Abstract:

Students designated as Multilingual learners (MLs) are the fastest-growing group of students in K-12 public schools across the United States. Therefore, preparing preservice secondary science teachers to adequately support their students' learning of science, as envisioned in these reform documents, should be a priority for all teacher education programs. This work examined ten preservice secondary science teachers’ understanding of academic language and the types of instructional supports they implemented to scaffold MLs’ academic language use during cognitively demanding tasks in their secondary science classrooms. In addition, this study showed that participants were willing to take responsibility for supporting the academic language demands of the cognitively demanding tasks they implemented and were able to draw on a robust range of strategies. As such, teacher education programs will need to provide preservice teachers with an even deeper understanding of how to scaffold the complex linguistic demands of discourse.