Focusing on Language and Meaning While Learning With Text

& English learners (ELs) in the United States have too often been denied access to rich and complex texts, especially informational texts (August & Shanahan, 2006). This is highly problematic because access to texts is integral to building content knowledge, expanding vocabulary, and nourishing students’ interests and motivations to read. Recognizing the importance of informational text in the reading diets of students, the Common Core State Standards recommend that, over the course of students’ careers, the balance of opportunity should shift, with each grade level, toward the reading of informational text. One of our primary goals has been to ensure that rich and complex informational texts have a presence in the curriculum of elementary grade English learners. But this is only the beginning. English learners then need support in accessing the ideas in these texts. Teachers can provide this support by building prior knowledge (Goldenberg, 2008), using graphic organizers to teach text structure (Echevarria, Short, & Powers, 2006), and through vocabulary instruction (Vaughn et al., 2009). It has also been well documented that, even when English learners have word-reading skills in the average range, syntactic awareness persists as an area of difficulty and impedes comprehension (Lesaux & Geva, 2006). This means that learners also need help understanding how language works at a discourse level, where linguistic choices of different kinds build meaning in a text. To respond to these learner needs we have been developing approaches that support teachers in talking with learners about how English works in the texts they encounter and produce in school contexts. The primary tool that we have been drawing on, in collaboration with teachers in Grades 2 through 5, is the metalanguage associated with systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; see Eggins, 2004, for an introduction). Metalanguage refers to language about language and includes both using terminology to refer to language as well as engaging in talk about language and meaning (Schleppegrell, 2013). To illustrate, consider the following. A segment