ attention to noun endings as clues to grammatical gender begs the simple question as to what exactly a noun ending is: Is it the final grapheme, the final phoneme, the final syllable, or a rhyme? Based on a corpus analysis of nearly 10,000 nouns (Lyster, 2006), noun endings as predictors of grammatical gender were operationalized in these studies as orthographic representations of rhymes consisting of either a nucleus in the case of vocalic endings or a nucleus and a coda in the case of consonantal endings. This definition guided the development of the treatment materials prepared by researchers in Study 1, and was also presented to teachers in Study 2 to support several of them who chose to target grammatical gender in the social studies units. This definition was useful for some of the teachers but not others for whom the selection of target nouns with reliable endings remained less clear.

Similarly, with respect to the linguistic target of Study 3, drawing students’ attention to derivational morphology brings to the fore the confounding fact that what appears to be an affix may no longer function as one (or never did). For example, whereas ‘redo’ is composed of two morphemes that together mean ‘to do again’, the word ‘repeat’ now functions as a single morpheme that does not mean ‘to peat again’ (although its etymology can be traced to two separate morphemes). Because some advanced linguistic knowledge is necessary to integrate form-focused tasks into content areas and literacy activities, this is a domain where applied researchers can provide useful support to teachers during collaborative projects such as the school-based initiatives described in this article.

Footnotes

Conflict of Interest

Full accounts of Studies 1 and 3 were previously published in Lyster (2004a) and in Lyster, Quiroga, and Ballinger (2013), respectively. Reference to their key components was made in the present article in order to convey, along with Study 2, a progression in the author’s program of research towards the inclusion of professional development initiatives in ISLA research. This was the theme of his plenary speech given at SLRF 2016 on which the article is based.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grants #410-98-0175 and #410-2002-0988) and the Quebec Ministry of Education and Higher Education.

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